Latin American Philosophy

Latin American Philosophy Currents, Issues, Debates Contributors are Santiago Castro-Gómez Enrique Dussel Beatriz González Stephan Jorge J. E. Gracia María Herrera Lima Norbert Lechner Eduardo Mendieta Walter D. Mignolo Amós Nascimento Ofelia Schutte Alfonso de Toro Edited by Eduardo Mendieta Latin American Philosophy Latin American Philosophy Currents, Issues, Debates Edited by Eduardo Mendieta This book is a publication of Indiana University Press 601 North Morton Street Bloomington, IN 47404-3797 USA http://iupress.indiana.edu Telephone orders 800-842-6796 Fax orders 812-855-7931 Orders by e-mail [email protected] © 2003 by Indiana University Press All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or utilized in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. The Association of American University Presses’ Resolution on Permissions constitutes the only exception to this prohibition. The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of American National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1984. Manufactured in the United States of America Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Latin American philosophy : currents, issues, debates / edited by Eduardo Mendieta. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 0-253-34180-9 (alk. paper) — ISBN 0-253-21563-3 (pbk. : alk. paper) 1. Philosophy, Latin American. I. Mendieta, Eduardo. B1001 .L38 2003 199’.8—dc21 2002008760 1 2 3 4 5 08 07 06 05 04 03 Contents vii Acknowledgments 1 Eduardo Mendieta Introduction PART 1. ON THE HISTORIOGRAPHY OF LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY 11 Enrique Dussel 1. Philosophy in Latin America in the Twentieth Century: Problems and Currents PART 2. CAN OR SHOULD THERE BE A LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY? 57 Jorge J. E. Gracia 2. Ethnic Labels and Philosophy: The Case of Latin American Philosophy 68 Santiago Castro-Gómez 3. Latin American Philosophy as Critical Ontology of the Present: Themes and Motifs for a “Critique of Latin American Reason” 80 Walter D. Mignolo 4. Philosophy and the Colonial Difference PART 3. NEITHER MODERN NOR POSTMODERN: POSTCOLONIAL GLOBALITY 89 Alfonso de Toro 5. Borges and Postmodernity 124 Amós Nascimento 6. Colonialism, Modernism, and Postmodernism in Brazil 150 Ofelia Schutte 7. Continental Philosophy and Postcolonial Subjects vi Contents PART 4. (RE)DISCOVERING THE POLITICAL AND ETHICAL IN HISTORY 165 María Herrera Lima 8. On the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: The Case of Chiapas 179 Norbert Lechner 9. Democratization in the Context of a Postmodern Culture 188 Beatriz González Stephan 10. On Citizenship: The Grammatology of the Body-Politic 207 Contributors 211 Index Acknowledgments This book would not have been possible without the diligence and patience of all the contributors and, above all, their trust in the editor. I want to especially acknowledge the help, support, and guidance that I was fortunate to receive from two great philosophers, Enrique Dussel and Jorge J. E. Gracia. At the University of San Francisco, where all the work for this book was done, I was supported by a unique group of friends: Pedro Lange-Churión, Lois Ann Lorentzen, and David Batstone. I also want to acknowledge the financial support from the Faculty De- velopment Fund at the University of San Francisco, which helped to pay for some of the translating for this book. I want to thank Elaine Katzenberg, editor at City- lights, for permission to use some images from the beautiful book by Guillermo Gómez-Peña, Enrique Chagoya, and Felicia Rice, Codex Espangliensis, which are now on the cover of this book. Acknowledgment is also due to David Pellauer, editor of Philosophy Today, for permission to reprint the essays by Jorge J. E. Gra- cia, Walter D. Mignolo, and Ofelia Schutte that first appeared in the journal. Above all, however, special thanks are due to Dee Mortensen, at Indiana Uni- versity Press, who for years had been asking me for something, and who with great enthusiasm and verve took this project under her wing. I am also particularly in- debted to Käthe Roth, who worked on this manuscript beyond the call of duty, and has thus made it more readable, and Jane Lyle, who saw it through production efficiently and in a timely fashion. Eduardo Mendieta Stony Brook, New York Latin American Philosophy Introduction EDUARDO MENDIETA In the imaginary worlds of Jorge Luis Borges, from which spew forth—as if by magical incantation—improbable but not impossible creatures, antinomian but not ontological contradictions, there exist encyclopedias that, by virtue of having entries on improbable subjects, such as the cities of Tlön and Uqbar, make these subjects real. In Borges’s world, books become gateways to other worlds or, as in the recent Pixar production Monsters Inc., portals through which the dream world irrupts into the “real” world, which is but a fiction anyway. But the reality of the world system of book publication seems to operate in reverse fashion to Borges’s world. In this “real” world of nicely packaged books, prodigiously advertised and peddled tomes, and hefty volumes of “companions,” encyclopedias, and dictio- naries, the absence of entries on Latin American philosophy and philosophers sug- gests, as if by conspiracy, that neither existed or exist.1 An unsuspecting young philosopher, browsing wide-eyed, pliant and expectant, naive and eager, trudging and flipping through numerous pages of recently published volumes on everything from Asian philosophies to world philosophies, would walk away without having noticed what she was not looking for, which betrays precisely what these sorts of books are all about. As I have documented elsewhere, one of the most amazing things about the bibliographical work on philosophy published in English over the last decade or so is its utter silence about Latin American philosophy and philosophers.2 Of course, if our young philosopher were to venture beyond these volumes, and beyond the mainstream venues of publication, she would find numerous books, articles, and anthologies on Latin American philosophy and its practi- tioners. There are therefore conceptual and philosophical reasons for publishing a book like the one that you, the reader, hold in your hands—reasons that have to do with the logic of exclusion and erasure that has resulted in a loud silence about an obvious topic. Further, this book is intended to be a resource that can be use- ful to both scholars and teachers. Latin American philosophy has a history of at least five hundred years of production and an accumulation of reflections covering all major areas of philosophy. Thus, philosophical thought has a very long lineage on this side of the Atlantic. Latin America has generative sources in meso-American and pre-Columbian forms of wisdom. Aztec, Maya, and Inca thought have slowly filtered through not just the imaginary of Latin American peoples and their lingua francas, but also 2 Eduardo Mendieta through that of organic intellectuals, party functionaries, and university profes- sors. In fact, some of the most interesting work in Latin American thought has emerged from a confrontation with these indigenous philosophical traditions. Latin American philosophy became the crucible for many philosophical currents and methods that originated in Europe and were later forced into exile in the New World. Some of these currents arrived in Latin America before they arrived in North America. Thus, Latin American philosophy was and is the place for both creative synthesis and innovative initiative. It has participated in and chronicled the projects of continental and national liberation from European colonialism and has grown to be the continental and spiritual sibling of North American liberal, democratic, and revolutionary ideals. Finally, Latin American philosophy is one of the primary veins of New World thinking, which combines Old World thinking with pre-Columbian thinking. The parallels with North America—that is, the United States and Canada, with apologies to those who insist that Mexico is also in North America—are unmistakable. As philosophers try to make sense of the traditions, currents, and forms of thought that have emerged in the New World, we will begin to speak of “American philosophy.” From this geo-historical and geo-political vantage point, Latin American philosophy is an integral chapter in the history of American philosophy, along with those on pre-Columbian, Amer- ican, and Canadian philosophies. In Latin America, as a continental unit, not- withstanding the internal subdivisions, we find a series of common preoccupa- tions, themes, questions, even forms of writing and communicating (and here the obvious parallel is so-called Continental philosophy, which can and should be studied in terms of its geographical units—Germany, Italy, Spain, England, France, and so on—without detracting from its unmistakable unity and identity). The reasons for studying Latin American philosophy are indeed many, and only obdurate ideological blindness and stubborn provincialism can render those of us in the English-speaking academic and intellectual world immune to its challenges and insights, as well as its vigor and creativity. Anthologies such as this one are not unlike city maps: they are circumscribed by the aims of their potential users and designers. This book is aimed at English- speaking audiences, who may use it to broaden or sharpen their knowledge of Latin American thinking. But the goals of the work can be couched more simply: to offer the reader a sampling of the most recent topical and creative work in philosophy being produced by Latin Americans, reflecting on Latin America, even if they are not in Latin America. This is not a historically oriented anthology. It is an anthology about what is most contemporary in Latin American thinking. Fur- ther, it is meant to interject in the debates about the sources and chronology of Latin American philosophy by offering a version of the way that works of Latin American philosophy should be analyzed.

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