Alejandro Vallega

Paul Klee’s sense of modern art and his own painting as the channeling of the originary movement of life leads to an insight beyond modern art, and back towards such dynamic cosmological experiences as that of the Onas people of Patagonia. In their daily life and their rituals their painted bodies expressed the living force of their cosmos, an originary energy that occurred at the limit of what one may call art and nature. In engaging Klee’s painting and drawing, one is brought to such an open space of living transformative movement; one finds a place wider than our present imagination, a time-space that in our being exposed to his works and experience remains for us to inhabit.

Dynamic mental images are co-constitutive of the determinations of reality and possibility under which our senses of life open and unfold. Ultimately, this dynamic sense of images introduces the difficulty of thinking in light of their role in the configuration of human knowledge and their power over interpretations and determinations of the many senses of beings. This relationship between images and philosophical knowledge is further complicated when one looks at it from the perspective of a colonized consciousness. In such cases self-knowledge and the very possibility of philosophical knowledge depend on images that are not one's own. This makes the articulation of the senses of distinct existences an impossible project. By looking at the work of Fanon, Anibal Quijano, and Alfredo Jaar, this article discusses how such pernicious images occur in spite of one's distinct sense of existence, and how the distorted displacement of existence may be challenged and overcome

Through a discussion of “translucence” in Plato’s Phaidros and in Juan Jose Saer’s “On Line,” in this essay I attempt to engage the simultaneous experience of the concrete sense of language and of the appearing of beings in their materiality through language. The discussion ultimately suggests that, when taken in its full force, the philosophical logos figures the elemental translucence of beings in their intelligibility; a formulation meant to resist the separation of language and concreteness. Such an interpretation of the philosophical logos also leads to the understanding of thought as an elemental, interpretative, transformative, and “marginal” experience.

Abstract If the question of the humanity of “the other“ may become a question, and not be reinscribed into Western colonizing patterns of thought, then its issuing must concern a limit (always arising beyond Western thought), a delimitation of existence that is risked and put at risk without recourse to the project or operation of that colonizing thought that situates it. Ideas of subjectivity, agency, and power-knowledge potential for progress, as well as rationalist instrumental thought used to recognize those peoples and cultures excluded and oppressed under the Western Modern tradition, must be put into question by the very agents claiming recognition, as well as the epistemic structures that sustain these concepts and the dispositions and subconscious expectations constituted by the colonizing practices of bodies and imaginaries that project the very horizons of one's existence

This article identifies temporality as a constructed and elemental level of aesthetic experience, and exposes the elemental role of such aesthetic experience in the unfolding of contemporary Latin American liberatory thought. This particularly with regard to the sense of temporality that underlies the unfolding of the development of modernity, a development that occurs throughout the colonization of the Americas in the construction of a rational European ego cogito and its "other." Temporality in the westernizing linear sense figures a projective horizon for the perception and understanding of existence and its coming. The key aim and meaning of all existence under this linear temporality is order and progress. However, ultimately in looking at Latin American thought and experience one finds a distinct sense of history and temporality beyond the possible determination of that sustaining westernizing European thought. In the recognition of distinct temporalities space-times open for rethinking modernity and the accompanying senses of humanity, life, freedom, and philosophical thought's issues and ways of articulating beings

This article shows that the duality of work (entity/image) and title that for the most part constitutes our experiences of paintings today is sustained and occurs out of a performative event, a certain physicality and rhythm that mark the finitude of visible-intelligible presence. These enactments of finitude figure a certain concealment, and therefore a loss, operative in the presence of work and title. The discussion ultimately indicates physicality, finitude, and loss in painting and provides insight concerning the question of language by inviting a broader understanding of it in the light of these same issues.