•  11
    Transpositions: Painting and the Phenomenological Fragments of the Unrecognizable
    Research in Phenomenology 53 (2): 133-161. 2023.
    For Anselm Kiefer, his painting shows that, that something exists “shows that there is also nothingness.” The moment of visibility is also the moment of our exposure in/with/through nothing (in a gerundive sense) elemental in the happening of the visible. Painting bears ways of exposing the becoming of the visible and ultimately of consciousness, both sensible and intellectual, in/through/with emptying and nothing, i.e., in the happening of the seer and the seen, in that coming into being of exi…Read more
  •  1
    Global Fragments: Latinamericanisms, Globalizations, and Critical Theory
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 23 (4): 364-367. 2009.
  •  11
    The Aisthetic-Cosmological Dimension of María Lugone's Decolonial Feminism
    Critical Philosophy of Race 8 (1-2): 61-83. 2020.
    In her work on decolonial feminism María Lugones expands and strengthens the task of decolonial thinking. On the one hand this occurs as gender becomes explicitly part of the very ways of being under modernity, and this means that gender, race, and labor are always entangled in the coloniality of power. As a result decolonial thought may only occur by the critique of one's concrete situation in the living intersectionality in which identities and power relations are founded. This turn to concret…Read more
  •  19
    The Descent of Thought and a Beginning of World Philosophies
    Journal of World Philosophies 5 (1): 61-75. 2020.
    This essay invites the reader to engage in a path towards understanding philosophy in terms of “world philosophies” rather than mapping out thought to the already operative westernizing conceptions of what “philosophy” is. The question of “world philosophies” is taken up through the way that Latin American thought is situated inbetween lineages and traditions. The essay focuses on the transformative encounter between Heidegger’s thought during the period of Being and Time and the Argentine think…Read more
  •  27
    Exordio: Towards a Hermeneutics of Liberation
    Research in Phenomenology 49 (2): 207-227. 2019.
    Liberatory thought in Latin American philosophy leads to the question of the reinterpretation of historical time consciousness. In the following pages I first introduce the challenge as articulated out of Latin American thought, particularly with reference to Enrique Dussel and Aníbal Quijano, and then I develop a reinterpretation of historical time consciousness in its happening as understood through Hans-Georg Gadamer’s discussion of effected historical consciousness in Truth and Method. As al…Read more
  •  3
    An Anachronic Response
    Research in Phenomenology 49 (2): 250-251. 2019.
  •  20
    Towards a Situated Liberatory Aesthetic Thought
    Comparative and Continental Philosophy 9 (2): 184-194. 2017.
    The following response is divided in two parts. The first addresses some general issues about my Latin American Philosophy: From Identity to Radical Exteriority, which was the topic of a session at the 2015 meeting of the Society for Phenomenology and Existential Philosophy. The second takes up in depth a point from each speaker: the question of developing “situated thought” as a way to undo and overcome the exclusion of non-Westernized thought and experience ; and the introduction of a “decolon…Read more
  •  5
    Light Traces
    Indiana University Press. 2014.
    What is the effect of light as it measures the seasons? How does light leave different traces on the terrain—on a Pacific Island, in the Aegean Sea, high in the Alps, or in the forest? John Sallis considers the expansiveness of nature and the range of human vision in essays about the effect of light and luminosity on place. Sallis writes movingly of nature and the elements, employing an enormous range of philosophical, geographical, and historical knowledge. Paintings and drawings by Alejandro A…Read more
  •  34
    Companion to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy (edited book)
    with Charles E. Scott, Susan Schoenbohm, and Daniela Vallega-Neu
    Indiana University Press. 2001.
    In theCompanion to Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophyan international group of fourteen Heidegger scholars shares strategies for reading and understanding this challenging work.
  •  37
    While recognizing its origins and scope, Alejandro A. Vallega offers a new interpretation of Latin American philosophy by looking at its radical and transformative roots. Placing it in dialogue with Western philosophical traditions, Vallega examines developments in gender studies, race theory, postcolonial theory, and the legacy of cultural dependency in light of the Latin American experience. He explores Latin America’s engagement with contemporary problems in Western philosophy and describes t…Read more
  •  11
    Thought’s Obsessive Vigilance
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 14 (1): 143-166. 2009.
    Although not often recognized as a major concern in his fecund writings, as Derrida himself indicates, Antonin Artaud accompanies his thought throughout his career. This essay explores that relationship by marking the various places where it appears, and by focusing on Derrida’s early discussions of Artaud. In them, Derrida traces the obsessive character of metaphysics as figured by Artaud’s word, a word that occurs as a speaking-writing-drawing. While Derrida’s discussions expose us to the phys…Read more
  •  25
    Paul Klee’s Originary Painting
    Research in Phenomenology 43 (3): 462-474. 2013.
    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 s…Read more
  •  5
    Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion (edited book)
    with Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Pérez Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres
    Duke University Press. 2013.
    Available in English for the first time, this much-anticipated translation of Enrique Dussel's _Ethics of Liberation_ marks a milestone in ethical discourse. Dussel is one of the world's foremost philosophers. This treatise, originally published in 1998, is his masterwork and a cornerstone of the philosophy of liberation, which he helped to found and develop. Throughout his career, Dussel has sought to open a space for articulating new possibilities for humanity out of, and in light of, the suff…Read more
  •  1
    Soglia
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 16 (1): 1-16. 2011.
    Giorgio Agamben’s thought arises out of thinking through the concrete negativity or ungroundedness figured by “life” as understood under the sovereign exception. His work is sustained by the continuous exposure of philosophical concepts to what remains excluded, silenced, and to an extent unsayable for philosophy: Thus, disfiguring, decentering, and violating the temporality of Western history and philosophy as well as the concepts that order it. This means that Agamben thinks out of the ungroun…Read more
  • Improper Borders
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 17 (1): 55-66. 2012.
    In 2010, Charles Scott gave a course at the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Italy titled “Bordered Americans.” The course followed his concern with understanding philosophical thought given our concrete cultural dynamics today. The lectures addressed the question of the limits and delimitations of borders as dynamic transformative events, which occur in encroachments between distinct and ever moving and shifting cultural configurations and borders. Scott emphasized the possibilities of thinking i…Read more
  •  61
    Displacements—Beyond the Coloniality of Images
    Research in Phenomenology 41 (2): 206-227. 2011.
    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 co…Read more
  •  34
    Unbounded Histories
    Idealistic Studies 38 (1-2): 41-54. 2008.
    The following article discusses a certain concrete ethical-historical sensibility that opens, in part, in the work of Hegel and serves as an introduction to two figures of spirit beyond Hegel’s onto-theological thought: namely, Frantz Fanon and Gabriel García Márquez. The discussion seeks to introduce a “thinking sensibility,” i.e., an opening toward the articulate understanding of history in and through its singularities. This figures a space for a way of thinking arising in the concrete unfold…Read more
  •  18
    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 t…Read more
  •  35
    From Time to Eternity (review)
    Review of Metaphysics 59 (4): 871-872. 2006.
    The author presents this volume as “a companion to Plato’s Phaedo”; as such, one expects it to engage closely the dialogue without abandoning critical rigor, while at the same time exposing us to some of the varied and rich issues that sustain today’s readings of Plato. As Beets’s Prologue indicates, his work focuses on “the issue of the coexistence and transition from the world of becoming to that of being”. The work is divided in two parts. The first part takes up one third of the book and beg…Read more
  •  17
    The Lightness of Words
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 9 (2): 279-295. 2005.
    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.…Read more
  •  18
    Letter from the Guest Editor
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 16 (1): 5-5. 2011.
  •  43
    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 i…Read more
  •  2
    Unbounded Histories
    Idealistic Studies 38 (1-2): 41-54. 2008.
    The following article discusses a certain concrete ethical-historical sensibility that opens, in part, in the work of Hegel and serves as an introduction to two figures of spirit beyond Hegel’s onto-theological thought: namely, Frantz Fanon and Gabriel García Márquez. The discussion seeks to introduce a “thinking sensibility,” i.e., an opening toward the articulate understanding of history in and through its singularities. This figures a space for a way of thinking arising in the concrete unfold…Read more
  •  17
    Soglia
    Epoché: A Journal for the History of Philosophy 16 (1): 1-16. 2011.
    Giorgio Agamben’s thought arises out of thinking through the concrete negativity or ungroundedness figured by “life” as understood under the sovereign exception. His work is sustained by the continuous exposure of philosophical concepts to what remains excluded, silenced, and to an extent unsayable for philosophy: Thus, disfiguring, decentering, and violating the temporality of Western history and philosophy as well as the concepts that order it. This means that Agamben thinks out of the ungroun…Read more
  •  24
    Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking on Exilic Grounds
    Pennsylvania State University Press. 2003.
    As the only full-length treatment in English of spatiality in Martin Heidegger's work, this book makes an important contribution to Heidegger studies as well as to research on the history of philosophy.
  •  31
    The naming of painting
    Research in Phenomenology 32 (1): 177-195. 2002.
    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…Read more