Angela Patricia Heredia Pineda

Amid an Anthropocenic context that questions the givenness, privilege, and boundaries of the modern notion of the human, new materialisms have consolidated as an important theoretical framework within feminist theory, environmental philosophy and posthumanisms (Fisher and Dolezal 2018; Rosa et al. 2021). Through their recentering of the immanent agency and vitality of matter, these perspectives offer a critical posthumanist perspective that aims to dislocate the modern desire to master more-than-human materiality (Braidotti 2019b). Focusing on the vitalist trend within feminist new materialisms (Bennett 2010; Braidotti 2013; Grosz 2011), this dissertation elaborates an anticolonial critique of these perspectives, taking as a point of departure black, indigenous, and decolonial feminist reflections on the colonial capture of the notion of the human (Wynter 2003; Spillers 1987; Smith 2020; Byrd 2011; Rivera Cusicanqui 2018; Anzaldúa 1987; Lugones 2010; Cabnal 2019; Rivera Garza 2025). Through an anticolonial phenomenological approach that focuses on the affective texture of meanings and their embeddedness in the histories of colonial violence, I develop this critique in two ways. First, I engage in an exercise of “mnemonic reading”(Byrd 2011) in which I investigate how the colonial/modern overrepresentation of the human as Man (Wynter 2003), the hu(Man), is grounded in an extractive “affective economy” (Ahmed 2004) that feeds the Anthropocenic context in which these discourses are situated. Second, I engage in a practice of “deciphering” (Wynter 1992) in which I examine the affective contouring of the notion of “vitality”, “aliveness”, and “life itself” in feminist neo-vitalist discourses. By texturing the notion of “Life” as a shimmering inhuman force that unsettles the reduction of matter to inertness, feminist neo-vitalist ontologies aim to open an affirmative ethico-political space of revitalizing freedom, renewal and existential exploration amid the petrifying forces of the Anthropocene. I argue that these neo-vitalist frameworks are not only insufficient to address the inhuman force of colonial forms of violence but that such insufficiency stems from their embeddedness in a hu(Man) extractive affective orientation towards the inhuman force of matter’s vitality. More specifically, I suggest that feminist neo-vitalisms fetishize matter’s vital powers as the source of a self-affirming and invigorating intimacy with unruly, future-oriented, empowering and freeing inhuman forces. Vital matter, a shimmery apotropaic fetish, wards off a negativity that becomes too much to bear and clogs the flows of vital affirmation: the colonial forms of violence that cut through this intimacy and sustain hu(Man) invigoration in a colonial Earth. In this way, this research contributes to current discussions on the need to decolonize the posthu(Man) subjectivities, narratives and origin stories of the colonial Anthropocene (Rivera Garza 2022; Yusoff 2024; Todd 2015; Davis and Todd 2017; King 2019; Povinelli 2021; Gómez-Barris 2019).

This thesis explores the need to rethink the way in which the historical temporality of the body has been articulated as a transition from an animal/prehistoric embodiment to a human/historical one, using as a point of departure a dialogue between feminist posthuman and decolonial thought. Current trends of the historiography of the body tend to consider the body as constituted by human culture or as determined by biological and natural structures, giving to each perspective different temporalities and chronological frames. Through a genealogical exercise focused in narratives from the sixteenth century (Bartolomé De Las Casas and Juan Ginés Sepúlveda) and the nineteenth century (Daniel Wilson), I argue that each of these perspectives is anchored in an iterative citationality of a colonial/modern understanding of the temporality of the body with two stages defined by colonial classifications: In one, the materiality of the human body is porous to external forces that bring it closer to the body of the animal and make its temporality much slower. In the other one, Man exceeds this animal materiality and is porous to his autonomous internal forces bringing a progression towards his full humanity. This shows that rethinking the historicity of the body beyond the bodies of Man requires recognizing that anthropocentric differentiations are sustained by colonial classifications in the current modern/colonial system, which invites to look at the posthuman through decolonial eyes, as well as opening decolonial thought to the innovative conceptualizations of the feminist posthumanities. To develop this, I cross-fertilize the thought of Elizabeth Grosz and Sylvia Wynter, with the purpose of searching theoretical paths that unsettle this prefiguration of modern/colonial bodies. First, their thought proposes a dynamic and undetermined relation between biology and culture and matter and meaning. Second, they open the temporality of history to the future and the virtual, which challenges the narrative of progress towards Man through accumulation. Furthermore, for them, history is not about the reproduction of the past, but about opening spaces for remembering different embodied futures.

This article explores how Derrida's questioning of the life/death dichotomy intersects with anticolonial and feminist perspectives about the violent tracing of this boundary. From this point of departure, I want to reflect on how Derrida’s unsettling of this dichotomy can open a space to trouble the desires for life and the terror for the inert at the centre of colonial/modern ontologies. His reflections about life and death seem to open avenues to address an un-appropriable negation, a constitutive absence, and otherness at the core of these desires for aliveness. Therefore, the main aim of this essay is to explore how this way of unsettling the life/nonlife dichotomy can encourage (or not) a reflection on how colonial forms of violence are at the root of desires for life and their capture of being. In the first part of the paper, I bring Sylvia Wynter and Elizabeth Povinelli into conversation, looking into the violent capture of the space of being, life and the human that sustains the modern/colonial order and its centring around Man. Following this, I engage with Derrida’s unsettling of the notion of life and consider the ways in which it can interrupt the logics of this capture and open a space to address the forms of violence that sustain them. In the last section of the paper, I offer a reflection on haptics (touch) through the perspectives of Hortense Spillers and Lorena Cabnal, whose anticolonial and feminist thought highlights the possibilities and limitations of Derrida’s thought to address the violences that permeate the Anthropocene’s intimate entanglements. In this sense, I present here a brief reflection on Derrida’s relevance to thinking through and with the violent entanglements of the “Colonial Anthropocene” (Gómez-Barris).