Don Thomas Deere

This essay argues that a new technique of ordering and producing space emerged in the sixteenth century, whereby the Américas were taken as a heterotopic laboratory for the space of the grid. As the ordered grid of space lightened the physical fortification of heavy walls traditionally found in medieval Europe, it implanted new methods of ordering the behavior of the human body and soul. In this way, the grid gave rise to disciplinary techniques of controlling and producing human subjectivity. The global problematic of space as it emerges after 1492 is a central thematic of decolonial philosophy and critiques of coloniality. Many accounts of decolonial philosophy emphasize the ontological nihilation of the periphery, the European production of the other as non-being in an empty space beyond the line. This article supplements this view by arguing that we need an account of the production and ordering of this space that goes beyond simple negation and emptiness. The coloniality of power, thus, has a disciplinary dimension that involves the ordering and production of subjects and spaces in the Américas, while Foucauldian disciplinary power is entangled with the coloniality of power.

ABSTRACT The critique of zero-point epistemologies has been a core development in decolonial philosophies, yet this critical move too easily falls back on an over-determination of place, fixing the thinker in their spot. This article argues that decolonial critique should move beyond zero-point theorizing without resorting to spatial or geographic determinism. This article illustrates the risks of this dualistic model by analyzing eighteenth-century Enlightenment discourse in Latin America and Europe in the period where geography establishes itself as a science. In this context, the racial determination of geography marks white European subjects as uniquely capable of reaching zero-point indetermination while non-white subjects are determined irreducibly by their geography and unable to achieve epistemic standing. Beyond this dualism, this article develops a pluralistic account of places of decolonial critique where the critical thinker is situated but not fixed in place. This article employs Santiago Castro-Gómez’s concept of heterarchy to articulate such an open conception of critical place by charting the intersections between local, regional, and global spaces.

Entre La hybris del punto cero y Crítica de la razón latinoamericana tenemos varias nociones diferentes de los lugares del pensamiento y sus problemas. Lo que nos lleva a preguntar cuál es el lugar (locus de enunciación) del pensador crítico (o decolonial) en la obra de Castro-Gómez. En estos dos libros vemos varias nociones del lugar del pensamiento que son problematizadas. Por ejemplo, recurrir a un fundamento geocultural puro es un problema que descarta la pluralidad de posiciones y agonismos que Castro-Gómez encuentra en la condición posmoderna. Otra versión de esta homogeneización del lugar en el pensamiento latinoamericano es la colocación de América Latina como la exterioridad de la modernidad. El intento de adjudicar la localización de América Latina resulta, en cambio, en el vaciamiento de toda especificidad que conduce a la deslocalización. Entonces, ¿dónde podemos encontrar una noción crítica de lugar? ¿Existe un locus de enunciación que evite la trampa de la determinación geográfica, en un extremo, y la hybris desarraigada del punto cero, en el otro? Argumento que la noción de heterarquía podría ser útil aquí para pensar una noción del lugar donde se encuentran lo local y lo global.

This essay offers a critical reading of the work of Enrique Dussel on the colonial history of modernity and the possibility of a plural trans-modern future. Dussel’s transmodernity points to a plural vision of global modernity, opening multiple possible modes of being and thinking. I critically analyze Dussel’s concept of the periphery and the “other” of colonial history, arguing for the importance of a materialist and non-absolute vision of the other. I consider the possibilities of dialogue in a transmodern framework in the wake of the battlefield of colonization. Emphasizing South-South and North-South dialogues, I argue for a plural vision that engages both rational-epistemic practices and creative passions that are not strictly epistemic.

In The Invention of Order, Don Thomas Deere retraces the colonial origins of spatial organization in the Americas and the Caribbean and its lasting impact on modern structures of knowledge, power, race, gender as well as understandings of global modernity. The coloniality of space dispossessed Indigenous, African, and mixed populations as it constructed new systems of control and movement. Deere demonstrates how these developments manifested, among other forms, in urban grid patterns imposed during the development of Spanish colonial cities as well as totalizing trade routes crisscrossing the Atlantic. Drawing on a range of thinkers including Enrique Dussel, Édouard Glissant, and Sylvia Wynter, Deere reveals how movement—who travels, who settles, and who is excluded—becomes an essential component of control under colonial rule. Against the violence of spatial reordering, Deere outlines how novel forms of resistance and insurgency geographies still take hold, particularly in the Caribbean, where landscapes remain excessive, eruptive, and uncaptured by the order of modernity.

This essay develops on the aesthetic dimensions of decolonial thought in the work of Rodolfo Kusch and Enrique Dussel, who both point us to non-objectifying modes of thinking and being. Beyond a strictly epistemological approach, decolonial critique ought to offer an account of bodies, spaces, and movements that are the very condition of thought—that is to say, the condition of a mode of thinking otherwise, beyond the dominant colonial paradigm. This account of aesthetics involves the spacing and temporalizing of bodies as they live and move through the world, or what Alejandro Vallega calls living-thinking. The spacing-temporalizing of life points us also to the rhythm of life—life as movement, flow, and spacing. Turning to resistant epistemologies alongside the work of Omar Rivera, I consider how these epistemologies go beyond disembodied and abstracted ways of knowing as they sidestep the subject/object divide and engage sensuous and embodied dimensions of thinking, aesthetic experiences, diverse geographies, and histories. In closing, I argue that decolonial aesthetics also points us to a critique of the coloniality of space. Moving beyond a cartographic grid that attempts to capture subjects and spaces in advance on its coordinate plane, decolonial aesthetics opens onto the richness of embodied and cosmic spaces.

In his final works, Foucault explains his overall project as a “history of truth” centered on the relations between subjectivity and truth. While the early archaeology focuses primarily on the formation of new objects and discourses of knowledge, and later, genealogy on techniques of power, the problematic of truth is the overriding framework through which Foucault develops these analyses. Throughout all of his work, in fact, Foucault’s question is how discourse, institutions, politics, and subjects are established within regimes of truth.