Gabriela Veronelli

In this conversation, Perry Zurn interviews Gabriela Veronelli, campañera of the late Argentinian feminist philosopher María Lugones. While the conversation centers on Lugones’s interest in fungi and the inspiration she took from mycelial networks, it expands well beyond that. Veronelli explores how the mycelial approach subtends Lugones’s critique of the coloniality of knowledge and its logic of purity but also supports her theorizations of relationality, Aymara philosophy, multilingualism, and human and non-human companionship. Zurn and Veronelli close by discussing Lugones’s conception of erotics as not rooted in definitive categories of gender and sexuality but rather in permeability and porosity.

This article begins by examining the importance that critical intercultural dialogues have within the Modernity/Coloniality Research Program toward reaching an alternative geopolitics and body-politics of knowledge, in order to raise the question whether the colonial difference creates conditions for dialogical situations that bring together critiques of coloniality emerging from different experiences of coloniality. The answer it offers is twofold. On the one hand, if one imagines such situations to be communicative exchanges à la Bakhtin that put logos at the center, given what is termed the coloniality of language and speech, the possibility of such exchanges is feasible only as an abstract gesture. On the other hand, when one faces the complications of the erasure of dialogue produced by coloniality, the kind of decolonial communicative relations that seem possible among people thinking and acting from the colonial difference are less conscious or agential than emotive. By articulating the relations between coalitional methodologies and a global sense of connection the article proposes a nondialogical theory of decolonial communication: a way of orienting ourselves with a sense of permeability and recognition of being on the same side that doesn't need to be politically motivated but is always active.