Michael Roland Hernandez

The necessity of questioning the privileged spaces of power—be it personal, social, political, or religious—is a demand intrinsic to philosophy’s very own structure. In this paper, an identification of the thinking and the practice of subversion with the essence of philosophy is undertaken as a response to the challenge of intellectual sterilization brought about by the insidious effects of an omnipresent techno-capitalism and academic complicity. In particular, I will discuss Jacques Derrida’s deconstruction as a fertile example of a subversive ethos that refuses to be complicit with the powers-that-be but transgresses the complacent order of the present so as to achieve an opening for a more just relation to the “other” of thinking that has always been marginalized by history and the philosophical tradition. If philosophy is to remain true to its originary inspiration, then, it must remain vigilant to the various moments and forms of fossilizations of power and truth. The achievement of a critical position ownmost to philosophy is incumbent to us: i.e., as a radical refusal to be complicit with the present effects of power and a continuous cultivation of an ethos of writing and thinking that does not concede its loyalty to anything, even to philosophy.

This paper traces the conceptual resources of Philippine ilustrado nationalism in the specific concept of Filipino identity given by Father Jose Burgos in his acclaimed Manifiesto. It argues that the racial and social exclusivism essential to ilustrado nationalist ideology can be traced to the essentially religious character of Burgos' anti-friar polemic. By tracing this essential connection between Filipino identity and Catholicity, we are reminded of the dangers connected with the emancipatory promises ushered by nativist and ethnocentric thinking.

The claim about Europe's and the West's spiritual indefensibility puts forth a critique of the western colonial project as informed by a subtle duplicity anchored on the employment of a techno-scientific and economic-capitalist rationality working under the illusion of a God-given mission civilisatrice. To combat this ideology, present postcolonial discourses, notably in Asia, tend to create a rupture within this linear view of global politics and history by employing discursive strategies of decentralization and destabilization from the perspective of an identity-politics by the marginalized colonial ―other.‖ Within the Philippine context, I claim that this obsessive-compulsive tendency to look for collective identities as basis for anti-colonial struggle is itself contained within that inescapable cycle of colonial violence and oppression. Using Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak's notion of epistemic violence, I argue that the insistence on the privilege of a discovered, achieved, or constructed Filipino identity by nationalist discourses, be it from the Ilustrado elite or the hastily generalized and abstract Filipino masses, render them susceptible to becoming subtle—though unwitting—arms of the colonial machinery itself. To insist on a certain Filipino identity as an ideal of who or what a Filipino is or Filipino-ness is to be implicated within discursive complicity, i.e., a process that implicates the anti-colonial struggle within the homogenizing ―identity-trap‖ laid down by the colonial processes themselves and simulates the struggle for a Philippine nationalist liberation as a worse—because more subtle—form of colonial hegemony. I illustrate my claim by describing how historical injustice is propagated and perpetuated through the distorted interpretations of historical data by nationalist historiographies that only solidify the horrible heritage of the Philippine colonial experience.

Perhaps, the greatest challenge that modern education and its institutions face today is its indictment as a modern slave factory. Fueled by a scientific and techno-capitalist rationality, modern education has become complicit with the production of happy slaves by its unwitting acquiescence to the demands of the international labor market and its inability to combat the manifold alienation, dehumanization, oppression and suffering of the world's poor and suffering majority. In the Philippine context, nowhere is this complicity more pronounced than in the introduction of the K-12 education. Designed to transform Filipinos into a competent workforce ready to be fed into the world's techno-capitalist market, the K-12 signals both the promise and the perils of a nationalist socio-political ideology intent not at human emancipation but on the continual fetishism of a consumerist-materialistic way of life that ultimately engulfs everyone within the anxiety and essential homelessness occasioned by modern technological enframing. In the face of the absurd, finding one's freedom is the only task worth pursuing in the end times.

This doctoral thesis examines the phenomenon of Filipinization, specifically understood as the ideological construction of a “Filipino identity” or ‘Filipino subject-consciousness” within the highly determinate context provided by the Filipino ilustrado nationalists such as José Rizal, Marcelo H. del Pilar and their fellow propagandists inasmuch as it leads to the nineteenth (19th) century construction of the modern Philippine nation. Utilizing Jacques Derrida’s deconstructive thinking, this study undertakes a genealogical critique engaged on the concrete historical examination of what is meant by the term “Filipino” across a select historical timeline (1864-1898) and the various notions of Filipino identity implied by the different contexts within which the term “Filipino” has been employed. More specifically, it undertakes a selective philosophical excavation of three seminal texts in the history of Filipinization, viz.: 1) the Manifiesto of Padre Jose Burgos; 2) the writings of the Filipino ilustrados in La Solidaridad; and 3) Jose Rizal’s Annotations on Dr. Antonio de Morga’s Sucesos de las Islas Filipinas. The philosophical claim of this work is the idea that Filipinization, taken as the differential construction of Filipino identity, is the effective translation of the colonial epistemic violence of Eurocentric racism and its consequent “horror of absolutism” into the homo-hegemony of Filipino nationalisms. By fetishizing the notion of a carefully constructed and essential “Filipino-identity,” Filipinization and the current nationalist discourses that utilize them, unwittingly, stands complicit with the same colonial violence and hegemony that they wish to combat. This happens precisely when the very structures of colonial oppression, on the ideological and practical levels, are transmogrified into nationalist ideals that assume legal and political power unto themselves in a self-referential and self-legitimating fashion. Three processes will demonstrate the above thesis: first, by examining historical texts and setting itself against established nationalist historiographies, a genealogical analysis of the term “Filipino” reveals it as a pliable signifier whose semantics have evolved through time. From its originary referent in the Spanish criollo (creole), it has come to refer to people who would have been otherwise entirely alien to this class, viz., the mestizos (both Spanish and Chinese), the principalia (native elite), and eventually, the lowland Catholicized natives themselves. The historical hermeneutic of this identity-discourse in Padre José Burgos’ Manifiesto yields the fact that what gives the term “Filipino” its semantic consistency as a class concept is its essential constitution as a Hispanic and Catholic identity. Second, from this semantic identification of the term “Filipino” as a Hispano-Catholic identity, we proceed to clarify the meaning of Filipinization in terms of the nationalist propaganda carried out by the Filipino ilustrados in the fortnightly periodical La Solidaridad. Here, the specific ilustrado construction of Filipino identity as a Spanish citizen (ciudadano Español) is revealed precisely as a political and legal construct that served as the basis for their own politics of social inclusion/exclusion. Filipinization can only be applied to those who have been hispanized and Christianized and never to those tribes who have resisted and remained outside Spanish colonial authority. Filipinization is thus revealed as a process of Hispanization and Christianization whereby the recipients of Spanish colonial hegemony are transformed into the religiously docile bodies of the Spanish Empire. From this highly determinate context, the study proceeds to examine Rizal’s ontological grounding of collective Filipino-ness in the mythological construction of the pre-hispanic past as the source of a unique Filipino ancestrality. In his work on de Morga’s Sucesos, what is revealed is a mythologization that grounds a native, essential Filipino identity within a past unscathed by the Spanish colonial experience. Such mythologization, however, can only be possible through an anachronistic nationalist interpretation of historical data. Here, Filipinization is revealed as an exclusive prerogative, a nationalist program by which Rizal and the ilustrado class can combat the evils and excesses of the Spanish colonial enterprise. Ironically, though, this same struggle for emancipation also became an instrument by which the ilustrado class can retain their unjustified position of power over those who belonged to the colonial underside, thus, securing the possibility of perpetuating their own ilustrado bourgeois class interests. Such discursive complicity is the essence of the myth of Filipinization: it presents nationalist identity discourse as an anti-colonial enterprise while being underlined by an economy of motives designed to cater primarily to the exclusive interests of the elite and ilustrado class. Thus, instead of securing the genuine, inclusive emancipation of all colonial subjects and a more humane existence for the poor and suffering majority, ilustrado nationalism has, ironically, merely reinforced those operative structures of colonial discrimination and oppression when the ilustrados: 1) grounded their racial theory upon the very same discourse of Eurocentric superiority that they are precisely supposed to question and 2) claimed a patrimony over Filipinas as their exclusive sovereign inheritance. These two factors illustrate how the manifest transfer of power from the Spanish Empire to the Philippine sovereign nation (and later as a nation-state) illustrate how Filipinization merely has transmogrified the face of Spanish colonialism into its new, subtle, and worse form in Filipino nationalism. In this vein, the existence of the 19th century modern Philippine nation merely masked and deferred the crisis that was supposed to transfer power from the Spanish Empire to the multitude of the poor and suffering native indio majority. This crisis became all the more difficult to address be-cause of the duplicitous character of the discourse of Filipinization itself. It has not only effectively transferred power into the hands of the nationalist elite but also captured authentic emancipatory discourse within the identity-trap against which it can only hope to get out. This study concludes with the claim about the impossibility of ever escaping and overcoming the epistemic and practical violence necessarily contained within the historical discourse of colonialism. Or simply, we have no language or discourse that would enable us to overcome the complicity of Filipinization with the very (epistemic) violence against which it has set itself.