•  9
    Violence and the Sacred Revisited: The Case of the Narco-World
    Radical Philosophy Review 26 (2): 235-256. 2023.
    In this article, I seek to contribute to the recent philosophical interest in the phenomenon of narco-culture. I build on the intervention initiated by Carlos Alberto Sánchez’s A Sense of Brutality: Philosophy after Narco-Culture (2020) by articulating the spiritually “generative” aspects of violence. For this endeavor, I turn to the French philosopher René Girard, whose work audaciously understands community-building and the maintenance of social order as a violent process of sacralization. Thi…Read more
  •  11
    Revolutionary Time: On Time and Difference in Kristeva and Irigaray (review)
    Philosophy Today 66 (4): 865-870. 2022.
  •  10
    Mentoring as Empowerment
    CLR James Journal 27 (1): 5-7. 2021.
  •  24
    Sylvia Wynter’s New Science of the Word and the Autopoetics of the Flesh
    Comparative and Continental Philosophy 14 (1): 72-88. 2022.
    This essay proposes that the work of Sylvia Wynter, a canonical figure in Afro-Caribbean philosophy, demonstrates other ways of doing philosophy, a comparative philosophy carried out as a cross-cultural exercise. Sylvia Wynter has argued for a “New Science of the Word” by drawing from the contributions of Frantz Fanon (sociogeny), Aimé Césaire (poetic knowledge), and the field of cybernetics, among other sources. This essay aims to explain the framework and methodology of the New Science and the…Read more
  •  12
    Liberation Philosophy, Anti-Fetishism, and Decolonization
    Journal of World Philosophies 6 (2): 61-75. 2021.
    The trope of fetishization is central to Latin American liberation philosophy and its proposal for an “anti-fetishist” method. In this essay, I offer a genealogy of the trope of fetishization in the work of the Argentine-Mexican philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel. Engaging recent work in cultural anthropology that demonstrates how the notion of “fetishism” develops out of a one-sided Eurocentric anthropology of religion that misrepresents elements of Afro-Atlantic religions, I argue that w…Read more
  •  6
    The Fetish Revisited: Marx, Freud, and the Gods Black People Make (review)
    Philosophy and Global Affairs 1 (2): 404-406. 2021.
  •  238
    Which Secular Grounds? The Atheism of Liberation Philosophy
    APA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy 2 (20): 2-5. 2021.
    *Winner of the American Philosophical Association's 2020 Essay Prize in Latin American Thought* This essay offers a novel account of the secularity of Latin American liberation philosophy. It challenges the accepted notion that liberation philosophy applies the methods and approaches of Latin American liberation theology to the philosophical arena, thus putting liberation theology on secular grounds. While this formulation is true insofar as liberation philosophy is not bound by the hermeneutic…Read more
  •  36
    Secular Decolonial Woes
    Journal of Speculative Philosophy 35 (1): 71-92. 2021.
    This essay builds on a recent intervention made by Mariana Ortega, who has called on philosophers committed to decolonization to avoid reproducing “colonial impulses and erasures” in the very attempt to advance epistemic decolonization. When connected to “practices of un-knowing,” these tendencies become an “affliction,” which Ortega labels with the notion of “decolonial woes.” The author focuses on the reception of the spiritual elements in Anzaldúa’s work to identify a specifically secular for…Read more
  •  1021
    Decolonising Philosophy
    with Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Jasmine Wallace, and Jeong Eun Annabel We
    In Gurminder K. Bhambra, Dalia Gebrial & Kerem Nişancıoğlu (eds.), Decolonising the University, Pluto Press. pp. 64-90. 2018.
    Based on Maldonado-Torres’s formulation of the term, we conceive the decolonial turn as a form of liberating and decolonising reason beyond the liberal and Enlightened emancipation of rationality, and beyond the more radical Euro-critiques that have failed to consistently challenge the legacies of Eurocentrism and white male heteronormativity (often Eurocentric critiques of Eurocentrism). We complement Maldonado-Torres’s account of the decolonial turn in philosophy, theory and critique by provid…Read more