Rafael Vizcaíno

This chapter probes conventional demarcations of the philosophical and the theological from the perspective of epistemic decolonization to contribute to the ongoing rethinking of “political theology.” Specifically, it theorizes an aspect of the modern/colonial world-system as a politico-theological problem by following the work of Enrique Dussel, the most notable Latin American scholar in the fields of philosophy and theology in at least the last fifty years. I contend that a careful engagement with Dussel's work will fruitfully help us rethink and expand what goes by the name of “political theology,” in large part because Dussel’s work is itself critical of the paradigm of classical political theology à la Carl Schmitt.

Vizcaíno examines Charles W. Mills's “early” (1984–1994) and “middle” (1994–1997) Marxist periods to contextualize his later “liberal turn.” Vizcaíno develops an interpretation of what it means to “occupy liberalism” for the purposes of a radical agenda, especially one that is expressed in terms of what Mills called “Black radical liberalism.” Mills's later liberal turn, when read in relation to his earlier work on Marxism, can be seen as an attempt to advance a revised theory of radical social transformation not only for the twenty-first century but for the entire third millennium. Given liberalism's privileged position as a mainstream ideological norm in the modern world, Mills's intentions were to “occupy” liberalism as an exercise of ideologiekritik, where one exposes the limitations and contradictions of the theory from within, with the ultimate aim of overcoming it. In short, according to Vizcaíno, Mills's liberal turn is not so much an abandonment of his earlier radical aspirations as it is a new attempt to fulfill them.

This essay looks at the Zapatista struggle in Southeast Mexico from the perspective of epistemic decolonization. I follow Walter Mignolo’s analysis of Zapatismo as a decolonial “theoretical revolution” and moreover build on it by articulating it in relation to other concepts in the decolonial theoretical toolkit, such as epistemic humility, pluriversality, and knowing how to listen. I conclude with an interpretation of recent events in the Zapatista communities that reinforce what Mariana Mora has called the Zapatista’s “politics of listening,” which also allude to the transformations that continue to make Zapatismo a global beacon of decolonial thinking and doing.

This article articulates the ways in which the Argentine-Mexican philosopher and theologian Enrique Dussel advances a distinctly postsecularist and decolonial reinterpretation of the Marxist critique of religion. Specifically, this article explores Dussel’s Las metáforas teológicas de Marx [The Theological Metaphors of Marx], a text that exposes how Marx often deploys the Bible against the Christian in a way that presumes the original criticality of an “un-inverted” or “unfetishized” Christianity. Such an interpretative maneuver promises to add a new layer of complexity to the well-known Marxist critique of theology as a critique of politics. At stake in such an interpretation is the rejection of facile readings of Marx’s presumed secularism and the reconceptualization of the relation between theology and philosophy in the context of epistemic decolonization.

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. This conception of violence then permits me to challenge some of Sánchez’s interpretations of the violence and brutality of narco-culture. My argument is that any comprehensive analysis of the narco-world, just as any other existential option, must consider the spiritual component that, in Girard’s terms, can be expressed as a search for the sacred.

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 original transdisciplinary engagement that such a framework facilitates. It argues that, by appropriating the concept of “autopoiesis” beyond the natural sciences, Wynter refashions autopoiesis as autopoetics to answer the age-old question of what it means to be human. Comparative philosophy, the essay concludes, can be fertile ground for Wynter’s project and epistemic decolonization.

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 without a serious revision of the metaphysical premises of “anti-fetishism,” liberation philosophy risks perpetuating a Eurocentrism that runs counter to the interests of epistemic decolonization to which it is committed. This essay therefore concludes by outlining the prospects of a decolonial “anti-fetishist” method that might overcome the Eurocentric misapprehension of Afro-Atlantic religions.

*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 hermeneutics of any particular religious tradition, this formulation could be misconstrued given that liberation philosophy does not premise such secularization in an undialectical understanding of secularity as secularism that disavows religion. Rather, liberation philosophy’s secularity is dialectical in that it requires constant engagement with re-ligion, not in the hermeneutics of any specific tradition but with “the traditional question of the Absolute.” Due to this often-misunderstood element of liberation philosophy, it has frequently been “ghettoized and relegated to the ‘safe’ area of theological studies,” as Eduardo Mendieta argues. However, I contend that liberation philosophy’s secular grounds offer an original contribution to philosophy as a decolonial and postsecularist liberation philosophy, one that conceives of secularism as an aspect of coloniality to be overcome, an obstacle rather than a benefit for Latin American philosophers seeking to gain a better understanding of our historical conditions.

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 form of a decolonial woe: the disregard for the potential that spirituality comprises for advancing the project of decolonization. To counter such secularist erasure, this essay offers an interpretation of Anzaldúa’s well-known concept of la facultad as a postsecular methodology that can help advance the project of epistemic decolonization.

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 providing an analysis of the trajectories of academic philosophy and clarifying the relevance of decolonising philosophy and of the decolonial turn for current efforts in transforming philosophy in face of the challenges of social movements such as the Third World Liberation Front and Black Lives Matter in the United States, and Rhodes Must Fall in South Africa and England. After a brief analysis of the trajectory and current status of philosophy as a discipline in the modern Western research university, we provide examples of the decolonial turn and of decolonising philosophy in three areas: the engagement with (1) Asian and (2) Latin American philosophies, and (3) debates in the philosophy of race and gender.