Professional Documents
Culture Documents
Colonial Differences
Author(s): Walter D. Mignolo
Source: The Journal of Speculative Philosophy , Vol. 32, No. 3, SPECIAL ISSUE WITH THE
SOCIETY FOR PHENOMENOLOGY AND EXISTENTIAL PHILOSOPHY (2018), pp. 360-387
Published by: Penn State University Press
Stable URL: https://www.jstor.org/stable/10.5325/jspecphil.32.3.0360
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The Journal of Speculative Philosophy
Walter D. Mignolo
duke university
1. The Circumstances
the pieces of the puzzle. I used the verb ran because the “discovery” of
Maturana and Quijano was serendipitous: I ran into Humberto Maturana
looking for a book on cognition by Paul Garvin in the open stacks of the
Indiana University library. And I ran into Quijano’s essay in a bookstore in
Bogotá, Colombia, looking at the table of “new books.”3
All of these reoriented my praxis of living, that is, sensing (that some-
thing was broadening my horizons), and my reasoning. I began to slide
from thinking within semiotics’ frame toward the horizons opened up
by concepts that were not yet in my vocabulary and my organism: biol-
ogy of cognition, praxis of living, languaging, lifeworld, coloniality,
modernity/coloniality, decoloniality. Your sensing changes with your know-
ing; and your knowing reifies or modifies your sensing. For me all of this
was fluctuating. I began to sense that semiotics was precisely the kind of
manifestation of modernity/rationality that Quijano was talking about,
complicit with coloniality. Perhaps it was those mutations that made me
sensible in the early 1980s to colonialism. It was not an abrupt change of
terrain. On the contrary, because I was trained in semiotics and sensitive to
signs, I was driven to explore the colonization of languages, colonization of
memories (history), and colonization of space (cartography).4
You may not believe me if I tell you that I still have on my bookshelf
the Spanish translation of Husserl’s La filosofía como ciencia estricta (1961),
which I acquired when I was a B.A./M.A. student in Córdoba, Argentina.
That this book is still with me, next to other books of philosophy from
that time, is a telling sign of material traces following someone. I am now
rereading the edition by Editorial Nova, Buenos Aires, with a sensation
between incredulity and curiosity. For as we know, according to the story
told by former Martin Heidegger (Germany) student Victor Farías (Chile),
Spanish was not a proper language in which to do philosophy.5 The same
feeling, although expressed in a less accusatory tone, was felt by Spanish
philosopher José Ortega y Gasset when, returning to Spain after studying
with Husserl, he defined himself as a philosopher in partibus infidelium,
for at that point he must have felt that doing philosophy in Spain was
something out of place.6 I am telling this short story because it made clear
to me, in reasoning and sensing, the meaning of “praxis of living” and
“biology of cognition” in Maturana’s work and of “coloniality of knowl-
edge” in Quijano’s work. This experiential story of researching, living,
sensing, thinking, reasoning, and being in the world, doing what we do
while we live, provides the frame in which I here approach decoloniality
and phenomenology.
When you change the terrain of sensing and emoting to building rational
arguments (oral or written) in a specific language (required by the circum-
stances), everything depends on where you start from.7 If you start from
the publications and the atmosphere that prompted the argument, and the
publications and the debates and conversations that ensue, you remain
caught in the web of Eurocentrism. If you start instead in the former colo-
nies, translating Husserl’s book fifty years after its publication, and you are
aware of it and make it explicit, you began to swim in the water of geopolitics
of knowing, sensing, and believing; the coloniality of knowledge; and colonial
difference. I start, then, from the Spanish translation of Filosofía como ciencia
estricta: it is not just the abstract and universal sky of ideas that counts,
where Husserl will win, but the praxis of living and my lifeworld that took
me to Husserl’s lifeworld. Sensing and thinking decolonially have driven
me to delink from codified national languages to embrace the praxis of liv-
ing and languaging in between national languages (in this case, German,
Spanish, and English). Let us read the first paragraph of Filosofía como cien-
cia estricta in the Spanish translation by Elsa Tabernig:
Decolonially read, this paragraph stands out in several respects and sets
the tone for the argument that follows. Let us parse it. In the first sentence,
Husserl states his obsession: making of philosophy a strict science. Although
in the third sentence he affirms that this claim has been made in differ-
ent historical periods, it is known that his concept of science comes from
Nicolaus Copernicus’s and Galileo Galilei’s works in the sixteenth and sev-
enteenth centuries, consolidated by Isaac Newton in the eighteenth. The leg-
acies of astronomy and theoretical physics, as well as modern Western ideas
of science since the eighteenth century, replaced what had previously been
the highest frame for the management and control of knowledge: theology.
The path from theological scientia (framed in the trivium and the qua-
drivium)10 to secular science and philosophy is a foundational trajectory
(decolonially interpreted) of the coloniality of knowledge. Interpreted from
the history of the colonial matrix of power, the trajectory is foundational
for Western modernity.11 Why? Because when the Renaissance was com-
pounded with European commercial expansion, knowledge and education
piggybacked on it. The European medieval and Renaissance institution of
learning, the university, was transplanted to the New World and then to
Asia and Africa. Today, this process has received renewed energy in the
United States, transplanting universities to the Middle East and East and
South Asia.12
Since both interpretations coexist today, the trajectory is constitutive
of modernity/coloniality. This means that the constitution of European
praxis of knowing and knowledge (its own conceptualization and its own
enactment or the enactment of its own conceptualization, i.e., the self-
representation of European thinking) was at the same time (knowingly
or not) a disavowal of all coexisting non-European praxes of knowing and
knowledge. Hence the modernity/coloniality of knowledge underscores the
entanglement and power differential amid the formation and growth of
knowledge in Europe and the strangling of knowing and knowledges in the
colonies as well as in non-European civilizations that were not colonized
but did not escape coloniality: China, Russia, Japan, the Ottoman sultanate,
and so on.
It may sound as if I have lost the gist of my argument. But I have not. I
am navigating the geopolitics of knowing, sensing, and believing. Returning
to Husserl’s quoted paragraph, we find at the surface all the constitutive
and underlying assumptions upon which knowledge (scientia and science)
has been built from the European Renaissance (to which Husserl returned
the concept that founded decoloniality (e.g., decolonial thinking) in the same
way, pedagogically speaking, that the unconscious is a psychoanalytic concept
that founded psychoanalysis and transcendental consciousness founded
phenomenology. At stake here is the radical relevance of the geopolitics of
knowing, sensing, and believing in decolonial thinking and doing.
In South America, the cultural sphere permeating the inhabitants at
the turn of the twentieth century—and at the end of the same century—
was quite different from the predominant cultural sphere permeating
the inhabitants of Germany, Western Europe, and its neighboring zones
of influence. In South America, disregarding the dissimilarities among
different countries, there was a sense that in the battle between civilization
and barbarism (which was the horizon on which the idea of “Latin” America
emerged),14 civilization was finally victorious. On the contrary, World War
I in Europe put an end to the illusion of progress and civilization built
during the nineteenth century, both for what it turned out to be, namely,
the barbarism of civilization,15 and for the political, economic, and cultural
repercussions that the war had on emerging nation-states that had gained
independence from Spain and Portugal and were voluntarily dependent
on the United Kingdom and France. The settler colonialism that founded
coloniality (e.g., the underlying logic of all modern Western colonialism
since 1500) was no longer necessary: coloniality was and still is at work
with or without historical colonialism. The Opium War, for instance, was
a case in point: China was not colonized, but it did not escape coloniality.
The same could be said about Russia and Japan, although each local history
has its peculiar manifestation. Likewise, coloniality continued its march
after independence ended colonialism from Spain and Portugal during the
nineteenth century.
Focusing on the coloniality of knowledge brings to the surface the
entanglement and power differential of knowing and knowledge in the
colonies, former colonies, and Western Europe. In South America, contin-
ental philosophy, in general, was not of high priority, and phenomenology,
in particular, was mostly unknown; and when it became influential, and
philosophical circles began to be formed in Latin American universities,
philosophy came into being with a colonial difference. The fact that La
filosofia como ciencia estricta was translated and published in Buenos Aires
fifty years after its publication in Germany reveals the time lag between
the two ends of the spectrum and the power differential manifested in
doing philosophy in Europe, Latin America, Africa, or Asia. All of that is
The question that Villoro asked was prompted by colonial epistemic dif-
ference. He addressed the sphere of philosophy, but epistemic difference
molded all spheres of life (political, economic, religious, philosophical,
scientific, racial, sexual, ethical, etc.), as far as such spheres are not just
spheres of doing but also spheres of saying, sensing, and thinking. Every
cultural praxis (of living among humans i.e., handmade in the larger sense
that all human making is handmade, including robotic and artificial intel-
ligence) is conceptualized, framed, and defended or contested in the social
as well as in the private sphere. The differences in all spheres between the
discourses managed and controlled by European institutions (starting from
the imperial languages in the colonies) have been shaped by European (e.g.,
embedded in its culture) actors, national languages, and institutions. That
is I understand that Villoro was sensing and expressing in the paragraph
quoted above.
wish, there were visible cultural differences hiding the power differentials
that constitute epistemic and ontological differences.
The increasingly dominant theological European discourses (a form of
storytelling) in all spheres of the social, together with the increasing navi-
gation and travel explorations, supported by the printing press and the pub-
lication of books and maps, evince the complicities between the Christian
theological mission, the economic interests of entrepreneurs and adven-
turers, the financial lenders, the political management of non-European
Indigenous organizations, and, above all, the increasing management and
control of knowledge: institutional, linguistic (European languages domi-
nating over local languages), and subjective (the self-assumed superiority
of European actors) knowledge that guided and justified the dismantling
and replacement of a form of governance among the existing great civili-
zations of the Americas (Mayas, Aztecs, Incas) by Spanish institutions and
justified the expropriation of land, the exploitation of labor, and the accu-
mulation of wealth. Whoever controls and manages meaning (knowledge)
controls and manages money (economic coloniality or capitalism in liberal
and Marxist vocabulary).
It is at this junction that coloniality (shorthand for the coloniality of
power and colonial matrix of power) was introduced, in 1990, in South
America. While phenomenology and transcendental consciousness and
the lifeworld were concepts that Husserl needed to respond to the current
historical and philosophical debates in Europe, for Aníbal Quijano (1928),
a Peruvian sociologist who was a teenager when Husserl died, the histori-
cal, political, and intellectual debates in South America required a different
approach and conceptualization. The pressing issues that fueled Husserl’s
phenomenology were issues emerging in Western Europe after four hun-
dred years of European accumulation of money and accumulation of mean-
ing: Husserl was thinking in the heart of Europe (Hegel’s expression), while
Quijano was dwelling in five hundred years of colonial legacies. Coming to
terms with the geopolitics of knowing, sensing, and believing is essential to
understanding the structural role of knowledge in the articulation of colo-
nial differences and the power differential in all spheres of the world order.
Transcendental consciousness and coloniality have the same status: geopo-
litical and theoretical abstractions needed to understand pressing issues in
the lifeworld that generated them.
I am not here comparing a Peruvian sociologist in his prime during
the fourth quarter of the twentieth century with a German philosopher in
his prime in the first quarter of the same century but, rather, underscoring
the entanglement of modernity/coloniality, an entanglement that gener-
ates decoloniality. Or better yet, decolonial thinking and doing came into
being at the moment that it became possible to unmask the complicities
of modernity with coloniality (hence, modernity/coloniality). Husserl may
not have been aware of it (I believe that he certainly was not, because he
could ignore it), but Quijano certainly was because he could not ignore
it. It was an awareness of colonial legacies and their trajectories in South
America as well as worldwide that triggered the concept of coloniality and
the fundamental distinction between colonialism and coloniality. The
concept ends up being the anchor and foundational stone of a school
of thought known under the compound modernity/coloniality as well as
modernity/coloniality/decoloniality. I am not comparing but underlining the
lifeworlds (so to speak) that prompted the emergence of phenomenology in
the heart of Europe and of coloniality in the South American Andes, where
the majority are Pueblos originarios of ancient Andean civilizational descent.
I just mentioned that coloniality should not be confused with colonial-
ism. Coloniality names the underlying logic of all Western European colo-
nialism, from the Iberian Peninsula since the sixteenth century to Holland
and Britain since the establishment of the East India Company, French
colonialism after Napoleon, and the United States since 1945, a particu-
lar case of coloniality without colonialism. Like Husserl’s transcendental
consciousness, Sigmund Freud’s and Jacques Lacan’s unconscious, Karl
Marx’s surplus value, and Noam Chomsky’s deep structures, coloniality
names something you do not see that works in what you do see. You do
not see coloniality, but there is no way you cannot sense it. Coloniality was at
its peak in Husserl’s time. By 1900 the entire African continent was under
the control of Western European states. World War I was not unrelated to
the intramural conflict of imperial interests. However, in Western Europe,
coloniality at that time was unthinkable and therefore unsensed, but it
could not be ignored by the African population—a population that had no
say in the management, control, creation, and distribution of knowledge.
Thus, transcendental consciousness was indirectly if unwillingly contrib-
uting to a general disregard of colonialism and to hiding an experience of
coloniality that nevertheless could not but be a component of Husserl’s
transcendental consciousness.
The coloniality of knowing and knowledge uncovered precisely the
regional pretense of universal fictions. It is not universality per se, or the
aim to totality and unification, that constitutes the problem. For every
cosmogony and cosmology (in their theological, scientific, and philo-
sophical versions) aims at totality. The problem arises when a regional
totality becomes totalitarian. “Nothing is less rational, finally”—Quijano
argued—“than the pretension that the specific cosmic vision of a particular
ethnie should be taken as universal rationality, even if such an ethnie is
called Western Europe because this . . . pretend[s] to impose a provincial-
ism as universalism.”21
The universal pretenses of Western science and philosophy are embed-
ded in Western Christian theology and its secular version, mainly since the
eighteenth century but already at work at the beginning of the seventeenth
in Francis Bacon’s Novum Organum (1620) and a couple decades later in
René Descartes’s Discourse de la method (1637). Every known non-Western
cosmology posits a totality, but for whatever reason none of the coexisting
civilizations on the planet, for thousands of years, was interested or able to
intervene in, dismantle, and control other civilizations. The crucial concept
of coloniality opened up a horizon of understanding and explanation of how
the coloniality of knowledge works in all disciplines as well as in the main-
stream media and the public sphere.
I already stated that coloniality is a decolonial concept as much as
transcendental consciousness is a phenomenological one. The concept of
coloniality brings to light the decolonial approach, just as the approach
illuminates the concept. Modernity is not a decolonial concept. It belongs
to the European social sciences and humanities (for European they are,
created to deal with their own interests and issues), a type of storytell-
ing based on assumptions and regulations about story-building that
defines and is still defending the contours of Western civilization (the
European Union and the United States). However, modernity/coloniality
is a decolonial concept. The compound concept undermines, from the
lifeworld of colonial legacies, one of the basic assumptions of Western
cosmology-philosophy: that concepts denote, that there is a one-to-one
correlation between words and things.22 In every domain of life, since the
sixteenth century, Western narratives of renaissance, enlightenment, and
modernity have gone hand in hand with coloniality. There is no moder-
nity without coloniality; hence modernity/coloniality, the foundational
step of decolonial thinking and doing, is a decolonial concept. Hence
modernity/coloniality, or the colonial matrix of power, is a heterogeneous
historico-structural node revealing the underlying structure that sustains
and governs, in the larger sense of the word, the order of knowledge and
manages the order of being.23
Before going back to Husserl, let us keep in mind the entanglement
between modernity/coloniality. The slash that divides and unites the two
concepts indicates both the colonial epistemic difference (lesser knowers,
knowing, and knowledges) and the ontological difference (lesser beings
because lesser knowers). Of course, Husserl’s investigation was not directly
addressing the inferiority of non-European knowing, thinking, and believ-
ing (as Kant did in Observations on the Beautiful and Sublime). However,
being oblivious of the planetary consequences of European expansion testi-
fies to his disregard for the global in his search for the (European lifeworld)
transcendental.
The task Husserl sets up for himself in The Crisis of European Sciences is
significantly different from the one he projected in Philosophy as a Rigorous
Science. In The Crisis, the goal is no longer that of philosophy becoming
a rigorous science but, in fact, the history of modern philosophy since
the European Renaissance, which Husserl conceives as the “struggle for
the meaning of man.”24 Rightly so—the Renaissance created the image
and the idea of Man/Human that became the measuring stick for classi-
fying and ranking lesser Men/Humans, including European women and
the rest of the people on the planet. Man/Human was the point of refer-
ence from which to build racism and sexism. Although by “man” Husserl
means “human beings,” the overall image that comes out of his argument
reflects the presupposition of the masculinity of the lifeworld that Husserl
inhabited.25 Prominent European women philosophers were not abundant
in philosophical and phenomenological debates. Husserl’s destination,
in summary, was the understanding of “transcendental consciousness”
through the experience of his lifeworld in the sphere of the sciences as
well as in, so to speak, everyday life. That was his “object” of investigation
(the enunciated and the content of the conversation) and the “objective”
of “transcendental phenomenology” (the enunciation or the terms of the
conversation).
A crucial moment of his philosophical argument (for the decolonial
one I am myself building) is part III.A, #43, of The Crisis, devoted to
the epoché and the transcendental correlation between world and world
consciousness.26 In this and the following section, Husserl makes a
distinction between objective science and science in general, a distinc-
tion that brings to light the goal of philosophy struggling to understand
the meaning of man. To that end, Husserl introduces the influential con-
cept of lifeworld as a partial problem within the general problem of the
objective sciences. This concept calls for a complementary expression,
not quite the status of a concept but nevertheless an important expres-
sion: life-praxis. The lifeworld is not static but includes the constant
movement of everything done by Man/Human as well as everything that
Man/Human did not make but which, on the contrary, made Man (water,
air, light, etc.). Whatever biological and theoretical vocabulary you would
like to invoke here, the point is that the species of living organisms, a
small set of which began to call themselves Man/Human very recently,
is part of the lifeworld that Husserl set up to investigate. At stake here
is the distinction in Greek philosophy between doxa and episteme. The
key insight of Husserl’s phenomenology was to realize that objective
knowledge of science is grounded on the lifeworld of the scientists,
something that the scientists take for granted—hence, the “phenome-
nological reduction” is necessary to seize and understand the essence of
the lifeworld.
There is here an important disclaimer that Husserl makes to set up
the task of the philosopher and “his” (the philosopher’s) relation to the
lifeworld. He has to suspend and bracket (epoché, reduction) all sensing
and emoting: “Situated above his own natural being, and above the nat-
ural world . . . —as philosopher, in the uniqueness of his direction and
interest— . . . he forbids himself to ask questions which rest upon the
ground of the world at hand, questions of being, questions of value, practi-
cal questions, about being or not-being, about being valuable, being useful,
being beautiful, being good, etc.”27 The task of phenomenological philos-
ophers, then, consists—on the one hand—in detaching themselves from
the lifeworld, recognizing—on the other hand—that the lifeworld in which
they are submerged continues to exist. This step is necessary, although it
may seem paradoxical to the investigation of the “transcendental correla-
tion between world and world-consciousness.”28
Husserl’s urgency to detach himself and the phenomenological
philosopher from the ground of “the world at hand” could be com-
pared with Quijano’s urgency to detach himself from the paradigm of
rather, thrown into the world of colonial legacies, colonial differences, and
colonial wounds. This means to throw oneself into the world of dehuman-
ization in all of its dimensions (sexual, racial, linguistic, national, religious,
epistemic, ontological). For decolonial thinkers and doers, the awareness of
dwelling on the border (rather than dwelling in the territory where Hegel
and Heidegger dwelled), of being thrown, rather than throwing oneself,
into colonial differences, is the foundational experience, the essence, to use
Husserl’s vocabulary, of coloniality and colonial differences. Once decolo-
nial thinkers, beings, and doers find and/or become aware of their place in
the colonial matrix of power (next to people experiencing colonial wounds),
their awareness will be simultaneous with the urgency to delink from the
CMP in order to relink with what the CMP disavows but which is relevant
to their own being in rebuilding communal islands today within and out-
side societies regulated by the state.
Husserl’s constant concern to achieve a rigorous foundation for sci-
entific knowledge is expressed as follows: “Scientific, objective truth is
exclusively a matter of establishing what the world, the physical as well as
the spiritual world, is in fact. But can the world, and human existence in
it, truthfully have a meaning if the sciences recognize as true only what
is objectively established in this fashion. . . ? Can we console ourselves
with that? Can we live in this world, where historical occurrence is noth-
ing but an unending concatenation of illusory progress and bitter disap-
pointment?”30 Now we begin to see that it is a question not of denying or
ranking but of starting from the entangled coexistence in power differen-
tials, of epistemic and political projects. For Husserl, the question was to
maintain the splendors of the scientific procedures of science, detaching
himself from its miseries: science limited to the “factual” dimension of the
world—hence his consistent critique of Cartesian dualism (mind-body),
Hume’s and Locke’s empiricism, and Kant’s transcendental idealism, which
Husserl replaced with his transcendental consciousness.
The difference between Husserl and his predecessors is that Husserl’s
concepts are grounded in an awareness of the lifeworld. By excluding
themselves from the history of philosophy in which they are embedded,
Husserl argues, other philosophers remain detached from the lifeworld,
including the history of philosophy that makes their philosophies possi-
ble. Husserl finds his way out by proposing and starting from a renewed
reading of philosophy in the European Renaissance: “It was not always
the case,” he observes, “that science understood its demand for rigorously
their thinking about their own praxis of living has nothing to do with the
history of European philosophy of which Husserl is so well aware.36 What
he is saying is telling us more about Europeans than about people of the
Congo. What the distinction does is to recognize the diversity of “the a
priori of the lifeworld” on the planet that is managed and controlled by the
“objective-logical knowledge a priori,” which is Husserl’s and Continental
philosophy’s problem. Recognizing “their” lifeworld is at the same time
denying “their own” thinking about what for Husserl is the lifeworld, for
the lifeworld is not an ontic entity but an ontological one: created by philo-
sophical phenomenology.
I arrived at the end of the journey but had to forgo further exploring the
meaning of the lifeworld in Husserl and Maturana’s biology of cogni-
tion and praxis of living. On my journey, I had room for Hans Jonas,
notes
1. See Walter D. Mignolo, “The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial
Difference,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 1 (2002): 57–96.
2. Humberto Maturana, Biology of Cognition, Biological Computer Laboratory
Research Report BCL 9.0 (Urbana: University of Illinois, 1970); and Humberto
Maturana and Francisco Varela, The Tree of Knowledge. The Biological Roots of
Human Understanding (Boston: New Science Library, 1987).
3. Paul Garvin, ed., Cognition: A Multiple View (New York: Spartan Books, 1970);
Aníbal Quijano, “Colonialidad y Modernidad/Racionalidad,” in Los conquistados:
1492 y la población indígena (Bogotá: Tercer Mundo Editores, 1992), 439–48.
4. Walter D. Mignolo, The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Literacy, Territoriality,
and Colonization, 2nd ed., with new afterword (1995; Ann Arbor: University of
Michigan Press, 2003).
5. Victor Farías, Heidegger et le nazisme (Paris: Verdier, 1987).
6. See Jesús Ruiz Fernández, “La idea de filosofía en José Ortega y Gasset,”
Departamento de Filosofía, Universidad Complutense de Madrid, E-Prints
Complutense, 2009, accessed January 25, 2018, http://eprints.ucm.es/9522/.
7. For limits of space I will not deal with Afro-Caribbean philosophy and
thought, which have much to offer in understanding the work of colonial
epistemic differences. For a summary, see Paget Henry, Caliban’s Reason.
Introducing Afro-Caribbean Philosophy (London: Routledge, 2000); and
Lewis R. Gordon, Existentia Africana. Understanding Africana Existential Thought
(London: Routledge, 2000).
8. Edmund Husserl, La filosofía como ciencia estricta, trans. Elsa Tabernig (Buenos
Aires: Editorial Nova, 1962), 7. See Edmund Husserl, The Crisis of European
Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology: An Introduction to Phenomenological
Philosophy, trans. David Carr (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1970).
9. Edmund Husserl, Philosophy as Rigorous Science, trans. and intro. by Quentin
Lauer (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 71.
10. James J. Murphy, ed., Three Medieval Rhetorical Arts (Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1971).
11. Walter D. Mignolo, “The Splendors and Miseries of ‘Science’: Coloniality,
Geopolitics of Knowledge, and Epistemic Pluriversality,” in Cognitive Justice in a
Global World: Prudent Knowledge for a Decent Life, ed. Boaventura de Sousa Santos
(New York: Rowman and Littlefield, 2007), 353–73. See also my “Prophets Facing
Sidewise: The Geopolitics of Knowledge and the Colonial Difference,” Social
Epistemology 19, no. 1 (2005): 111–27. For a detailed description of the colonial
matrix of power, see Walter D. Mignolo, “Global Coloniality and the World
Disorder. Decoloniality After Decolonization and Dewesternization After the Cold
War,” World Public Forum “Dialogue of Civilizations,” 2016, accessed February 2,
2018, http://wpfdc.org/images/2016_blog/W.Mignolo_Decoloniality_after_
Decolonization_Dewesternization_after_the_Cold_War.pdf.
12. Walter Mignolo, “Globalization and the Geopolitics of Knowledge. The Role
of the Humanities in the Corporate University,” in The American-Style University
at Large: Transplants, Outposts, and the Globalization of Higher Education, ed.
Kathryn L. Kleypas and James I. McDougall (New York: Lexington Books, 2012),
3–40.
13. G. W. F. Hegel, The Philosophy of History, trans. J. Sibree, prefaces by J. Sibree
and Charles Hegel (Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001), 96–127.
14. Walter D. Mignolo, The Idea of Latin America (London: Blackwell, 2005).
15. Eric Hobsbawm, “Barbarism: A User’s Guide,” New Left Review 1, no. 206
(1994): 44–55.
16. Alexis de Tocqueville, Democracy in America (1833; Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 2002), bk. II, chap. 1. No one had yet traced, to my knowledge, the
evasions in American philosophy as does Cornel West, The American Evasion of
Philosophy: A Genealogy of Pragmatism (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press,
1989).
17. It became common practice to refer to “Latin” America after the 1960s. Juan
Bautista Alberti in the middle of the nineteenth century could not have referred
to “Latin” America because “Latin” America did not yet exist. See Mignolo, Idea of
Latin America.
18. Luis Villoro, “La posibilidad de una filosofía latinoamericana,” in México entre
libros. Pensadores del siglo XX (Mexico City: El Colegio Nacional/Fondo de Cultura
Económia, 1995), 90–118, at 95.
19. Michel-Rolph Trouillot, “North Atlantic Universals: Analytic Fictions,
1492–1945,” South Atlantic Quarterly 101, no. 4 (2002): 839–58, at 848.
20. Edmundo O’Gorman, La invención de América: Investigación acerca de la
estructura histórica del Nuevo Mundo y del sentido de su devenir (Mexico City:
Universidad Nacional de México, 1958); English translation: The Invention of
America: An Inquiry into the Historical Nature of the New World and the Meaning of
Its History (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1961).
21. Aníbal Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Cultural Studies 21,
nos. 2–3 (2007): 168–78, at 175.
22. Michel Foucault, Les mots et les choses (Paris: Gallimard, 1966).
23. For a detailed description, see Mignolo, “Global Coloniality and the World
Disorder.”
24. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 14.
25. Ibid., 122.
26. Ibid., 151ff.
27. Ibid., 152.
28. Ibid., 151.
29. Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” 177; emphasis added.
30. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 6–7.
31. Ibid., 7.
32. Mignolo, Darker Side of the Renaissance.
33. Adam Smith, “On the Colonies” and “The Mercantile System,” in An Inquiry
into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations (1776), vol. II, bk. IV, chaps. 7–8,
Library of Economics and Liberty, http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN
.html; for a decolonial reading on the Smith sections, see Walter D. Mignolo,
“Second Thoughts on The Darker Side of the Renaissance: Afterword to the Second
Edition,” in Darker Side of the Renaissance, 427–63.
34. Husserl, Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Phenomenology, 137, 139.
35. Ibid., 139; italics added.
36. Building on Gloria Wekker’s general argument in her White Innocence.
Paradoxes of Colonialism and Race (Durham: Duke University Press, 2017), one
could make this equation: “White ignorance legitimizes white innocence.” I owe
this formulation to Manuela Boatca.
37. Tunisian writer Hélé Béji, dividing her time between Tunisia and Paris,
participated in the struggles for liberation of Tunisia. Here she offers self-
reflections several decades later: Hélé Béji, Nous, décolonisés (Paris: Aerea, 2008).
38. Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” 172. Postmodern debates
at the end of the twentieth century did not radically question the privilege of the
individual. It is in recent debates on the posthuman that Continental philosophy
has begun to pay attention to relationality. See Ceder Simon, “Cutting Through
Water: Towards a Post-human Theory of Educational Relationality” (Ph.D. diss.,
Lund University, 2016). Relationality in Quijano, as well as in millenarian
Indigenous philosophy in the Americas, is as fundamental as ontology in Western
metaphysics: Indigenous philosophy does not see objects but, rather, relations.
Humberto Maturana arrived at the same conclusion many years ago, precisely
through explaining the biology of cognition and the origin of living organisms,
of which Human/Man is a latecomer. See Simón Aymara Yampara Huarachi,
“Cosmovivencia Andina. Vivir y Convivir en Armonía,” Bolivian Studies Journal 18
(2011): 1–22. As for Maturana, relationality is embedded in the structural coupling
between organism and niche, in structural coupling between living organisms,
in languaging, and in the biology of cognition. See Maturana and Varela, Tree of
Knowledge, chaps. 9–10.
39. Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” 172.
40. Ibid.
41. This was the crucial point that Max Horkheimer made in his classic
“Traditional and Critical Theory” (1937), in Critical Theory. Selected Essays, trans.
Matthew J. O’ Connell et al. (New York: Continuum, 1982), 188–249.
42. Quijano, “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” 173.
43. Hans Jonas, The Phenomenon of Life: Towards a Philosophical Biology
(New York: Harper and Row, 1966).
44. In the 1960s Maturana was researching, with colleagues in the United
States, vision in frogs and pigeons. This investigation led him to turn around
the previously held belief in Western civilization (from common knowledge to
the natural sciences and philosophy) that the images of the world enter through
the eyes and are communicated to the brain. Maturana reversed this by arguing
and showing that it is the nervous system that “creates” an image of what we see.
His well-known dictum: “We do not see what there is, we see what we see.” The
question of “what there is” occupied analytic philosophy for a long while. See
William Van Orman Quine, “On What There Is,” Review of Metaphysics 2, no. 5
(1948): 21–38. The first article I know of where Maturana devised the fundamental
explanation of the emergence of living organisms on earth, the ideas that would
be encapsulated in the concept of molecular autopoiesis, is from 1974: Humberto
Maturana, “The Organization of the Living: A Theory of the Living Organization,”
repr., International Journal of Human-Computer Studies 51 (1999): 149–68.
45. Jonas, Phenomenon of Life, 1, introduction.