Walter Mignolo and the Other

Michael Murphy

Research output: Contribution to conferencePaper

Abstract

Mignolo’s primary interest are the intellectual assumptions that Europeans carried with them to America, the various paradigms or frameworks of knowledge through which they saw the unfolding of universal history, that is the Western narrative of modernity. ‘Decolonisation’ points toward conceptual projects of de-linking from the colonial matrix of power. ‘Delinking’ is necessary as there is no way out of the coloniality of power from within occidental categories of thought and presupposes border thinking or a border epistemology. Mignolo’s position cannot be understood without the rationality of Levinas. Via the work of Levinas and Dussel, Mignolo explores the possibilities of delinking Europeanness from indigenous and mixed forms of life through which to provide an ethical space within liberation philosophy. Whilst Mignolo maintains the insight that recalls the ‘forgotten horizon’ of the other of relation in totalising the Other, in failing to provide the means of identity within the multiple realities of everyday life he fails to protect against the totalization and relativization of the subject, presenting an illusion of singularity in the Other, something that Mignolo claims is the hallmark of the Occident. The irony of this is that the cause of this problem lies in Mignolo’s full acceptance of European presuppositions of thought. In the rest of this paper I will explain the cause of this problem. In the second part I will outline the theoretical and practical issues that Mignolo’s relationship to Levinas raises in particular Levinas’s portrayal of intersubjectivity. Far from providing the basis of a critical science of the excluded that reveals thought as ideological what we find is a premise of being human that cannot accommodate border-thinking.
Original languageEnglish
Publication statusUnpublished - 2013
EventGSA annual conference 2013 call for papers The Cosmopolitan Ideal: Challenges and Opportunities Roehampton University, Wed 10th –Fri 12th July 2013 - , United Kingdom
Duration: 10 Jul 201312 Jul 2013

Conference

ConferenceGSA annual conference 2013 call for papers The Cosmopolitan Ideal: Challenges and Opportunities Roehampton University, Wed 10th –Fri 12th July 2013
Country/TerritoryUnited Kingdom
Period10/07/1312/07/13

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