SANTIAGO CASTRO-GÓMEZ
FOREWORD A Principled Pessimist of the Left—Castro-Gómez’s Critique of Latin American Reason L I N DA M A R T Í N A LCO F F
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roviding rich opportunities for transnational conversation, Santiago Castro-Gómez’s Critique of Latin American Reason has finally, very belatedly, been translated for English speaking audiences. For anyone addressing the very general questions of critical theory, of liberation, and of philosophy’s relation to history and its social context, this text is irreplaceable. The current discussions about the relationship between colonialism, Eurocentrism, and the European critical theory tradition cannot be advanced without attention to CastroGómez’s capacious analysis and original critical interventions. This engagement is long overdue. The challenge of Castro-Gómez’s work for the Anglo-European philosophical community lies in its thorough embeddedness within Latin American philosophy. He does not, as Walter Mignolo does in the main, write books intended to provide strategic interventions in North American or European debates. For those unfamiliar with Latin American philosophy, this will be a challenge. It is also the book’s strength—given Castro-Gómez’s extensive and insightful summaries of the traditions and debates in Latin America, new readers to this tradition will learn a tremendous amount from reading just this single book. This is what makes the English translation all the more of an important intervention. Since Castro-Gómez’s interventions are centrally aimed at the Latin American critical intellectual scene, this book operates to shift the center
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and to realign the central topics of debate, a much more effective way to defeat Eurocentrism than simply turning away from or vilifying all European texts, which Castro-Gómez rightfully refuses to do. When it was published in 1995, the Critique of Latin American Reason’s central intervention in Latin America was to create a left pole or a new kind of left position that articulated a certain pessimism (or skepticism) toward the dominant anticolonial left. His was the most well worked through and thoroughly argued version of this left pole. Since 1995, a larger grouping has emerged that includes left critics of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela such as Fernando Coronil, left critiques of Evo Morales in Bolivia in the work of Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and Catherine Walsh, left critics of Lula da Silva in Brazil, and others. Their many differences notwithstanding, this group have shared a worry about recreations of old forms of socialism based on unreconstructed and overly unified ideas about “the poor” or “the people” that legitimate exclusionary binaries and authoritarian practices. This clearly was a motivation for Santiago’s critique as well, given his championing of the concept of dissensus and rejection of all metanarratives within which social movements could be judged, as if from above. Equally anti-imperialist and decolonial, this group of critics—or left pessimists—offer different notions of liberation or of the way forward. Mignolo and Román de la Campa’s own criticisms of Latin Americanism would belong to this camp as well. So although this book must be understood in relation to a very different time and place, its relevance has if anything increased as we try to navigate new political formations in the twenty-first century. It should be stressed that the book’s contextualization to Latin American philosophical debates does not restrict its relevance to the continent. It is also essential reading for revised understandings of Anglo-European critical philosophy. Castro-Gómez engages fraught debates concerning how to understand the situatedness of philosophy (a debate that has lasted centuries) and real battles about how to conceptualize liberation. Going far beyond either Marxism or liberalism, these Latin American debates should, in their nonuniversal register, be instructive of the limitations of the Anglo-European intellectual horizon. In my historical metanarrative, Latin America is way ahead in offering positional understandings of philosophy and shares this with African theorists such as Kwame
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Nkrumah, Amílcar Cabral, Frantz Fanon, and others. Castro-Gómez’s critical analysis of the various arguments within this trend does not return philosophy to its transcendental space. This 1995 book contests the way in which contextualization was itself understood in relation to its site of enunciation, rendering Latin American thought an object of knowledge. In this, his work is an invaluable push for all of us on the left to think more deeply. This is not to say, of course, that the analysis can be accepted as is. As we know, the Santiago of 2020 is not the Santiago of 1995, as new translations in the works (including Zero-Point Hubris) will reveal. Critical questions have been posed to Critique of Latin American Reason by an array of brilliant young thinkers on the question of identity in general and of race in particular. (Santiago has to be happy with the quality and the amount of dissensus his book has already generated.) Barnor Hesse, for example, has observed that the extensive debates over populism summarized in this book entirely neglect the crucial issue of the racialized basis of such popular appeals. I share these concerns, but I would encourage readers to read this text in the context of its locus of enunciation, its time and space. So often we pore through works exhibiting similar lacunae for some glimmer of relevant analysis, straining to find something in work by Michel Foucault or Gilles Deleuze (or, for that matter, Judith Butler or Wendy Brown) more adequate to a thinking of race or analogous to race. In this effort, we often sidestep missteps, reading generously, concentrating on what is useful. Like more recent decolonial theorists, Castro-Gómez warns us to be wary of metanarratives that can—unwittingly in some cases, purposefully in others—derail dialogue, condemn dissensus, and obscure certain kinds of voices. Importantly, many of the most marginalized voices speak a more local tongue, rejecting the need to situate their claims within a legitimated meta-account that espouses mastery over the whole. Herein lies, I suggest, the key to Castro-Gómez’s politics, a pessimism toward projects of mastery, an optimism toward the many forms of resistance that continue to exceed the predictions of the mapmakers.
“Critique of Latin American Reason is one of the pivotal texts in Latin American studies and an obligatory reference for anyone who is interested in approaching critical thinking in the context of the global south. If the field of philosophy can recognize that it is in need of a serious critique of its colonial methodologies, this book will be at the center of that undertaking.” MA RÍA DE L ROSA RIO ACOSTA LÓP EZ ,
University of California, Riverside
“Critique of Latin American Reason is an ambitious archaeological reconstruction of the idea of a separate form of thinking that characterizes the region in opposition to imperial and colonial forces. This is a book that is only more urgent today than when originally published.” author of Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religion in Times of Terror
BRUNO BOSTEELS,
“In this foundational work, Santiago Castro-Gómez rethinks Latin American thought. While undoing the essentialist and colonizing myths that underlie the last hundred years of Latin American philosophy, he exposes Latin American reality as configured by the incessant raging of globalization. Castro-Gómez’s critique makes a major contribution to liberatory thought in and beyond Latin America.” AL E JA N D R O VA LL EGA ,
author of Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority
“This long overdue translation of Castro-Gómez’s groundbreaking Critique of Latin American Reason is timely. Readers today will find important precursors to and critical keys for engaging the coloniality of power in knowledge production; contemporary pressures on the categories of ‘Latin American,’ ‘Latinidad,’ and ‘Latinx’; and the complexities of the racial order that defines the afterlife of colonialism in the region. This book is essential reading for any engagement with Latin American thought.” ROCÍO ZA MBRA N A ,
author of Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico
S A N T I AG O C A S T R O - G Ó M E Z is professor of political philosophy at the University
of Santo Tomás and the University Javeriana in Bogotá. He was part of the influential intellectual collective modernity/coloniality, and he has been visiting professor at Duke University, the University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Frankfurt. His publications in English include Zero-Point Hubris: Science, Race, and Enlightenment (2021). A N D R E W A S C H E R L has translated several works of Latin American critical theory
and literary criticism. L I N DA M A RT Í N A LCO F F is professor of philosophy at Hunter College, City University of New York. E D UA R D O M E N D I E TA is professor of philosophy at Pennsylvania State University. ISBN: 978-0-231-20006-6
Cover design: Lisa Hamm Cover image: Shutterstock CO LU M B I A U N I V E R S I T Y P R E S S / NEW YORK
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