Delimitations of Latin American Philosophy

Beyond Redemption

Omar Rivera

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780253044860
• Topic: Philosophie
• Subtopic: Philosophie politique

"[An] original view of José Carlos Mariátegui's role in Latin American philosophy and his relation to identity, liberation, and aesthetics (Elizabeth Millán Brusslan, editor of After the Avant-Gardes ). In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Latin American philosophy focused on the convergence of identity formation and political liberation in ethnically and racially diverse postcolonial contexts. In this book, Omar Rivera interprets how a "we" is articulated and deployed in this robust philosophical tradition. With close readings of Peruvian political theorist José Carlos Mariátegui, he also examines texts by José Martí, Simón Bolívar, and others. Rivera critiques philosophies of liberation that frame the redemption of oppressed identities as a condition for bringing about radical social and political change. Shining a light on Latin America's complex histories and socialities, he illustrates the power and shortcomings of these projects. Building on this critical approach, Rivera studies interrelated epistemological, transcultural, and aesthetic delimitations of Latin American philosophy in order to explore the possibility of social and political liberation "beyond redemption."

ONE

RAPTURE

A “Contextual” and Redemptive Reading of Bolívar

IDENTITY IN LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY: BEGINNING WITH MARTÍN ALCOFF

Linda Martín Alcoff approaches Latin American philosophy in terms of the complex processes of identity formation in the Americas.¹ The complexity is due not only to the diversity of peoples that come to be exposed to one another but also to the conditions in which these exposures happen, namely, colonial and postcolonial economic, social, and political conditions. She writes, “New identities have been continually foregrounded, exhaustively catalogued, hierarchically organized, and often instrumentalized in Latin American political thought and discourse but rarely ignored. Their existence demanded new narratives of identity, history, progress, national unity, aesthetic beauty, and the possibility of universality.”²

In particular, Martín Alcoff draws attention to the investment of Latin American political philosophy in emerging identities and suggests that it recasts, or even renews and re-creates, these identities for the sake of liberatory political projects. Following her, I focus on the ways Latin American liberatory philosophical thought intersects with, and attempts to elucidate and influence, processes of identity formation in the context of coloniality, specifically with respect to the identities “Indian” and “American.” In this sense, I am interested in tracing constructions of a “we” in identity narratives within Latin American philosophy; that is, in constructions of collective identities that confer senses of moral and historical purpose and elicit affective and ideological commitments to liberatory goals. In particular, this book turns to political liberatory philosophies—Bolívar’s, Martí’s, and Mariátegui’s—in which the elucidation of identities is the condition for the articulation and enactment of projects of social and political liberation.³

This first chapter delves into Martín Alcoff’s identity-based, contextual delimitation of Latin American philosophy, complements it with Mariátegui’s notion of myth, and pursues it as the basis for an interpretation of Bolívar’s “Jamaica Letter” and “Angostura Address.” It reveals redemptive dimensions of Bolívar’s political project tied to the construction of the identities “American” and “Indian.” The chapter ends with a discussion of the legacy of Bolívar’s redemptive investments in the work of Leopoldo Zea and its racial, ethnic, and temporal implications as laid out in the work of Earle, Pagden, and Mariátegui.

MARTÍN ALCOFF’S CONTEXTUAL DELIMITATION OF LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY

In the text “Educating with a [De]Colonial Consciousness,” Martín Alcoff identifies a “running thread of colonial self-consciousness” within the Latin American philosophical tradition, which, within its geohistorical frames, can become defensive of its integrity, abilities, and accomplishments in the face of Anglo and European philosophy. Yet Martín Alcoff sees a philosophically productive facet of such defensiveness: “This required defense, and concomitant defensiveness, has had the beneficial result of making visible the context in which knowledge occurs, and of disabling the usual pretensions, still found in European influenced philosophical traditions, of being able to make transcendent abstractions removed from all concrete realities. Hence a general approach to knowledge has emerged that renders it self-conscious and reflective about its context and social location.”

There are two important interrelated aspects of Latin American philosophy exposed here. First, the defense of its validity in the face of a universal Eurocentered philosophy implies foregrounding the contexts in which Latin American philosophy takes place, showing that it philosophizes from a distinct set of experiences and geohistorical realities. Second, Latin American philosophy’s defensiveness informs a particular way of doing philosophy, one in which all knowledge and knowledge production is taken as contextual, so that philosophical thinking cannot avoid including a questioning of the social, political, economic, and geographic determinants that condition it. In this way, Eurocentered philosophies’ aspirations to universality, and their assumption of a universal locus of enunciation, can be challenged. Latin American philosophy, then, turns its defensiveness into a body of philosophical thought that must be studied in its own right.⁴

Martín Alcoff shows how this affects philosophies concerned with the possibility of social and political liberation. Eurocentered liberatory philosophies tend to turn local truths into universal ones, and “As a result, liberatory theories, including the truly rich resources of the Marxist tradition, developed no theory of race, no conceptualization of xenophobia, no critique of Eurocentrism, no concept of indigeneity, no understanding of the link between colonialism and culture, and no analysis of the ways in which geographical hierarchies affects the making of theory itself.” In contexts not defined by histories of colonialism, or where such histories are denied or deemed secondary, oppression in terms of culture, race, and knowledge production, among others, is not readily considered central to the articulation of liberatory theories. It is interesting to recall here that in orthodox Marxism even class differences are understood as the distillation of all others and that cultural determinations are derivative. Hinting at the inefficacy and dangers of imposing such Eurocentered liberatory theories on colonial and postcolonial environments, Martín Alcoff evokes the contextual insights of Latin American philosophy: “theories of justice, of progress, of liberation or of oppression emerge within specific contexts, and . . . in fact these contexts play a constitutive role in the formulation of theoretical tasks and projects, setting the agenda but also affecting how reasons and arguments were judged in regard to their plausibility, adequacy and even intelligibility.”⁵

In colonial and postcolonial contexts, for example, liberatory theories need to address the denial of the humanity of certain racialized populations, a denial tied to the formation of their identities within coloniality. Since it is the liberation of these populations that is primarily at stake, the structures that deny their humanity, whether economic, social, political, or ideological ones, have to be the primary target of liberatory theory and praxis. Rigorous attention to the complex processes of identity formation of the colonized is, then, necessary in anticolonial, liberatory philosophies. At the same time, through such philosophies, identities that are instantiated to further oppression can be reconfigured for the sake of resistance and liberation.⁶

In this sense, Martín Alcoff gives a contextual delimitation of Latin American philosophy and traces its lineage back to the debate between Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de las Casas. She notes that Sepúlveda denies the humanity of the colonized “on the basis of the specific cultural and social identities of the Indians.”⁷ Retroactively engaging de las Casas as an example of a Latin American contextual philosopher, she states, “He allowed that the Indians might look brutish to the Spanish, as Sepúlveda claimed, but this was only because the conventions within which their practices were embedded were strange and unknown to the Spaniards. The context of the judgment was here brought into relief.”

Consistent with the delimitation of Latin American philosophy Martín Alcoff describes, de las Casas’s argument for the humanity of the “Indians” is contextual, localizing the frames within which it has to be assessed rather than appealing to universal ones, and, thus, seeks to overturn the racist determinations of this identity by generating a new elucidation of it. The role of philosophy here is to engage particular contexts so that the humanity of colonized peoples comes through in a way that is not apparent to a “universal” perspective. This indicates that a strain of Latin American liberatory philosophy contextually challenges the racist framings of coloniality through elucidations of the identity of the oppressed on the basis of their specific historical, geographic, ethnic, and cultural determinations. Martín Alcoff states that this becomes “a general exploration of the relationship between thought and identity, cultural location and philosophy.”⁸

Elucidations of identities such as de las Casas’s, however, can continue to relate to foreign contexts. Moreover, Latin American philosophy, even when contextual, is always in danger of elucidating identities within entrenched dynamics of racism that continue to inform it. Martín Alcoff seems attentive to this when she notes that in “the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, much of the discussions turned on the various methods of advancing, or repairing, the cultural context so that it might ‘deserve’ self-determination.” Following this train of thought, one could delve deeper into the ways in which liberatory philosophies in the context of coloniality, by having to elucidate the identities of the oppressed, can themselves become racist mechanisms.⁹

Martín Alcoff maintains that Latin American political philosophy has contextually brought forth a Latin American identity in two ways. First, Alberdí, Sarmiento and Rodó “emphasized in various ways the dominance of the European lineage of Latin American culture, and proposed highlighting or expanding this dominance as a means to solve Latin America’s inferior status.” Martín Alcoff’s point is that this call for the expansion of European dominance was argued for through contextual claims about specific characteristics, including historical and geopolitical determinations, of Latin American peoples. It, however, did not intend the liberation of “Latin Americans” as such because this particular elucidation of this identity affirmed the dependence on European and Anglo peoples. Second, she mentions a different, “non-capitulationist” lineage: Bolívar, Martí, Mariátegui, and Haya de la Torre. Her argument is that they followed the same philosophical contextual approach, but in their case the elucidation of a Latin American identity took them to contrasting views. They affirmed the humanity of Latin Americans as a group—their capacity for self-determination, their belonging to a distinct civilization, their potential to make contributions to world history—and, therefore, they proposed thwarting the expansion of European dominance and dismantling remaining colonial structures.¹⁰

The noncapitulationist political philosophers found, within their specific contexts, sources to argue for the cultural integrity, social and political viability, and historical purpose of Latin Americans as a distinct people, showcasing an identity characterized by a diversity and mestizaje that demand a distinct philosophical approach, one that eludes Eurocentered epistemic frames and challenges Anglo-European claims to political and philosophical dominance. Here I touch on an earlier point, in which Latin American philosophy, according to Martín Alcoff, appears to take root in the relationship between emerging determinations and formations of peoples and projects of political liberation in the Americas.

THE POSSIBLE CONVERGENCE OF THE CONTEXTUAL DELIMITATION OF LATIN AMERICAN PHILOSOPHY AND MYTH

This book hinges on three contextual noncapitulationist philosophers identified by Martín Alcoff: Bolívar, Martí, and Mariátegui. These three figures find themselves in revolutionary junctures and are invested in elucidating an identity in order to both reveal the humanity of the oppressed and galvanize collective agents that would endorse their specific liberatory projects. “Americans” for Bolívar and Martí and “Indian” socialist revolutionaries for Mariátegui, are identities argued for, and made manifest, through the articulation of their liberatory philosophies. In them, the conditions for the possibility and efficacy of alternative political options are at stake.¹¹

These three liberatory philosophies can posit the overturning of oppressive structures as implicated in the affirmation of the humanity of a specific identity, something that appears possible only within the scope and aims of their particular revolutionary goals. Their approach elucidates a demarcated oppressed identity as a critical position that can make apparent both an oppressive structural totality and the structural transformation that would overturn it. In this way, the affirmation of the humanity of the oppressed gathered under an identity appears to be at issue in a coming comprehensive and liberatory event. The oppressed are thus oriented to a single liberatory futural horizon. In my terms, this is the mythical horizon of “redemption.”

I am approximating here an aspect of the term myth in Mariátegui’s work and relating it to Martín Alcoff’s contextual delimitation of Latin American philosophy, even if she does not fall into redemptive commitments in the elucidation of her philosophical position. In Mariátegui’s lexicon, the term “myth” can be seen as implicitly linked both to the lineage of Bolívar and to that of Martí as Latin American contextual philosophers of liberation, as well as to Marx’s discovery of the proletariat as a revolutionary agent. In terms of socialism as myth, Mariátegui states,

Marx appears as the discoverer and, I would say, the creator of the proletariat; he has, effectively, not only given the proletariat the conscience of its nature, of its legitimacy and historical necessity, of its inner law, and of the ultimate instance toward which it moves, and has, thus, conferred upon the proletariat that consciousness that they lacked; he has also created, one could say, the very notion and, supporting the notion, the reality of the proletar...