Latin American Philosophy from Identity to Radical Exteriority

Alejandro A. Vallega is Assistant Professor of Philosophy at the University of Oregon. He is author of Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking on Exilic Grounds and Sense and Finitude: Encounters at the Limits of Art, Language, and the Political.

"No other contemporary philosopher is more engaged with the meaning and sense of philosophy in Latin America than Alejandro A. Vallega." -Omar Rivera, Southwestern University "Vallega engages with current debates among those seeking a decolonial approach to concepts of identity, history, and liberation without unhelpful baggage from European colonial modernity. He impressively remaps and advances the debate. Many have been anticipating this book with some excitement; it will exceed their expectations." -Linda Martin Alcoff, Hunter College "Vallega's wonderful book demonstrates that the question 'Is there Latin American philosophy?' has outlived its rhetorical usefulness. Instead, it announces that the task before us is to engage with a vast canon that is as dispersed and buried as it is unsuspecting and challenging. If we read Jefferson, Adams and Hamilton as philosophers of the 'American Revolution'-why not read Bolivar and Miranda also as political philosophers par excellence? If we read Martin Luther King, Malcom X, and Angela Davis as radical thinkers, why not do so with Marti, Guevara and Subcomandante Marcos? Those before Vallega had to apologetically introduce some key figures and themes in the U.S. context. After this book, we have been brought to the elevations of thinking from which we can surmise and survey a tradition that reaches across time, beyond the emergence of a putative vanguard of history led by an imagined 'Europe' or 'West,' and beyond equally illusory disciplinary purity and unity. Vallega reminds us that philosophy is homeless by definition and that thinking deserving that name operates under the imperative to be attentive to new questions, which may come from unusual places, in different accents, with different gestures. By exposing us to the vibrancy, richness, relentless tarrying with difference and alterity of Latin American thinking over several centuries, Vallega also gifts philosophy as such." -Eduardo Mendieta, Stony Brook University

• Introduction Part 1. Identity, Dependency, and the Project of Liberation1. The Question of a Latin American Philosophy and its Identity: Simón Bolívar and Leopoldo Zea 2. Existence and Dependency: Ernesto Mayz Vallenilla's Phenomenological Analysis of Being Latin American and Augusto Salazar Bondy's Negative Critique of Latin American Philosophy 3. Latin American Philosophy and Liberation: Enrique Dussel's Project of a Philosophy of Liberation 4. Delimitations... of Dussel's Philosophy of Liberation and Beyond Part 2. The Decolonial Turn and the Dissemination of Philosophies 5. Beyond the Domination of the "Coloniality of Power and Knowledge": Latin America's Living Ana-Chronic Temporality and the Dissemination of Philosophy 6. Remaining with the Decolonial Turn: Race and the Limits of the Social-Political Historical Critique in Latin American Thought Part 3. Thinking from Radical Exteriority7. Yucatán: Thought Situated in Radical Exteriority as a Thinking of Concrete Fluid Singularities8. Modernity and Rationality Rethought in Light of Latin American Radical Exteriority and Asymmetrical Temporalities: Hybrid Thinking in Santiago Castro-Gómez 9. Thinking in Remarkable Distinctness: Decolonial Thought in Some Key Figures in Contemporary Latin American Philosophy 10. Fecund Undercurrents: On the Aesthetic Dimension of Latin American and Decolonial Thought NotesBibliographyIndex