Decrypting Power and Coloniality: Philosophical Perspectives from and through the Global South – serie

This book deploys the theory of encryption of to decrypt justice, setting in opposition Justice, written with the hegemonic capital letters of Western ideas, and justice, in its everyday workings within disparate communal forms and the exercise of multiplicity. As it decrypts justice, the book argues that late-coloniality, through its construction of the “hidden people,” shattered the possibility of true communities in the service of a transcendent model, consisting ofthe market, the constitution, the nation, and the economy. The first three chapters serve as the theoretical backbone of the book, engaging sovereignty, posthumanism, Artificial Intelligence, and epistemic injustice. Chapters 4 and 5 describe the emancipation of the people through alternate communal practices: “Quilombismo” in Brazil and “Corazonar” of Tseltal women in Mexico. Chapter 7 examines the Tosepan’s practices in Mexico to decrypt hegemonic territorial forms, and chapters 6 and 8 explore how Western judicial systems disempower the people, focusing on Central American migrants and critiques from the Colombian peace process.Edited by Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo, Marinella Machado-Araujo, and Sabelo J. Ndlovu-Gatsheni, Decrypting Justice: From Epistemic Violence to Immanent Democracy is a transforming force, not only in the way which we understand reality but also in the tools with which we build it.

Bringing political criticism, a variety of theoretical approaches, and the author’s concrete experiences together, this book offers a political definition of hope as a utopian signifier, rooted in concrete processes of historical differentiation. Oscar Guardiola-Rivera addresses the problem of current limitations to the exercise of political imagination which severely contain, encrypt, and obscure our vision of social alternatives and normative possibilities? While grounding ethical and political stances on liberation philosophy and the anthropology of visual systems, A Hopeful Political Imagination: Courage and Fantastic Critique in the Age of Meltdown engages in dialogue with theories of encryption, a-legality, and the critique of anthropological absolutism coming from decolonial and ecological approaches. It allows us to understand 'decryption' as reversing encrypting linguistic and spatial processes in modernity, and proposes a new approach called 'fantastic critique' to reinvent the dynamics of power, judgement, time and the imagination, based on historical, literary, and philosophical examples. This book recovers and reimagines principles of hope and courage as republican, ethical virtues of revelation of what is figured and made in movement together, for practical action.

Advancing a democratization of secularization theory from a distinctly Latin American standpoint, this book challenges the theory’s modern-centric and colonial underpinnings.Contemporary socio-political debates increasingly revisit the concept of secularization, yet not uniformly across disciplines or public arenas. The shifting visibility and agency of religion in modern contexts challenge the classical secularization thesis, whose early-twentieth-century formulations predicted a steady decline or confinement of religion within modernity. Contrary to these expectations, religious expressions have not only persisted but diversified, expanding their modes of influence within public and political spaces.The theory of the encryption of power offers a critical framework for interpreting these dynamics by complicating traditional definitions of both power and the religious. Religion functions not merely as a legitimizing resource for dominant political narratives but also as a generator of differentiation, tension, and counter-hegemonic practices. It can simultaneously uphold, contest, and reconfigure colonial and decolonial projects, aligning this approach with post- and de-colonial critiques that view secularization itself as entangled with the coloniality of power, knowledge, and being.This book brings together theoretical essays and case studies centered on Latin America, offering diverse contributions to the understanding of these contemporary dynamics. Edited by Nicolás Panotto, the collection interrogates the ways in which secularization has historically operated as a mechanism of colonial othering, shaping and marginalizing religious, racial, political, and cultural minorities.

This book presents a genealogy of the concept of political theology through the theory of encryption of power. The legitimacy of political power, largely overlooked in traditional political theory and philosophy, is largely rooted in what has come to be known as political theology, although the current state may be formally secular. This concept is essential for philosophical interpretations that can unveil and address the complex interconnections between religion and politics, as well as faith and power. This book employs the theory of the encryption of power and the ontological idea of an-anarchy—that is, a practice of thought without foundations and centered on flow, potency, and contingency—to provide a brief genealogy of the idea of political theology, exploring its key authors, both classical (such as Schmitt, Benjamin, and Taubes) and contemporary, including feminist, black, and decolonial perspectives. These contemporary approaches emerge from processes that decrypt power and, by moving beyond the sovereign framework, antagonize political-economic authority. The book also examines phenomena such as Christofascism, prosperity theology, and neo-Pentecostalism in politics, alongside other significant themes relevant to today’s world.

Using the theory of encryption of power in a tight connection with the theory of archism sheds light on sovereignty and thus politics.Archism is that prevailing form of power that seeks to go nameless insofar as it claims to be ubiquitous and just how politics is. The theory of encryption of power explains how the use of language monopolizes and hides power, preventing access to it through the denial and neutralization of differences based on class, race, and gender. Archism and the theory of encryption of power are intimately linked: one potentializes and sharpens the other to bring together an especially pernicious form of sovereignty and its role in our world. Coloniality exists because it encrypts power. The encryption of power hides the ubiquity of archism and, in this way, preserves and enhances its power. A transcendent model, one that poses as ordinary, dictates from a vanishing point of invisibility—outside language and any relation—the conditions to which every and any form of beingness must abide in order to be and thus to exercise power.This collection, edited by James R. Martel and Ricardo Sanín-Restrepo, explores these questions in parallel with decolonial theory and critical and subaltern studies, using conceptual tools that allow us to think difference without the interference of the void of normality, a position from where the possible may come to be. In the name of the people, the people are made vulnerable to dispossession and exclusion; in the name of democracy, democracy is undermined and potentially destroyed. Theorizing encryption challenges the linkages between liberalism and colonialism, capitalism and sovereignty, constitution and economy, and their claims of necessity.

Bringing political criticism, a variety of theoretical approaches, and the author's concrete experiences together, this book offers a political definition of hope as a utopian signifier, rooted in concrete processes of historical differentiation. Oscar Guardiola-Rivera addresses the problem of current limitations to the exercise of political imagination which severely contain, encrypt, and obscure our vision of social alternatives and normative possibilities? While grounding ethical and political stances on liberation philosophy and the anthropology of visual systems, A Hopeful Political Imagination: Courage and Fantastic Critique in the Age of Meltdown engages in dialogue with theories of encryption, a-legality, and the critique of anthropological absolutism coming from decolonial and ecological approaches. It allows us to understand 'decryption' as reversing encrypting linguistic and spatial processes in modernity, and proposes a new approach called 'fantastic critique' to reinvent the dynamics of power, judgement, time and the imagination, based on historical, literary, and philosophical examples. This book recovers and reimagines principles of hope and courage as republican, ethical virtues of revelation of what is figured and made in movement together, for practical action.