Geopolitics of Knowledge

ISSN 1360-4813 print/ISSN 1470-3629 online/04/010029-28 © 2004 Taylor & Francis LtdDOI: 10.1080/1360481042000199787

CITY, VOL. 8, NO. 1, APRIL 2004

The topology of being and thegeopolitics of knowledgeModernity, empire, coloniality1

Nelson Maldonado-Torres

This essay by Nelson Maldonado-Torres examines the conjunction of race and space in thework of several European thinkers. It focuses on Martin Heidegger’s project of Searchingfor roots in the West. This project of searching for roots is unmasked as being complicit withan imperial cartographical vision that creates and divides the cities of the gods and the citiesof the damned. Maldonado-Torres identifies similar conceptions in other Western thinkers,most notably Levinas, Negri, Zizeck, Habermas, and Derrida. To the project of searchingfor roots and its racist undertones, he opposes a Fanonian critical vision that highlights theconstitutive character of coloniality and damnation for the project of European modernity.He concludes with a call for radical diversality and a decolonial geopolitics ofknowledge.

“Until today, ontological foundation hastaken the Center as the end and point ofdeparture. ‘Being’ has been, in truth, theCenter. ‘Thinking’ has been CentralThinking. In the Center they have met. Outof the Center one finds the entity, thecontingent, and the underdeveloped; thatwhich came to be recognized only throughthe Center.

Metaphysics in its entirety has imposed aphilosophical foundation that goes throughthe Center. The theory of knowledge in allits forms has imposed and still imposes anEnlightened Center. Ethics, on its turn,imposes a Center through which valuesobtain their value.” (Agustın T. de laRiega2)

It has become a pedestrian truth toacknowledge that social theory in gen-eral has taken a spatial turn that

parallels the linguistic turn of Westernphilosophy. Reflections on how ideasabout spatiality have shaped philosophical

thought are also gradually emerging in thefield of philosophy. For too long the dis-cipline of philosophy proceeded as if geopo-litical location and ideas about space wereonly contingent features of philosophicalreasoning. Rightly avoiding the reduction-ism of geographical determination, philos-ophers have tended to consider space as toosimplistic for being philosophically rele-vant.3 To be sure, there are other relevantreasons to explain the allergy of space as asignificant philosophical factor. Questionsabout space and geopolitical relationsundermine the idea of a neutral epistemicsubject whose reflections only respond tothe strictures of the spaceless realm of theuniversal. They also bring to light the waysin which philosophers and teachers ofphilosophy tend to affirm their roots in aspiritual region always described in geo-graphical terms: Europe.4 The absence ofreflections on geopolitics and spatiality inthe production of knowledge works intandem with the lack of critical reflection

30 CITY VOL. 8, NO. 1

regarding the commitment of Westernphilosophy and philosophers with Europeas a privileged epistemic site.

While the introduction of spatiality as asignificant factor in the understanding ofphilosophy is an important step forwardfor the discipline, it would be a limited oneif it promotes the reaffirmation of a newneutral epistemic subject who can alonemap the world and draw associationsbetween thinking and space. This is a risknot only for philosophy, but for socialtheory as well. The idea is not to change thealleged neutrality of the philosopher withthat of the equally mythical image of theneutral scientific cartographer. The intro-duction of spatiality as a significant factorin the understanding of philosophy and inthe production of social theory can becomethe new locus for the idea of a detachedobserver who can only examine the intri-cate relations between knowledge and ideasof space because she or he is ultimatelybeyond such relations. At the end, suchbelief in neutrality, I would like to suggest,tends to reproduce blindness, not in regardto space as such, but in relation to non-European ways of thinking and to theproduction and reproduction of the impe-rial/colonial relation, or what I would liketo refer to, following the work of thePeruvian sociologist Anıbal Quijano, ascoloniality.

This essay has to do with what I wouldcall the forgetfulness of coloniality in bothWestern philosophy and contemporarysocial theory. To be sure, in this context Ican only offer brief analyses which for-tunately will make sufficiently clear bothmy criticism of modern and contemporarytendencies in philosophy and social theoryas well as my suggestions as to how toovercome these limits. In the first section ofthe essay I critically analyse influentialthinkers in the linguistic turn. I focus onthe relationship between Martin Heideg-ger’s ontology and Emmanuel Levinas’smetaphysical ethics. My aim is to show thatwhile both Heideggerian ontology and

Levinas’s ethics gave a strong ground tothe linguistic turn and provided ingeniousways to overcome the limits of the Westernidea of Man, their philosophies remainedcomplicit with imperial spatial formations.Their philosophies are marked by the for-getfulness of coloniality. In the secondsection I offer a theoretical account ofcoloniality in relation to the concept ofmodernity. I distinguish this critical per-spective from critical theories that conceivethe global as a post-imperialistic networkof relations, most notably Michael Hardtand Antonio Negri’s Empire. In the thirdand final section I offer an alternative toWestern identity politics, as it is expressedin the project of searching for roots in theWest. Instead of legitimating the search forEuropean and US roots and its link with anallegedly universal point of view, I willdefend a notion of radical diversality. Radi-cal diversality is a critique of roots thatbrings into light both coloniality and theepistemic potential of non-Europeanepistemes.

Between Athens and Jerusalem:Heidegger, Levinas and the search forroots

The work of Martin Heidegger occupies acentral place in the list of philosophers whosework has been influential in the creation andpropagation of the perspective commonlyknown as the linguistic turn, particularly inits hermeneutic and deconstructionist varia-tions. Heidegger first got international noto-riety by shifting the grounds of philosophyfrom epistemology to a form of ontologicalreflection that offered new perspectives tothink about the subject, language and histo-ricity.5 The question of the meaning of Beingrepresented for him the rescue of a radicalpoint of departure which came to oblivionthrough the tradition of Western metaphys-ics. This point of departure provided themeans to respond to the crisis of modernityby proposing a philosophical position that

MALDONADO-TORRES: THE TOPOLOGY OF BEING AND THE GEOPOLITICS OF KNOWLEDGE 31

pointed to alternative ways of being andbehaving. Heidegger was not thinking partic-ularly in ethics when he considered alter-native ways of being that defied the para-meters of modernity. His writings rathersought to formulate subject positions notinspired by the primacy of the subject or themodel of being human that is dominant inmodernity, that of Man.

The key to evade the problematic effects ofmetaphysics and the modern conception ofMan, which for Heidegger undergirded theideal of modern life in terms of technologicaladvancement, resided in shifting philosoph-ical reflection from epistemological to onto-logical questions. This does not mean thatHeidegger did not have anything to do withepistemology; the idea is rather, that insteadof positing epistemology as first philosophy,he explored epistemological questions interms of the horizon of questioning openedup by the question of the meaning of Being.While Heidegger’s first efforts in this direc-tion gave a central important to philosophicalanthropology, his critique of epistemologyand the idea of Man—the subject of modernEuropean epistemology—led him to shiftfrom a perspective that took human existenceas the opening toward Being to languageitself and the opening to language as the locusof ontological reflection. After Heidegger’sso-called Kehre, the ontological turn deci-sively represented also a linguistic turn.6

Language, Heidegger came to affirm, is thehouse of Being, and human beings, rather thanlords of it, are its shepherds. By turning tolanguage in this way Heidegger believed thathe had found an opening that allowed him toarticulate an alternative to the metaphysicallyand epistemologically oriented Western phi-losophy which ultimately led human beingsto become prisoners of their own creations.Like other Western philosophers before him,Heidegger believed that he was confrontingan epochal moment and that philosophicalperspectives played a fundamental role insustaining the ideas and historical projectsthat defined that moment. The moment inquestion was for him the crisis of Europe

which found expression in Western nihilismand the rootless cosmopolitanism of liberalmodels of the nation-state designed in thecontext of the French Revolution.7 CharlesBambach has examined carefully the linksbetween Heidegger’s thought and the termswith which he defined and tried to respond towhat he conceived to be the crisis of Europe.A brief exploration of Bambach’s thesesconcerning Heidegger’s philosophical dis-course and project will give an idea of theways in which Heidegger’s ontological andlinguistic turn cannot be understood com-pletely without perceiving a geopolitical turnin his work that gave a new basis to racism.

Bambach’s Heidegger’s Roots analysesHeidegger’s work in the context of intellec-tual and political debates concerning thecrisis of Europe. The crisis of Europe wasconceived by a number of conservativethinkers in Germany, not as the crisis ofEurope per se, but as a crisis of the centre ofEurope.8 At the centre of Europe there wasfor them Germany and the German Volk.The crisis of Europe came to be understoodin this way as a crisis of the German Volk andthe rural environment in which many ofthem lived. Important in this context was theAthenian myth of authochtony according towhich the founder of Athens, Erichthonius,was himself self-generated from the earth.9

Erichtonius had an indigenous relation withthe Athenian land and landscape. The visionof the myth is clear: the greatness of Athensdepended on a similar intimate relationbetween the citizens of Athens and its soil.Many thinkers in Germany conceived thepolitical crisis of their country in similarterms. Only the affirmation of roots in theland could withstand the force of nihilismand the rootless cosmopolitanism of theFrench Enlightenment. And such roots werefound precisely in the world of the Greeks.Bambach comments that,

“In an age where German culture wasdeveloping without the framework of aunified nation state, a range of philosophersand writers asserted their own national


ideals in terms borrowed from their visionsof antiquity. Within the context of thisGerman Hellenomania, heightened by theinvasion of Napoleon in 1806, Fichte,Hegel, and their contemporaries came todraw upon the myth of a singularGraeco-German affinity rooted in bothlanguage and Heimat.”10

One of Bambach’s central points is thatHeidegger’s ontological and linguistic turnrepresents an original articulation of thesearch for a home or homeland (Heimat).11

While Erichtonious remains as the model forthe political myth of roots in the land,Heidegger posits Pre-Socratic thinking,“sprung up from the arche of being itself”, asthe authentic root of thinking—a way ofthinking that would contrast sharply withWestern metaphysics and epistemology.12

The location of an arche in Greece stoodbehind the effort to make Germany (theGerman language and the German Volk) thenew arche of Europe. Heidegger’s geopoliticsis, as Bambach notes, a politics based on theintimate relationship among the people, theirlanguage, and their land. Geopolitics is botha politics of the earth and a politics ofexclusion. Germany should be protectedfrom “the French spirit of Enlightenmentand from the Latinity of both Gallic andRoman Catholic culture”.13 Geopolitics alsobecomes for Heidegger a politics of epistemicracism and imperialism. Epistemic racismand imperialism are not new modalities inHeidegger’s world. In some ways, theyformed an intrinsic part of Western moder-nity and precede the excesses of technologythat Heidegger found so problematic in theWest. By accounting for the crisis of Europein terms of nihilism and technology, and notin terms of such epistemic racism, he feltjustified in the adventure to do to Europewhat Europe had done to the rest of theworld: epistemic subordination. His inter-view in Der Spiegel makes this very clear.

Spiegel: It is exactly at the same place wherethe technological world originated, that itmust, as you think . . .

Heidegger: . . .be transcended [aufgehoben]in the Hegelian sense, not pushed aside, buttranscended, but not through man alone.

S: You assign in particular a special task tothe Germans?

H: Yes, in the sense of the dialogue withHolderlin.

S: Do you believe that the Germans have aspecial qualification for this reversal?

H: I have in mind especially the innerrelationship of the German language withthe language of the Greeks and with theirthought. This has been confirmed for metoday again by the French. When theybegin to think, they speak German, beingsure that they could not make it with theirown language.

S: Are you trying to tell us that that is whyyou have had such a strong influence on theRomance countries, in particular theFrench?

H: Because they see that they can no longerget by in the contemporary world with alltheir great rationality when it comes rightdown to understanding the world in theorigin of its being.14

The idea of people not being able to get bywithout Europe’s theoretical or cultural ach-ievements is one of the most definitive tenetsof modernity. This logic has been applied forcenturies to the colonial world. Heideggertook on this tradition but shifted it in a waythat, through his Germancentrism, he coulddo to the rest of Europe what Europe haddone to a large portion of the globe. Thisepistemic turn is not surprising when oneconsiders that not so many years beforeHeidegger made these assertions the Germanshad taken over Paris. In some ways, to be sure,as Aime Cesaire so aptly noted, the Germanstried to do politically with Europe whatEurope had done with the colonial world.15

Heidegger continued this project, but in morestrict philosophical ways. The epistemic ren-


dering of the project, to be sure, does notmake it any less ideological or racist.

There were antecedents to the Nazi andthe Heideggerean gesture towards Europe.Through the late 16th to the 19th centuries,the French and the English had established aline between northern Europe and southernEurope.16 The difference gradually emergedthrough the propagation of the Black Leg-end, the prestige of technological advance-ment, and assertion of imperial control inAfrica and South-East Asia. The French andthe Industrial Revolutions provided addi-tional justifications for the marginalization ofSpain and Portugal from the story of moder-nity. The appearance of new disciplines in themodern Western university in the 19th cen-tury and their continued expansion in the20th only came to cement the subalternizedposition of southern Europe. Heidegger’slinguistic turn repeats some of these patterns.The difference is that where others put thenorth of Europe and south of Europe divide,he and other conservative German thinkersposit the metaphysics of Mitteleuropa. ForHeidegger the new beginning is in themiddle. And the middle is precisely what isbeing threatened first by French ideals andthen by foreign forces. German conservativethinkers insisted early on the threat ofFrance’s Zivilization to Germany’s Kultur.As Bambach points out, Heidegger not onlyshared this position, but also called attentionto the threat of two emerging powers: theSoviet Union on the one hand, and the USAon the other.

The Soviet Union had become a majorpolitical force since the Bolshevik Revolutionin 1917. After Hitler broke the Treaty ofVersailles in the 1930s, France made a pactwith the Soviet Union. The goal, to be sure,was to isolate Germany in the centre. Per-ceiving the alliance between the rootlesscosmopolitan France and the Asiatic SovietUnion Heidegger stated in 1936:

“Our historical Dasein experiences withincreasing distress and clarity that its futureis tantamount to a naked either/or: either

Europe’s rescue or its destruction. Thepossibility of rescue, however, demands twothings:

1. The preservation of the European Volkeragainst the Asiatic.

2. The overcoming of their ownderacination and fragmentation.

Without this overcoming such preservationcannot be realized.”17

Although Heidegger maintained his Ger-mancentrism until the end, he translatedsome of the core ideas of this position intothe more widespread form of Eurocentrism.His Eurocentrism, to be sure, still pre-supposed a strong Germancentrism. In someway, the defence of Europe became anextension of his diatribe with French thoughtover who owned the legacy of Europe.France’s pact with the Soviet Union indicatedjust how un-European they could be. Verydisconcerting here is that it was France’sreaction to Hitler’s violation of the Treaty ofVersailles, and not Hitler’s anti-semitism andimperial policies, that represented the moredangerous threat to Europe for Heidegger.

Heidegger was very clear about the threatof the USA as well. In 1942, after theAmerican entry into the Second World War,he wrote: “we know today that the Anglo-Saxon world of Americanism has resolved toannihilate Europe, that is, the homeland[Heimat], and that means: the commence-ment of the Western World”.18 Bambachsummarizes Heidegger’s view of America asfollows:

“Leaning on the staple of pronouncementsfrom Hegel, Burckhardt, Nietzsche, Scheler,Junger, Rilke, and others, Heideggerdeemed America (by which he meant theUnited States) a land without history, aculture without roots, a people held in thedeadening grip of total mobilization,preoccupied by size, expansion, magnitude,and quantity . . . Read within the context ofhis geo-philosophical account ofMitteleuropa, Americanism symbolizes


rootlessness, deracination, the loss ofautochthony and of any meaningfulconnection to the earth.”19

Heidegger’s philosophical geopolitics wereambitious, grand and racist. As Bambachnotes, while Heidegger opposed the biolog-ical racism of Nazi ideologues, he stillsustained a form of racism nonetheless.20 Hisracism is not biological, nor cultural, butepistemic. As all forms of racism, epistemicracism is linked with politics and sociality.Epistemic racism disregards the epistemiccapacity of certain groups of people. It maybe based on metaphysics or ontology but itsresults are nonetheless the same: the evasionof the recognition of others as fully humanbeings.

Heidegger’s racism was very clear in hisperception of the Jews and the Hebraictradition. In a letter to a colleague in 1929Heidegger states:

“I would like to say more clearly what Icould only hint at indirectly in my report.At stake is nothing less than the pressingconsideration that we stand before a choice:either to provide our German spiritual lifeonce more with genuine forces andeducators rooted in the native andindigenous or to deliver it over ultimatelyto increasing Judification.”21

Heidegger’s views of the Jews were groundedon the nationalistic ontology of the home-land (Heimat). The experience of exodus anddiaspora made the Jews inherently rootlesssubjects for him.22 He considered Jews to bea threat to the homeland. They have anurban, rather than a rural identity. Thesewanderers defy the Athenian principle ofautochthony. For this reason, even thoseJews who speak German still represented athreat to the German Volk. That Heideggerowed gratitude to his teacher Edmund Hus-serl does not represent an exception fromthis. Heidegger was not concerned so muchabout individuals per se, but about “increas-ing Judification”, which has to do, not withhis relationship with any one Jew in partic-

ular, but with his attitude regarding theiroverall collective influence in Germany.

Heidegger’s epistemic racism certainly didnot go unchallenged. One of Heidegger’smost virulent critics, if not the most, was aformer student of Edmund Husserl in Frei-burg who also attended Heidegger’s lectures:Emmanuel Levinas. All of Levinas’s maturework attempts to subvert Heidegger’sthought. In his first great work, Totality andInfinity, Levinas describes ontology as aphilosophy of power.23 Against Heidegger-ean ontology Levinas proposed ethics as firstphilosophy. And this ethics was stronglybased precisely in what Heidegger could notfind any value: the Hebraic tradition. WhileHeidegger’s criticism of the West is based onthe alleged forgetfulness of Being, Levinascriticism rather lies on the forgetfulness ofthe Hebraic in Western thought. Levinasfound in Jewish sources the possibility ofarticulating an ethical metaphysics that putlimits to the Christian and liberal ideasregarding the autonomy of the subject. Jew-ish sources also provided Levinas clues todevelop an account of corporality very dif-ferent from Nazi racial logics.24

Levinas’s ethical turn in philosophy res-cues the epistemic relevance of Judaism whilealso holding on to the legacy of the Greeks.As Husserl before him, what he took andpraised from the Greeks was not the myth ofautochthony, but the idea of universality.Levinas insisted that this idea of universalitywas very well compatible with Jewish sour-ces. Philosophy for him became precisely thecreative fusion of Greek and Jewish sources.For him, Athens and Jerusalem were notprincipled opposites, but co-habitations ofthe universal in the human.

Levinas responded to Heidegger’s epis-temic racism directly. He attempted to showthat Jews could not be excluded from Europeor the West because of alleged epistemicdifferences. The Hebraic experience andknowledge based on a combination of theHebraic and Greek traditions of thoughtwere in this regard not extra-Western, but insome way paradigmatically Western. Levinas


reconfigured the idea of the West andattempted to construct an alternative philo-sophical framework that would simultane-ously respond to the threats of racism andviolence and that would make clear theepistemic relevance of Judaism.

Levinas had a different philosophical geo-politics from Heidegger. He could imagineAthens and Jerusalem side by side as thebedrock of the West. The question is theextent to which this marriage respondedsatisfactorily to the challenges confronted byother regions and cities in the world. WhileHeidegger holds on to the ground or earth ofthe rural environment, to the myth of Greekautochthony and to German as the languageof the Volk in the middle of Europe, Levinasmore decisively embraces the cosmopolitan-ism of the urban experience, but only thinksof Greek and Hebrew as legitimate languagesfor thinking. At the end, only Athens andJerusalem stand out as cities of knowledge inhis work. In some ways Levinas writes as ifthe epistemic inclusion of Judaism in theinternal dynamics of the West were enoughto address epistemic exclusion everywhere.Thus, while Levinas successfully defendsJews and Judaism from Heideggerian epis-temic racism (indeed, from an epistemicracism endemic to much of modern Westernphilosophy), he does not escape Heidegger’slogic of searching for roots or his inclinationto think about epistemology only in refer-ence to the achievements of the Westernworld. As a European Jew Levinas searchesfor roots in the West, and thus transforms thehegemonic idea of the West in order to fit init. But he transgresses Heidegger’s discourse(and that of much of European philosophy)only partially. He is still concerned withfinding roots and defending the idea ofEurope (and Israel, to be sure) as project. Hisgeopolitics are thus limited by his strongdesire to find roots in Europe.

Where can one find a more radicalresponse to Heidegger’s project? Levinasresponds critically to Heidegger’s anti-Semitic views. But Heidegger’s epistemicracism, as that of many European philoso-

phers, goes well beyond that scope. It wasnot only Jerusalem that Heidegger was scep-tical about. As we have seen, it was alsoRome, Asia Minor, Russia and America thatwere in question. Heidegger articulated hisphilosophy in a context where Europeanimperialism was being contested from manydirections. Taking into consideration thislarger geopolitical context, Bambach con-trasts Heidegger’s efforts to find roots in theWest with those of the Martiniquean psy-chiatrist and philosopher Frantz Fanon.25

Fanon, who fought against the Germans inthe Second World War and later on againstFrench imperialism in the Franco-AlgerianWar, had in mind not only the predicamentof the Jew in the Holocaust, but also that ofother victims of the European racist andimperial ethos in other parts of the world,particularly the colonial world. This histor-ical experience and political commitment ledFanon to enunciate, in remarkable contrast toHeidegger and Levinas:

“The European game has finally ended; wemust find something different . . . Forcenturies [Europeans] have stifled almostthe whole of humanity in the name of aso-called spiritual experience. Look at themtoday swaying between atomic and spiritualdisintegration . . . Europe now lives at sucha mad, reckless pace that she has shaken offall guidance and reason . . . It is in the nameof the spirit, in the name of the spirit ofEurope, that Europe has made herencroachment, has justified her crimes andlegitimized the slavery in which she holdsfour-fifths of humanity. Yes, the Europeanspirit has strange roots.”26

Bambach’s comment to this passage is enlight-ening: “Like Fanon, Heidegger understoodthat Europe was ‘running headlong into theabyss.’ But where the former colonial under-stood the need for difference, Heideggersought the way out of Europe’s crisis byauthorizing a more narrowly constrictedform of identity”.27 In the face of anencroachment that is not unique to Heideg-ger’s project of finding roots in the German


Fatherland, an encroachment and a racismthat had shown themselves for centuries tocolonized peoples in different regions of theglobe, Fanon proposed a radical dislocation ofEurope and its roots. Modernity/nihilismappeared to Fanon as another expression ofmodernity/racism, the vile segregation andclaim for superiority of Europe over all theother peoples of the earth.28 Fanon’s philo-sophical geopolitics were transgressive, deco-lonial and cosmopolitan. He wanted to bringinto view what had remained invisible forcenturies. He was claiming the need for therecognition of difference as well as the needfor decolonization as an absolute requirementfor the proper recognition of human differ-ence and the achievement of a post-colonialand post-European form of humanism.29

Fanon’s decolonial cosmopolitanism wasgrounded on the struggle for decolonizationof the Algerian people. His cosmopolitanismdid not sacrifice the commitment with localstruggle. Rather than cosmopolitanism assuch perhaps his project should be charac-terized as an attempt to give expression to aconsistent decolonial consciousness. Decolo-nization is not for Fanon only about theachievement of national liberation. Decoloni-zation is about the creation of a new sym-bolic and material order that takes the fullspectrum of human history, its achievementsand its failures, into view. This side of historyis what neither Heidegger nor Levinas couldsee—or did not want to see. Their search forEuropean roots blinded them to this kind ofdecolonial geopolitics. Instead of giving pri-macy to the search for roots in Europe orelsewhere, Fanon’s decolonial consciousnessaims to dislocate the subject through theawareness of a response to those who arelocked in positions of subordination. Ratherthan trying to find roots in the earth, Fanonproposed responding responsibly to thedamned of the earth. Fanon’s decolonialgeopolitics offers an alternative to Heideg-ger’s philosophical racism and to the limitedperspectives of those who like Levinas, whilecritical of some aspects of this project, arestill in some ways complicit with it.

Heidegger’s racism and Levinas’s blind-ness reflect what in their will-to-ignorancecan be partly translated as the forgetfulnessof damnation. The forgetfulness of thedamned is part of the veritable sickness ofthe West, a sickness that could be likened toa state of amnesia that leads to murder,destruction and epistemic will to power—with good conscience. The opposition tomodernity/racism has to address this amne-sia and the invisibility of the damned. Forthis, a historical vision that combines spaceand time is needed. A group of scholars inLatin America and the USA has been work-ing on a geopolitical perspective that rescueswhat they refer to as the logic of coloniality.Reference to this logic allows one to refernot only to ontological oppression, but tothe coloniality of Being. In the effort tofinding a more radical critical path thanthose opened by Heidegger and Levinas’sphilosophical projects, I will elaborate inthe next section some of the theoreticalelaborations and findings that go in thisdirection. They constitute an important partof what could be referred to as Fanonianmeditations.30

Modernity, coloniality and the colonialityof being

The concept of coloniality of Being emergedin conversations between a group of scholarsin Latin America and the USA about therelationship between modernity and thecolonial experience.31 In coming up with theterm they followed the lead of scholars likeEnrique Dussel and the Peruvian sociologistAnıbal Quijano, who put forward an accountof modernity and a conception of power thatare intrinsically tied to the colonial experi-ence.32 At first glance, there seems to be amismatch between the theme of modernityand the imperial/colonial relation. One con-cept refers to time (the modern) while theother makes reference to space (expansion-ism and control of lands). Modernity wouldseem to be involved with the European’s


colonization of time, that is, with the crea-tion of stages in history that led to the adventof modernity in the European soil. Yet, thevery ties between modernity and Europe indominant discourses of modernity cannotescape reference to geopolitical location.What the concept of modernity does is toingeniously hide the significance of spatialityfor the production of this discourse. That iswhy most often than not those who adoptthe discourse of modernity tend to tend toadopt a universalistic perspective that doesaway with the significance of geopoliticallocation. The escape from the legacy ofcolonization and dependency is provided formany by modernity, as if modernity as suchhas not been intrinsically tied to the colonialexperience.

The problems of modernity surpass theexcesses of instrumental rationality. Theircure, if there is any, resides well beyond theredeeming virtue of an allegedly inherentcommunicative turn, like Jurgen Habermasrecommends.33 Habermas’s conception ofmodernity, its limits, and its possibilities, hasnot taken into consideration enough Euro-pean modernity’s ties with what J.M. Blauthas referred to as a diffusionist myth ofemptiness. As Blaut describes it:

“This proposition of emptiness makes aseries of claims, each layered upon theothers: (i) A non-European region is emptyor nearly empty of people (hence settlementby Europeans does not displace any nativepeoples). (ii) The region is empty of settledpopulation: the inhabitants are mobile,nomadic, wanderers (hence Europeansettlement violates no political sovereignty,since wanderers make no claim to territory).(iii) The cultures of this region do notpossess an understanding of privateproperty—that is, the region is empty ofproperty rights and claims (hence colonialoccupiers can freely give land to settlerssince no one owns it). The final layer,applied to all of the Outside sector, is anemptiness of intellectual creativity andspiritual values, sometimes described byEuropeans . . . as an absence of‘rationality.’ ”34

The discourse of modernity has not allowedits firm adherents to explore the ways inwhich imperial conceptions of space havebeen formative of the modern experience.What are the relations between the instru-mentalist and monological trends of moder-nity and the myth of the emptiness of landsand of rational peoples in those lands? Howcan one communicate with subjects who area prior-ily suspected of lacking reason? Inorder to address these questions it is neces-sary to introduce a concept of modernity thattakes seriously into consideration its relationto geopolitical relations. This is partly whatthe coloniality group in the USA and LatinAmerica has been trying to do for a few yearsnow.

As Walter Mignolo has pointed out, one ofthe most effective ways to maintain questionsregarding the role of the colonial experiencein modernity at bay has been to posit the late18th century as the birth of the modern era.35

It is true that post-colonial studies havebrought to attention questions of spatialityand coloniality to the surface. But most oftenthan not, post-colonial studies scholarsassume the self-definition of modernity interms of its beginnings in the late 18th andthe beginnings of the 19th century. Thus,while they are able to illustrate the ways inwhich the imperial adventures of Britain andFrance in the 19th century were constitutiveof Western modernity, they lose from viewmore long-standing patterns of colonialdomination and exploitation.36 It is notpossible, for instance, to understand the tiesbetween modernity and the diffusionist mythof emptiness that Blaut discusses withouttaking the so-called discovery and conquestof the Americas into account. It is for thisreason Quijano and Wallerstein give a centralrole to Americaneity in their account ofmodernity:

“In the Americas . . . there was suchwidespread destruction of the indigenouspopulations, especially among hunting andgathering populations, and such widespreadimportation of a labour force, that the


process of peripheralization involved lessthe reconstruction of economic and politicalinstitutions than their construction, virtuallyex nihilo everywhere (except perhaps in theMexican and Andean zones). Hence, fromthe beginning, the mode of culturalresistance to oppressive conditions was lessin the claims of historicity than in the flightforward to ‘modernity.’ The Americas werethe ‘New World,’ a badge and a burdenassumed from the outset. But as thecenturies went by, the New World becamethe pattern, the model of the entireworld-system.”37

To raise the question of the relationshipbetween modernity and the colonial experi-ence in Latin America and other parts of theAmericas, especially if done by subjects whoare sceptical of the promises of moderniza-tion and the “redeeming” qualities of thenation-state, is to bring out the relevance ofwhat Quijano and Wallerstein refer to as thelong 16th century in the production ofmodernity. While the imperial adventures ofthe 19th century certainly introduced newtechniques of subordination and colonialcontrol, and thus, rearticulated in originalways the ties between modernity and thecolonial experience, the logic that animatedthe imperial projects was not so differentfrom the patterns that emerged in the contextof the conquest of the Americas. Indeed, itwould be impossible to understand this logicwithout reference to them. Awareness of thelong-standing patterns of racialization, dom-ination and dependence that were tested andenacted in the context of the conquest of theAmericas (but certainly not restricted to theAmerican territory) is what has led someLatin American and US Latino/a scholars,including people involved in indigenousstruggles in South America, to enter in acritical dialogue with perspectives such asthose of Quijano and Wallerstein, who iden-tify long-term patterns of relations of powerin what we have come to call modernity.While post-colonial theory has made a tre-mendous contribution to the understandingof modernity in its relation to the colonial

experience and to the dislocation of thenation-state as the unit of analysis, insightsthat have yet to be fully assumed from aworld-system perspective, it also risks takingfor granted the narrative of modernity: withits fixation on secularism, its critique oftradition, and its depiction of the empires ofSpain and Portugal and its multiple colonialsubjects as insignificant precedents of West-ern modernity. The idea here is that while itis true that “modern Britain was producedalong with modern India”, it is impossible toaccount for the “modernity” of these nationscompletely without making reference to alarger framework that brings into view theexperiences of colonized peoples in theAmericas and elsewhere at least from the16th century on.38 As Sylvia Wynter insists,particularly relevant is also the relationshipbetween southern Europe first, and northernEurope afterwards, with Africa.39 Europe’srelationship with Africa is constitutive ofboth the first and the second modernities.

According to Wynter and to scholars likeAnıbal Quijano, what emerges in the 16thcentury is a new way of classifying peoples inthe globe.40 As the medieval mappae-munditurns into the Orbis Universalis Christianusthere is a significant change in the concep-tions of peoples and space. As the maps weredrawn, the peoples described, and the rela-tions between conqueror and conqueredestablished, a new model of power emerged.For Quijano,

“Two historical processes associated in theproduction of that space/time convergedand established the two fundamental axes ofthe new model of power. One was thecodification of the differences betweenconquerors and conquered in the idea of‘race,’ a supposedly different biologicalstructure that placed some in a naturalsituation of inferiority to the others . . . Theother process was the constitution of a newstructure of control of labor and itsresources and products. This new structurewas an articulation of all historically knownprevious structures of control of labor,slavery, serfdom, small independent


commodity production and reciprocity,together around and upon the basis ofcapital and the world market.”41

The new pattern of domination and exploita-tion involved an articulation of race andcapitalism in the creation and further expan-sion of the Atlantic commercial route. Qui-jano has referred to this complex matrix ofpower as the coloniality of power. “Colo-niality of power” is a specifically modernmodel of power that links together racialformation, the control of labor, the state, andknowledge production.42 But this constitu-tive character of the colonial experience andcoloniality are lost in accounts of modernitythat dismiss the significance of spatial rela-tions in the emergence of the modern world.To address this situation Mignolo introducesthe concept of the modern/colonial world.Concepts such as renaissance and early mod-ern period tend to erase the significance ofspatiality and coloniality. For Mignolo:

“The expression modern/colonial has theadvantage over early modern period ofintroducing a spatial dimension that thelatter lacks. Early modern periodpresupposes a linear narrative ascendingfrom antiquity, to the middle age, the earlymodern, and the modern and contemporary.Spatially such a macronarrative is confinedto the territory extending east and north ofthe Mediterranean to the North Atlanticand presupposes the Occident as an overallframe. Modern/colonial world instead bringsthe entire planet into the picture, as itcontemplates, simultaneously, the emergenceand expansion of the Atlantic commercialcircuit, its transformation with theIndustrial Revolution, and its expansion tothe Americas, Asia, and Africa.Furthermore, modern/colonial world opensup the possibility of telling stories not onlyfrom the perspective of the ‘modern’ and itsoutward expansion but from the perspectiveof the ‘colonial’ and its constant subalternposition.”43

The “coloniality of power” brings spatialityinto view and demands a concept of the

modern that reflects the constitutive role ofcoloniality in the idea of the modern. AsMignolo puts it in a different context: “Colo-niality of power opens up an analytic andcritical door that reveals the darker side ofmodernity and the fact that there never was,nor there can be, modernity withoutcoloniality.”44

It is out of these reflections on modernity,coloniality and the modern/colonial worldthat the concept of coloniality of Being firstemerged. The relationship between powerand knowledge led to the concept of being.And, if there was coloniality of power andcoloniality of knowledge (colonialidad delsaber) then, the question arose as to whatwould the coloniality of being be.45 Mignoloarticulated the relation between these termssuccinctly when he argues:

“ ‘Science’ (knowledge and wisdom) cannotbe detached from language; languages arenot just ‘cultural’ phenomena in whichpeople find their ‘identity’; they are also thelocation where knowledge is inscribed.And, since languages are not somethinghuman beings have but rather something ofwhat humans beings are, coloniality ofpower and of knowledge engendered thecoloniality of being [colonialidad del ser].”46

Like Heidegger, Mignolo relates being tolanguage. But unlike Heidegger, who glor-ified one specific language and adopted astrong form of epistemic racism, Mignolopoints to the locus of the coloniality of beingas the being-colonized that forms the darkerside of Heidegger’s reflections. This being-colonized emerges when power and thinkingbecome exclusionary in the way that Heideg-ger’s proposals were. To be sure, being-colonized is not the result of the work of anyone author or philosopher, but the veryproduct of modernity/coloniality in its inti-mate relation with the coloniality of power,the coloniality of knowledge and the colo-niality of being itself.

Following Fanon, being-colonized couldotherwise be rendered as the damne orcondemned of the earth. The damnes are


those found in the wastelands of empires aswell as in countries and mega-cities whichbecome small empires into themselves—e.g.“fabelas” in Rio de Janeiro, “villa miseria”in Buenos Aires, homeless and extremelypoor communities in the Bronx, New York.These are the territories and cities that aremost often simply ignored in philosophicaldiatribes about the location of knowledge.We saw this in the previous section. Heideg-ger privileged Athens and the Black Forest.Levinas challenged this Germancentrism bylocating true philosophy (the “wisdom oflove”) in Athens and Jerusalem. The con-trast between Heidegger and Levinas tosome extent comes down to that whileHeidegger was tormented about the Judifi-cation of Europe, Levinas saw in philoso-phy an opportunity to combat epistemicanti-Semitism and thus to legitimate thepresence of the Jews in Europe and theirepistemic contributions to Western civiliza-tion. The problem with Levinas’s project isthat in the process of redeeming the Heb-raic tradition as a significant root of theWest—Athens and Jerusalem as the twomost significant sources for Westernthought—Levinas forgets or dismisses therelevance of the colonial experience inreflections on being and modernity. For thisreason he was not able to address thequestion of the colonial aspect of Being.

Forgetfulness of coloniality in reflectionson Being is not unique to the phenomeno-logical tradition. We find it, as I suggestedabove, in many other critical accounts ofmodernity that tend to interpret the dia-lectics of enlightenment quite exclusively interms of instrumental reason or the emer-gence of totalitarian regimes. These inter-pretations can lead to a critique of theexcesses of Being qua generally violent oreven as genocidal but not as colonizing. Apassage from a recently published work inFrench and Spanish by Antonio Negri showsclearly what I mean here:

“The Book of Job is not only a protestagainst the seduction of reason, but also the

phenomenological discovery and themetaphysical intimation of the disaster towhich the coherence of instrumental reasonleads. Tragedy besieges Being and painpenetrates it deeply. That which can’t bemeasured can’t be named. Reason becomesmad and confused if one tries to name it.Tragedy can’t be lived and even lessmanipulated or dominated. Tragedydominates all views and blocks everypossible means of escape. Tragedydemolishes any possible means of salvation.This is what happens to Job. The obstaclethat he confronts unceasingly repeats inhistory: how to believe in reason afterAuschwitz or Hiroshima? How to continuebeing a communist after Stalin?”47

In consonance with a theme that becamecommon currency with the work of theFrankfurt School, Negri explains the trag-edy of modernity in light of the extremecoherence of instrumental rationality. As hisreferences to Auschwitz, Hiroshima andStalin at the end of the quote indicate, thereis clearly a geopolitics at place in his text.The tragedy to which Negri refers is themost evident failure (for a European) ofthree projects of modernity: Fascism(Auschwitz), liberalism (US bombing ofHiroshima) and Communism (Stalin in theSoviet Union). Here Germany, the USA andthe Soviet Union appear, not as loci ofsalvation or menaces, like in Heidegger, butas geopolitical sites of crisis. Negri began towrite his book on Job in 1982–83, when hewas already in jail and when he could onlytry to come to terms with defeat. Just likeHeidegger kept his grounding in Germanythrough his elaboration of the contactsbetween German and Greek, Negri culti-vates his roots in the West in times of crisisthrough reflection on Judeo-Christian sour-ces, in this case, the Book of Job. In someways, the crucial matter for these thinkers isto maintain Western modernity alive. Thisform of hegemonic identity politics wouldnot be so problematic if it did not assumethat the critique of instrumental reason isenough to account for the logic of colo-


niality. There is in much of critical thinkingthe tendency to recognize critical thoughtonly when it uses the terms of debate thatderive from consideration of certain co-ordinates typically located in crucial spacesfor the production of modern and post-modern ideologies. Negri’s geopoliticshardly include serious reflection on thecondition of racism and sexism as shown inthe West’s relationship with its colonies.The tragedies of centuries of Western incur-sions, genocides, impositions and segrega-tion of the greatest part of the planet seemto pass unnoticed in his account of evil. It isas if they only take a secondary role in lightof the most obviously malefic expressions(for a European) of modern ideologies.Contrary to this gesture, Fanon attemptedto come to terms with forms of evil as theypresented themselves in Auschwitz andAlgiers, in Hiroshima and the French Car-ibbean, in the Soviet Union and everywherewhere the lives of some human beingsappeared to others as dispensable. From thisperspective evil did not appear as an eventthat disturbed the tranquil waters of Being,but rather, as a symptom of Being itself.Similar to Levinas, Fanon intimated the ideathat Being itself may have an evil side to it,that evil may itself be the product of theexcess of Being.48 Fanon made this connec-tion through attention to long-standing pro-cesses (coloniality) that make colonizedcommunities feel trapped in a world whereeven God himself sometimes appears to bean enemy.49

Levinas put forward the idea of the evilside of Being, but he did not relate it tocoloniality.

“What is the structure of that pure being?Is it the universality that Aristotle conferson it? Is it the background and limit of ourpreoccupations, as certain modernphilosophers think? Is it, on the contrary,nothing but the stamp of certaincivilization, which is installed in theaccomplished fact of being and incapable ofgoing out (leaving, escaping, evading) [d’ensortir]?”50

For Levinas, the sickness of Western civiliza-tion can be related to an investment in Beingto such an extent that the West has come tobe trapped by it. This notion of entrapmentin a limitless realm also appears, interestinglyenough, in one of Negri’s most recent andinfluential works. Compare Levinas’s con-ception of the problem of Being withMichael Hardt and Antonio Negri’s concep-tion of Empire in the work with the sametitle. Empire

“is characterized fundamentally by a lack ofboundaries: Empire’s rule has no limits.First and foremost, then, the concept ofEmpire posits a regime that effectivelyencompasses the spatial totality, or reallythat rules over the entire “civilized” world.No territorial boundaries limit its reign.”51

In some ways Empire gives consistentexpression to Levinas’s depiction of Being.Being and Empire are closely linked in thatthey are limiting, rather than limited. Theygive ontological and geopolitical expressionto the imperatives for expansion, power andcontrol.

Different from Heidegger’s early themati-zation of Being, the association betweenontology and imperial formations brings outthe relevance of space in ontology. But thelimitless space of Being is hardly one thatadmits of colonial differentiations, whichmakes it impossible to account for theselective character of ontological/imperialviolence in the modern and post-modernworld. This is one of the difficulties withHardt and Negri’s conception of Empire.One of the characteristic features of theirproposal is that Empire is in some way a no-place. For them,

“The striaded space of modernityconstructed places that were continuallyengaged in and founded on a dialectical playwith their outsides. The space of imperialsovereignty, in contrast, is smooth. It mightappear to be free of the binary divisions ofstriation of modern boundaries, but really itis crisscrossed by so many fault lines that it


only appears as a continuous, uniformspace. In this sense, the clearly defined crisisof modernity gives way to an omni-crisis inthe imperial world. In this smooth space ofEmpire, there is no place of power—it isboth everywhere and nowhere. Empire is anou-topia, or really a non-place.”52

Bringing Levinas and this conception ofEmpire together it would seem that Beingaccomplishes its imperial destiny in theformation of the non-place of Empire. Buthere again the conception of Being thatemerges in the works of thinkers rooted inthe West differs from that which emerges inthinkers who take more centrally into con-sideration the way in which different subjectswith different histories and memories experi-ence modernity and respond to its legacies inthe contemporary world. Theorizing in thetradition of W.E.B. Du Bois, at the end of thecentury that Du Bois conceived as that whichwould dramatically face the problem of thecolour-line, Sylvia Wynter makes the argu-ment that the problem of the colour-line isnot only the problem of the 20th century, butthe problem of modernity itself, including itslatest more global expressions. As Wynterputs it:

“Nowhere more pronounced [today] thanin the still-subordinated and largelyimpoverished situation of the descendantsof the idolators/Human Others, whetherindigenous or of African and Afro-mixedex-slave descent, these inequalities aregraphically expressed in the illogic of thepresent 20/80 ratio of the globaldistribution of the world’s resources. Thisratio, as Du Bois also presciently saw, wasand is causally correlated with the color lineas the problem of the twentieth century.”53

Hardt and Negri, in contrast to Wynter, limitDu Bois’s analysis to the 20th century andargue that, “by contrast, looking forwardperhaps to the twenty-first century, [imperialracism] rests on the play of differences andthe management of micro-conflictualitieswithin its continually expanded domain”.54

The obvious question here is whether theincreasing inequality in world’s resources, aninequality that seems to follow in manyrespects a particularly modern horizon ofsignification regarding who is human andwho is not entirely human, can be explainedby this emphasis on “play of differences” and“management of micro-conflictualities”.

Taking Du Bois and Wynter’s lead, I wouldlike to suggest that from the perspectives ofthe repeatedly racialized groups of moder-nity, particularly indigenous people and peo-ple of African or Afro-mixed ex-slavedescent, but also Jews and Muslims, a con-cept of Being premised on what is oftenreferred to as the dialectics of modernity andthe nation, and their supposed overcomingby the emergence of imperial sovereignty orEmpire, miss the non-dialectical character ofdamnation. That is, in short, that what arechanges for many, for those whom FrantzFanon called the condemned of the earthseem rather to be perverse re-enactments of alogic that has for a long time militated againstthem. Space, for them, never becomessmooth, and the prejudice against themcannot be understood through “play ofdifferences” or “management of micro-con-flictualities”. The non-space of Empire, whileit brings to light important dynamics in thestructure of sovereignty in the post-modernworld, it can also serve an ideological pur-pose. It hides coloniality or the modern logicof damnation from view.

Coloniality makes reference to race, andthus, to space and experience. Post-modernspaces may be defined in a post-colonialfashion, that is, beyond the strictures of therelationship between empire and colonies,but this does not mean that either race orcoloniality have been rendered any lesspowerful. There could be now, to someextent, an Empire without colonies, but thereis no Empire without race or coloniality.Empire (to the extent that there is any of it)operates within the overall logic or water-mark of race and coloniality. That is why thewalls and boundaries of the West keepreinforcing themselves with such easiness in


so many key places of the modern world;that is also why the USA can explicitly referto some countries as evil and why, forinstance, we see a witch hunt nowadaysagainst Muslim critics of the new right incountries like France.55 I’ll elaborate some ofthese aspects toward the conclusion of thisessay. The point that I want to make here isthat this conception of space invites reflec-tion not only on Being, but more specifically,on its colonial aspect, the one that makessome human beings feel that the world is likean inescapable hell.

Coloniality of Being suggests that Being insome way militates against one’s own exist-ence. Levinas, a racialized and persecutedsubject, had an intimation into this reality.Being was not something that opened to himthe realm of signification, but something thatseemed to make him the target of annihila-tion. It is this racial experience that partlyexplains why what for Nietzsche, a son of aprotestant minister in Germany, wasexpressed as ascetic mystification, for Levi-nas, a Jew from Lithuania, plainly appears asevil and violence. He experiences a differentaspect of Western modalities of being. Buteven though Levinas begins to depart radi-cally from European conceptions of Being,his commitment with the West’s as a civiliza-tion project and as an epistemic formationultimately drives him away from articulatinga view of being that explained the logics ofdamnation. That is why his view of Beingappears to collapse so easily into a concep-tion such as that of Hardt and Negri.

The limits of Levinas’s account of Beingcome to the surface clearly if one compares itwith figures who also responded critically toWestern ideals from the perspective of racial-ized subjectivities. In his classic Is God aWhite Racist? William Jones argues that thesuffering of black people legitimates intro-ducing the question of divine racism. That is,the enormity, non-catastrophic or natural,and above all the maldistribution of sufferingshould lead one to raise the question whetherGod himself or herself is a White Racist.56

The feeling of being trapped in a centuries-

old paradigm of violence and the experienceof seeing how changes for everybody hardlyrepresent changes for oneself or one’s com-munity naturally lead to the question ofwhether being is inherently colonizing orwhether God is racist. Now, there is animportant difference between these two.While God can, through his agency andautonomy, select the object of his divineprejudice, it is not clear how the violence ofBeing as such can be focused on a particulargroup or population. In short, while onto-logical violence may lead to Empire, that is toan impersonal and transnational form ofsovereignty, it is not clear how it is tied withcolonialism and racism. What we do not findhere is an explanation of the preferentialcharacter of violence; that while Being isoppressive, it is not equally oppressive toeverybody. We could therefore refer to ageneral ontological violence, but not neces-sarily to the coloniality of Being.

Coloniality of Being would have to refernot only to an originary event of violence,but to the unfolding of modern history interms of a logic of coloniality.57 I suggest thatin order to do this we would need to followHeidegger in connecting Being with historic-ity and tradition—a movement that under-girds much of Gadamer’s hermeneutics. Thedifference with Heidegger and Gadamerwould be that instead of historicity andtradition, what would best explain theunfolding of Being and the coloniality ofBeing would be the colonial difference andthe logic of coloniality. That is, I suggest thatBeing is to history and tradition, as colo-niality of Being is to coloniality of power andcolonial difference. The coloniality of Beingrefers to the process whereby common senseand tradition are marked by dynamics ofpower that are preferential in character: theydiscriminate people and target communities.The preferential character of violence can bespelled out by the coloniality of power,which links racism, capitalist exploitation,the control of sex and the monopoly ofknowledge, and relate them to modern colo-nial history.58 This is my suggestion then:


that to define and unveil the coloniality ofBeing we could follow Heidegger and Gada-mer’s track, but only, as Levinas himselfpartially did, by transgressing its boundariesand Eurocentred perspectives. We wouldneed to introduce ideas that emerge from theexperience of colonization and persecutionof different subjectivities. Coloniality ofBeing could become one possible way totheorize the basic fundaments of the patholo-gies of imperial power and the persistence ofcoloniality. Coloniality of Being would allowone to bring up connections between Being,space and history that are missing in Hei-deggerian accounts and that would also belost by associating Being with Empire. Fur-thermore, coloniality of Being would intro-duce the question of being-colonized or thedamne, who would appear not only as analternative to Heidegger’s Dasein but also tothe modern concept of “the people” and toHardt and Negri’s concept of the “multi-tude”.59 While it is not possible for me todevelop these ideas here, I do want to pursuethe question of why is it that Levinas, whoreflected critically about ontology with somuch originality and sophistication, did notpursue the path that I just mentioned.60 Thiswill lead me to explore the question of theconnections between the search for ethnicroots (in Athens) and the search for religiousroots (in Jerusalem).

Between New York and Baghdad orblindness to damnation: Christianity,Judaism and the renewed search for roots

I would like to begin this section with thequestion of why Levinas did not feel that hehad to account for the complex but selectivecharacter of violence that is clearly shown incolonialism? In some way at least the answerto this question lies in that while Levinas wasvery suspicious of European goodness, par-ticularly when it was premised exclusively onliberal terms, he was not either interested oraware of the legacies of liberal and non-liberal European empires, and much less of

the logic of damnation that undergirdsmodernity. Going through many of hiswritings it becomes clear that Levinas’scritique of ontology is premised more on hisexperience as a European Jew and his interestfor redeeming the epistemic value of Judaism,than on the links between his position andthose of colonized peoples interested inprojects of decolonization and in the articu-lation of decolonial cosmopolitanisms. Thatis, Levinas’s intellectual project is heavilycircumscribed by the interest in showing thepertinence of Judaic sources to Westernthought, and by demonstrating the onto-logical roots of anti-Semitism. Levinas doesthis very well. But when it comes to showinghow Western civilization is partial against themany colonial others Levinas responds sim-ply by stating the idea that these others arethe victims of the same anti-semitism, thesame hate of the Other man.61 For Levinasthe Jew denotes both the possibility ofepistemic transformation, and the more gen-eral category of oppression. In their sufferingand marginalization all the colonized areJews. Now, why is it that Western civiliza-tion persecutes the Jews? Persecution isconnected to religion and the possibility ofepistemic transformation. What the Jewintroduces in Western culture is for Levinaswhat makes the Jew unique as Jew, that is, anethics of ultimate responsibility for the otherhuman being. The Jew has been elected byGod to serve others, and thus to remindothers of their responsibility to others.62 ForLevinas the problem with Western civiliza-tion does not reside in the forgetfulness ofBeing, but in persecution against the Jews.Such persecution is natural in a contextwhere the demands for preservation andconservation overshadow those of ethics andradical responsibility for the other, or soargues Levinas.

At the end, thus, Levinas addresses theselectivity of domination, but his account isseverely limited by his philosophical andreligious vision as well as by the more or lessexclusive concern with the identity of theJews, particularly European Jews and those


in Israel.63 Unfortunately, ethnic affiliationand religious commitment take the place ofcareful socio-historical analysis. There is aheavy investment on the idea of the West thatblinds Levinas to the various forms ofoppression, colonial experiences, imperiallegacies, sites of struggle and epistemicchange. To be sure, this blindness is notunique to Levinas. I suggest that it is bestunderstood as a constitutive feature ofmodernity and postmodernity as such. Forthis reason, it is not surprising to see a similarlogic in place in other texts that I havediscussed such as Negri’s Job and Hardt andNegri’s Empire.

Negri’s search for answers in the Book ofJob and his particular interpretation of thetext also show how a commitment with theWest, in this case through Western Christian-ity, can blind an intellectual in regard to thelogic of coloniality. In the introduction toJob Negri writes,

“Since we were like Job, who fought againstthe powers that enslave and dominate theworld and against the misery that thestrongest and cruelest create, there was aneed to insist on a relation between onebody and another similar to that which Jobhad with God.

From this point of view it is easy tounderstand the importance of the belief ofthe Christian Fathers of antiquity, who sawJob as a prefigurement of Christ: like us, hecrossed the desert so that he could achieve ahigher level of life, an absolutely materialistredemption, which means the happiness ofrevolutionizing the world.”64

Peculiar in this passage is the way in whichNegri substitutes a vague “we” with subjectswho are in inescapable positions of sufferinglike Job. This gesture contrasts sharply withother readings of Job who see in Job’sanswers to God a discovery of the innocenceof the suffering of others and a commitmentwith the plight of those who seem to becondemned by a situation that they did notcreate nor called for.65 In his critical engage-

ment with Hardt and Negri, Timothy Bren-nan has also pointed out the strangeness andpeculiarity in the substitution of this vague“we” of a certain European left with subjectsin manifold positions of subordination:

“Each time any of the new Italians speak ofworkers they see an image of themselves,although that image is necessarily blurredinto constructs that transcend Mexican daylaborers, fast-food deliverymen, secretaries,maids, and auto mechanics. That kind ofspecificity tarnishes the aura of the‘multitude’—a term redolent of the NewTestament, embraced by the authors forevading the guilty telos of the workingclass. But the term multitude betrays areverse teleology, as it were, an etiologythat is religious in form: their designated‘multitude fidelium’ (429). Negri’s politicaland intellectual formation in 1950’s Catholicradicalism in Italy may be worth somemention in this context, although it hasreceived almost no commentary. Mostreviewers have had very little to say aboutNegri’s early inspirations in Catholicradicalism—not entirely unrelated to theuniversal harmony of his later vision.”66

Like in Levinas, there is in Hardt and Negri’swork a “veiled theology” that takes the placeof careful elucidation of the varieties ofstruggles and existential conditions of sub-jects with different imperial legacies, differ-ent cosmologies, and different aspirations forworld and ego transformation. Levinas’s caseis most interesting, for while he defies thestrictures of the Western philosophicalcanon, and thus reactivates lessons from theTalmud and the Hebrew Bible in a criticalway, he still falls short of observing thecoloniality of knowledge at work. Therefore,he does not connect his struggle with that ofmany other racialized subjects of modernityin a significant way. These are subjects whosebodies and epistemic contributions have beenmarked, like Levinas, by the evil of racism.Scholars who specialize on Levinas typicallyfocus on his contributions to the linguisticturn, reading him in dialogue with Heideg-ger, Derrida and other figures in continental


philosophy. By approaching Levinas’s workstrictly in relation to the genealogy anddiscipline of Western philosophy, they tendto leave questions about spatiality and colo-niality entirely out of their reflections. Theythus tend to repeat the same kind of prob-lems that one finds in Levinas’s work. Spati-ality, coloniality and the struggle for epis-temic diversity are also left aside in Hardtand Negri’s conceptualization of Empire andthe formation of the “multitude”. Accountssuch as those of Levinas and Hardt andNegri fail to recognize the imperative forepistemic and ethical pluriversality in theworld. One reason for this is that the meta-narratives of Judaism and Christianity areheavily privileged in their writings. WhileLevinas identifies racism with anti-Semitism,Hardt and Negri (much more Negri thanHardt, to be sure) can only find St Francis ofAssisi as the most adequate example of acommunist militant.67 Hardt and Negri insome way want to vindicate Rome (a Roman[Catholic] rendering of communist utopia),when others insisted on the Black Forest, andyet others in Athens and Jerusalem.

Re-rooting communist hope in WesternChristianity became very important for theEuropean left after the collapse of the SovietUnion. Without being able to find a home inthe Soviet Union or the traditional commu-nist party, there were not too many choicesopened to maintain alive the communistproject. There was thus the need for areconciliation of the European Marxist leftwith Europe and with Western Christianity.By the time in which such need becameurgent, the very idea of Europe had beenstrongly contested by scholars who, follow-ing Fanon’s insight about the roots ofEurope, turned to criticize heavily the proj-ect of European civilization. Like anyonedesperately in the search for roots, the lefthas tended to turn increasingly reactionary,to the point of embracing orthodoxy as anemblem of criticism.68 The Lacanian MarxistSlavoj Zizek represents the highest expres-sion of the anxiety for roots that has charac-terized the leftist project in Europe and the

USA as well.69 His search for roots is nottotally different from Heidegger’s. Like inHeidegger, there is in Zizek’s project anextreme critique of Western modernity andan equal attempt to save the West at the sametime. The difference is that where Heideggerturned to fascism and Germancentrism,Zizek vindicates Marxism, Eurocentrism andan orthodox version of Western Christian-ity.70 This difference, however, only groundsthe highest commonality between Heideggerand Zizek: their epistemic racism. For whileHeidegger could not think about genuinephilosophy out of the German language,Zizek cannot see political radicalism out ofthe Marxist-Christian diad. As he puts it inThe Puppet and the Dwarf:

“My claim here is not merely that I am amaterialist through and through, and thatthe subversive kernel of Christianity isaccessible also to a materialist approach; mythesis is much stronger: this kernel isaccessible only to a materialistapproach—and vice versa: to become a truedialectical materialist, one should gothrough the Christian experience.”71

Zizek’s conservatism is radical, and becauseof that, it challenges the complacency ofconservatives and non-conservatives alike.The radicalism, however, does not hide theamount of epistemic racism; just like Heideg-ger’s suggestive analyses of the problem oftechnology and nihilism did not hide iteither. This racism is evinced in the abovepassage. Since it does not surface in Zizek’swork that there could be truly radical polit-ical options beyond the horizons of dialec-tical materialism then it follows that Chris-tianity is the one and only source of trueradicalism. This explains, among many otherthings, his view of Buddhism. Zizek’s viewsabout Christianity and the left gives himlicence to engage in a new form of Orien-talism that knows no boundaries. After a fewpages dedicated to the analysis of the state-ments of a few Zen Buddhists and a portionof the Bhagavad Gita, Zizek assumes enoughauthority to observe:


“This means that Buddhist (or Hindu, forthat matter) all-encompassing Compassionhas to be opposed to Christian intolerance,violent Love. The Buddhist stance isultimately one of Indifference, of quenchingall passions that strive to establishdifferences; while Christian love is a violentpassion to introduce Difference, a gap inthe order of being, to privilege and elevatesome object at expense of others.”72

Zizek reifies Buddhism and Christianity andthen assigns them intrinsic logics that help todiscriminate one from the other just as easilyas Heidegger was able to differentiatebetween philosophical and non-philosoph-ical languages. For Zizek, Oriental spiritual-ity is indifferent to the world and its logic ofnon-distinction leads its adherent to becomecomplicit with military powers, if not evenopenly endorse them. Monotheists, are, onthe contrary, either tolerant of differences orintolerants of love.73 The search for rootsinhibits the capacity for careful examinationof the ways in which that which we callreligion never operates in a vacuum. Theextremism of Zizek’s epistemic racism ismanifest in that while he dismisses “Orientalspirituality” because of its affiliations withmilitarism, he keeps Hegel in his sanctuaryeven though Hegel remains one of thestrongest supporters of war in the Westernworld.74

In contrast to Zizek, who tries to discrim-inate between discreet entities called religionsor spiritualities, I would suggest that theproblems with intellectuals such as Levinasand Negri, who heavily invest in religiousvisions, is, not so much the religious visionsalone by themselves, but also, and perhapsmore fundamentally, their desire to rootthemselves in the West. It is an impetus and aproject, rather than a discreet religio-ideolog-ical source, that blinds them to the darkerside of modernity. References to ethics asfirst philosophy or to nomadic experience donot hide the tautological tendencies that leadmany critical thinkers to remain within thestrict limits of the Western canon. To be sure,the problem with Christianity and to some

extent Judaism is that they have helped todefine the West, and thus find themselvesimplicated in their corrupted roots. Thisawareness should not lead necessarily todefeatism or despair, but to a heightenedsense of responsibility that helps to bringinto view that which the project of Europeanmodernity has made invisible in Europe andelsewhere. One of the most obvious missingelements in their reflections is the other lessprominent face of the West and monotheism:Islam and the Muslim people.

There are several reasons to introduce thetheme of Islam and Muslim peoples here.First, because any talk nowadays of the natureof selective violence on the part of imperialpowers or even Empire cannot proceedwithout at least mentioning them. This ishardly new, but is becoming prominent inpost-Cold War years. Now, while it is clearwhy it won’t be adequate to subsume Mus-lims under the general idea of the multitude(today, the Muslims would be like the dyingmultitude, the targeted multitude in post-Cold War), why should we expect Levinas tomention or think about the condition of theMuslims? The first answer to this question isthat Levinas not only lived in times of theHolocaust, but also in times of the cruelly andbloody Franco-Algerian War, which culmi-nated with thousands and thousands ofMuslims killed. The second is that the state ofIsrael has had from its very beginning a sort ofimperial relationship with the Palestinians,the majority of whom are Muslim. Todaythree Palestinians have died for every singleIsraeli. The third reason is more intriguing.What Levinas fails to mention, but whatPrimo Levi does not forget is that Musselman,Muselmanner or Muslim was a term “thatinmates of the Nazi camps gave to a certaincategory of Jews in the camps who were readyto die”. Primo Levi writes:

“But with the Musselmans, the men indecay, it is not even worth speaking . . .Even less worthwhile is it to make friendswith them, because they have nodistinguished acquaintance in camp, they do


not gain any extra rations . . . in a fewweeks nothing will remain of them but ahandful of ashes in some near-by field and acrossed out number on a register. Althoughengulfed and swept along without the restby the innumberable crowd of those similarto them, they suffer and drag themselvesalong in an opaque intimate solitude, and insolitude they die or disappear, withoutleaving a trace in anyone’s memory.”75

The Musselmans are “those who have nostory, they follow the slope down to thebottom, like streams that run down to thesea”.76 In fact Levi is more haunting when hesays that the Musselmans are “non-men whomarch and labor in silence, the divine sparkdead within them, already too empty toreally suffer. One hesitates to call themliving: one hesitates to call their death death,in the face of which they have no fear, as theyare too tired to understand”.77 As the scholarof Medieval Islam and Islamic Law EbrahimMoosa puts it following Levi’s insights, inthis context the meaning of Muslim takes theconnotation of “the weak, the inept, thosedoomed to selection, the truly damned ofhistory”.78

The demonization of Muslim subjects isnot the exclusive result of 19th-centuryEuropean imperial enterprises. The forgetful-ness of the epistemic contributions of Islamand its exclusion as a relevant source of theWest goes well beyond Levinas’s Judaism,Negri’s Roman Catholic background orZizek’s orthodoxy. If Mignolo is right thatthe imaginary of the modern/colonial world“arose in the process of establishing thecolonial differences on the southern frontierof the Mediterranean (with the Arabic world)and on the western frontier of the Atlantic(with the Amerindians)” then these featuresmay be very much part of the very idea of themodern West.79 They have defined and con-tinued to define the horizon of modernity,and with it, legitimate intellectual work,policy and common sense. This is evinced ingeopolitical dynamics today when the West-ern world (the USA and Europe) is oncemore in conflict with the Middle East. The

“war against terror” has also led to inter-occidental dynamics, which seem to corrobo-rate Heidegger’s concern about the “threat”of US Americanism to the European world.

Today, just like Europe in the 16th century,the emerging empire is remaking the bound-aries and borders that will define the newimperial order. Similar to Europe itself thenew empire is raising “in the process ofestablishing the colonial differences on thesouthern frontier of the Mediterranean [andthe Middle East] (with the Arabic world) andon the [South-] western frontier of theAtlantic”. That the reassertion and rear-ticulation of these differences break in someways the political model of the relationshipbetween empire and colony does not reducetheir significance and power. The logic ofcoloniality helped not only to interpretterrorist attacks as acts of war, but also toprovide the moral authority for a politicalleader to publicly map an “axis of evil”. Theattack to the Empire’s city (or city of theEmpire State) led to the creation of theOffice for Homeland Security, which cameto target not only people coming to the USAfrom abroad but also all those foreignerswithin who are seen as threats to the Home-land. Following a similar logic to that whichled to interpreting acts of terror as acts ofwar, the border between the USA andMexico has gradually become militarized.80

Both Iraq and the US–Mexico border havebecome death zones. Borders appear in ourworld as death maps of empire. Discoursearound the idea of defence of the Homeland,which echoes Heidegger’s beloved Heimat,furthers racist geopolitics and leads to thejustification of military aggressions, whichare conceived as missionary work. Americahas to be defended from evil men who comefrom evil places. The Middle East and LatinAmerica are first in line, along with thoseother liminal subjects of Western modernities(Africans, blacks, indigenous peoples andpeople of colour more generally).

US discourse on evil is simultaneouslyarticulated with a prayer for the Homeland(“God bless America”). US Americanism


grounds the logic of coloniality on the oldand traditional onto-theology which assignsa primary role to God, goodness and evil.From this perspective one can understandHeidegger’s fear of the USA. While hisGermancentrism is ontological and anchorsEurope at its very centre, US Homelandmetaphysics represents a regression back toonto-theology and a relocation of the heartof the West from Europe to America. It isfrom this re-located centre of the West thatnew global designs are being produced. TheAmerican Dream today, as it is adopted bythe state, is expressed by the desire to achievethe global pax Americana, one in which USideals of sociality, government and lifebecome regulative ideals for the people of theglobe. Islam is acceptable when it ratherlooks like the kind of Christianity that USAmericans practice. Islam is recognized as a“religion of peace”. Multiculturalism hides inthis way a deeper multiracism that onlyrecognizes the right for difference whenpeoples are well domesticated by capitalism,the market economy and liberal ideals offreedom and equality. Policy (both foreignand national) follows the contours of adivision between blessedness and evil, the siteof God on the earth (Western civilization thathas found its reach in American soil) and thesites of evil. This is the new face of the logicof coloniality; a face that, as Heideggerfeared, was not going to leave Europeintact.

As I discussed earlier, the idea of Europeemerged not only through the production ofcolonial differences, but also, as Mignoloindicates, through imperial differencesbetween Northern and Southern Europe.Heidegger’s Germancentrism and the meta-physics of Mitteleuropa were the reflection ofa political project that sought to reconstituteimperial differences. Hitler showed veryclearly how societies with an imperial pastrespond to their marginalization. He respon-ded with a vengeance: he sought to redrawimperial differences in favour of Germany.Heidegger was one of the most sophisticatedintellectuals who helped to advance this cause

by formulating a similar project at theepistemic level. When Heidegger talked infront of audiences in France or Italy, heemphasized the need for European unity infront of the Asiatic and the American menace.Europe was between Asia and America, justlike Germany was in the middle of Europe. Acall to defend Europe followed the same logicas his Germancentrism.

Today, there is no longer an Asiatic men-ace—or rather, perhaps, it has now a MiddleEastern rather than a Soviet face. Gradually,as the USA asserts itself as the only uncon-tested hegemon on the globe, Heidegger’snightmare begins to become a reality. Europebegins to fade in the shadow of irrelevance.Instead of achieving salvation through anintimate association with a strong Germany,Europe, regarded by many for so long as thebeacon of Western civilization and the climaxof human rationality, loses its previous envi-ous geopolitical relevance. An ad hoc “coali-tion of the willing” (or as some have put it,coalition of the billing) proved to be enoughto gain the artificial moral and politicalauthority that the USA needs to advance itsimperial excursions. Southern Europe (par-ticularly, Spain and Portugal) has joined sideswith the USA. This move helps to addressthe logic of internal European imperial dif-ferences that rendered Southern Europeirrelevant in the geopolitics of the last 200years. Now they form part of what the USAhas referred to as the New Europe, whichalso consists of Eastern European countriesthat have come to form part of the EuropeanUnion. The USA is reinforcing colonialdifferences (with Latin America and theMiddle East) and redrawing imperial differ-ences (with Europe and the Soviet Union).The North of Europe/South of Europedivide is also being reconstituted as the OldEurope/New Europe binary. New Europerefers to those who favour the uncontestedhegemon; old Europe is the name of those inEurope who do not conform to their posi-tion in the new world order.

The rearticulation of imperial geopoliticsby the USA, which has led to certain


instability in the European Union, explainswhy Europeans have had to reformulate theirown metaphysics of the Homeland. Veryrecently, a German and a French philosopher,Jurgen Habermas and Jacques Derrida,joined to call for common foreign policy“beginning in the core of Europe”. As thethreat that Heidegger feared became realthese two thinkers joined forces in the effortto resist their now obvious political sub-alternization. Habermas and Derrida attemptto show “what binds Europeans together” byarticulating the “historical roots of a politicalprofile”.81 Heidegger would probably beboth happy and dissatisfied if he were alivetoday: happy because the project of searchingfor roots is still alive in Europe; dissatisfiedbecause Germany has succumbed to Franceand has included it as part of the “core” ofEurope.

Bypassing the much relevant divide forGerman romanticism between French ideasof civilization and Germany’s Kultur, thefigure that bridges France and Germany isthe most renown German figure of theEnlightenment, Immanuel Kant. Kant’swork brings France and Germany togetherwhile also promoting global institutions ofauthority, which, translated into the pres-ent, would counter US unilateralism. Hab-ermas and Derrida do not interrogate theties of Kant with the imperial mentality ofhis times or the way in which their “pleafor a common foreign policy, beginning inthe core of Europe” has all the problematicties with a tradition of searching for rootsin Europe.82 In a very condescending ges-ture Habermas and Derrida write thatEuropeans “could learn from the perspec-tive of the defeated to perceive themselvesin the dubious role of victors who arecalled to account for the violence of aforcible and uprooting process of moderni-zation. This could support the rejection ofEurocentrism, and inspire the Kantian hopefor a global domestic policy”.83 In theirreference to “victors” called to account forthe “uprooting process of modernity” itwould seem that Habermas and Derrida

have more Heidegger in mind than formercolonized peoples. It is also as if they areresponding more to the complaints of Ger-man romantics who were very critical ofthe Enlightenment, than to colonized peo-ples everywhere. They reduce the chal-lenges of Europe’s imperial past to the“uprooting of modernity”, a process towhich Europeans, among others, havebeing victims. They cannot see the peculi-arity of the challenge that emerges in thecolonial world. That is why they posit thesearch for roots at the core of Europe as aresponse to the marginalization of Europe.Fanon’s statement remains as significanttoday as it was when Heidegger was forg-ing his mythical project of searching forroots:

“For centuries [Europeans] have stifledalmost the whole of humanity in the nameof a so-called spiritual experience. Look atthem today swaying between atomic andspiritual disintegration . . . Europe now livesat such a mad, reckless pace that she hasshaken off all guidance and reason . . . It isin the name of the spirit, in the name of thespirit of Europe, that Europe has made herencroachment, has justified her crimes andlegitimized the slavery in which she holdsfour-fifths of humanity. Yes, the Europeanspirit has strange roots.”84

Until figures like Habermas and Derridacome to terms with this statement, I believethat it will be impossible for them toovercome the epistemic racism that continuestoday through so many different means.

Habermas and Derrida at most gesturetoward a Eurocentric critique of Eurocen-trism. Instead of challenging the racist geo-politics of knowledge that have become socentral to Western discourse, they continueit by other means. Why not engaging seri-ously Muslim intellectuals?85 Why not try-ing to understand the deeply theoreticalclaims that have emerged in contexts thathave known European coloniality? Whynot breaking with the model of the univer-sal or global and furthering the growth of


an epistemically diverse world?86 Fanon didnot do all these things, but in some wayshe set a mark below which theorists andintellectuals should not allow themselves togo. His radicalism was about a critique ofthe roots, which was inspired by the needto respond to the damned of the earth. Theconcepts of coloniality of power, colonial-ity of knowledge and coloniality of beingfollow Fanon’s radicalism. Yet they alsocan become problematic if they do notmake space for the enunciation of non-Western cosmologies and for the expressionof different cultural, political and socialmemories. Radical critique should take dia-logical forms. It should also take the formof radical self-questioning and radical dia-logue. The project of searching for rootswould be, in this regard, subordinated tothe project of criticizing the roots thatmaintain alive the dominant topology ofBeing and the racist geopolitics of knowl-edge. Radical diversality would involve theeffective divorce and critique of the rootsthat inhibit dialogue and the formulation ofa decolonial and non-racist geopolitics ofknowledge. Part of the challenge is to thinkseriously about Fort-de-France, Quito, LaPaz, Baghdad and Algiers, not only Paris,Frankfurt, Rome or New York as possiblesites of knowledge. We also need to thinkabout those who are locked in positions ofsubordination, and try to understand boththe mechanisms that create the subordina-tion and those that hide their reality fromview to others. There is much in the worldto learn from others who have beenrendered invisible by modernity. Thismoment should be more about examiningour complicity with old patterns of dom-ination and searching for invisible faces,than about searching for imperial roots;more about radical critique than aboutorthodox alignments against what are per-sistently conceived as the barbarians ofknowledge.

In an essay written in 1955 in response toErnst Junger’s attempt to map nihilism andresponses to it, Heidegger wrote:

“Certainly a topography of nihilism isrequired, of its process and its overcoming.Yet the topography must be preceded by atopology: a discussion locating the localewhich gathers being and nothing into theiressence, determines the essence of nihilism,and thus lets us recognize those paths onwhich the ways toward a possibleovercoming of nihilism emerge.”87

Through an analysis of Heidegger’s implicittopology of Being, which is inscribed in hisgeopolitics, I have suggested that the appar-ent neutrality of philosophical ideas can verywell hide an implicit imperial cartographythat merges race and space. Racism—in theform of the forgetfulness of damnation,epistemic racism and many other forms—ismore widespread than often thought. It isinscribed into the cartography of what isoften considered to be consistent philosoph-ical work and critical thinking. Beyondbiological justifications of racism, or justifi-cations based on differences in culture ormanners, one can find in some influentialtrends in Western thought a more subtleontological and epistemological justification.The implications are nefarious since themerging of race and space is behind imperialand military conceptions of spatiality thattend to give new meaning to Augustine’sclassical account of the earthly and heavenlycities: the difference between the City of Godand the Earthly City of Men is translatedinto the divide between the imperial cities ofthe human gods and the cities of the damned.Unfortunately, the search for roots in Europeand racist geopolitics often go hand inhand.

The project of searching for roots inEurope also leads, or so I have argued in thisessay, to dismissal of the larger geopoliticalrelations at work in the very formation ofmodernity. Against this systemic amnesia,Fanon proposes an-other geopolitics. WhileHeidegger attempts to find roots in the earth,and Levinas grounds philosophy in two cities(Athens and Jerusalem), Fanon opens up apath of reflection that takes colonial differ-ences as a point of departure for critical


thinking. A critical account of the Europeantopology of Being and its geopolitics ofknowledge should lead, or so I have attemp-ted to make clear here, to render visible whathas remained invisible or marginal so far andto uncover how categories of damnationwork—e.g. the black, the Jew and theMuslim. It is for this purpose that conceptssuch as modernity/coloniality, coloniality ofpower, coloniality of knowledge and colo-niality of Being have been formulated. Theseare only a few of the concepts that wouldhave to become part of a decolonial grammarof critical analysis which would recognize itsown vulnerability by being open to criticalaccounts based on the experiences andmemories of peoples who have confrontedmodernity/racism in any of its forms.

Notes and references

1 I presented an earlier version of this essay underthe title “Imperio y colonialidad del ser” at theAnnual Meeting of the Latin American StudiesAssociation in Dallas, Texas on 29 March 2003. Iwould like to thank the members of the DialogicalEthics and Critical Cosmopolitanism Group at DukeUniversity for offering a wonderful context to testalternative ideas in radical political thought. I alsothank Eduardo Mendieta for comments on asecond version of the essay and for crucialrecommendations for further expansion. I wouldlike to dedicate this essay to the group of youngphilosophers who 30 years ago put forward in anexplicit form some of the ideas that appear hereconcerning the location of Being and knowledge.They were Osvaldo Ardıles, Hugo Assmann, MarioCasalla, Horacio Cerutti, Carlos Cullen, Julio deZan, Enrique Dussel, Anıbal Fornari, DanielGuillot, Antonio Kinen, Rodolfo Kusch, Diego Pro,Agustın de la Riega, Arturo Roig and Juan CarlosScannone. See their collective work, OsvaldoArdıles et al. (1973) Hacia una filosofıa de laliberacion latinoamericana. Buenos Aires:BONUM. This work formulates original critiquesand advances alternatives to the racist geopoliticsof knowledge and the topology of Being that willbe critically investigated in this essay. It is to agreat extent a testament to such problematicgeopolitics that their work has remained unknownto many for so long.

2 de la Riega, A.T. (1973) ‘America fuera delcentro: del privilegio y de la culpa’, in Ardıles et

al., p. 216, my translation. The original reads“Hasta hoy, fundamentacion filosofica a traves delser, ha significado fundamentacion a traves delCentro. ‘El ser’ ha sido, en verdad, el Centro. Y ‘elpensar’ ha sido el Pensar Central. En el Centro sehan unido. Fuera del Centro: lo ente, locontingente, lo subdesarrollado, que solo a travesdel Centro pudo ser reconocido. Toda la metafısicaviene imponiendo una fundamentacion a traves delCentro. Toda la teorıa del conocimiento vieneimponiendo un Centro Iluminador. Toda la etica,un Centro por el que los valores valgan.”

3 Of course, there are exceptions to this. Perhaps themost obvious of which is Hegel who combinedtemporality and spatiality in his account of Spirit.To be sure, such Spirit reached a climax in Europeand had America as a future horizon. See Hegel,G.W.F. (1991) The Philosophy of History, trans. J.Sibree. Buffalo, NY: Prometheus Books. For acritical analysis of Hegel’s views on America seeCasalla, M. (1992) America en el pensamiento deHegel: admiracion y rechazo. Buenos Aires:Catalogos. For an alternative account of worldhistory from an “American” point of view seeDussel, E. (1995) The Invention of the Americas:Eclipse of ‘the Other’ and the Myth of Modernity,trans. M.D. Barber. New York: Continuum.

4 There are other modalities of this. With an acuteperception of the undergirding commitment of thediscipline of philosophy with Europe as anepistemic site, a group of young Latin Americanphilosophers met in Argentina during the 1970s todiscuss the relevance of space for philosophy andthe possibility of grounding philosophical reflectionin Latin America, not Europe (see Note 1). In asimilar vein, US philosophers in the late 1980sturned to pragmatism as a way to articulate a USphilosophy. While these two projects share withEuropean philosophy a particular tendency tosearch for roots that are not without problems, theLatin American group has tended to be morecosmopolitan than the US one—this is particularlyevinced in the work of Enrique Dussel. The LatinAmerican group was also more critical ofliberalism than its US counterpart. I discussed someof these issues in ‘Envisioning postcolonialphilosophies in the Americas: the cases ofpragmatism and Latin American liberationthought’, presented in the Plenary Session of theSociety for the Advancement of AmericanPhilosophy, Denver, Colorado, 15 March 2003.Some of the ideas presented are included inMaldonado-Torres, N. (forthcoming) ‘Toward acritique of continental reason: Africana studies andthe decolonization of imperial cartographies in theAmericas’, in L.R. Gordon and J.A. Gordon (eds)Companion to African-American Studies.Cambridge, MA: Blackwell.


5 See Heidegger, M. (1996) Being and Time:A Translation of Sein und Zeit, trans. J.Stambaugh. Albany: State University of New YorkPress.

6 For reflections on Heidegger’s turn see Risser, J.(1999) Heidegger Toward the Turn: Essays on theWork of the 1930s. Albany: State University ofNew York Press.

7 Bambach, C. (2003) Heidegger’s Roots: Nietzsche,National Socialism, and the Greeks, p. 6. Ithaca,NY: Cornell University Press.

8 ibid., p. 137.9 ibid., p. 52.

10 ibid., p. 116.11 Bambach’s account of Heidegger’s Heimat

metaphysics contrasts with the vision of spatialityand existence that according to Alejandro Vallegacan be located in Heidegger’s work. UnlikeBambach’s, Vallega’s project is more constructiveand philosophical than historical orarchaeological. But given Bambach’s meticuloussearch for the Heideggerian conception of “roots”,Vallega clearly has to demonstrate the extent towhich he can truly attribute to Heidegger aconcept of “exilic grounds”. He also has to showwith precision how this conception of space isultimately not complicit with Heidegger’s racistgeopolitics. See Vallega, A. (2003) Heideggerand the Issue of Space: Thinking on ExilicGrounds. University Park: Pennsylvania StateUniversity.

12 Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, p. 112.13 ibid., p. 117.14 Heidegger, M. (1993) ‘ “Only a God can save us”:

Der Spiegel’s interview with Martin Heidegger(1966)’, in R. Wolin (ed.) The HeideggerControversy: A Critical Reader, p. 113.Cambridge, MA and London: MIT Press.

15 Cesaire, A. (1972) Discourse on Colonialism,trans. J. Pinkham. New York: Monthly ReviewPress.

16 For an elucidation of the imperial differencebetween Northern and Southern Europe seeMignolo, W. (2000) Local Histories/GlobalDesigns: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, andBorder Thinking. Princeton, NJ: PrincetonUniversity Press.

17 See Heidegger, M. (1993) ‘Europa und diedeutsche Philosophie’, in H.H. Gander (ed.)Europa und die Philosophie, p. 31. Frankfurt:Klostermann. Quoted in Bambach, Heidegger’sRoots, pp. 167–168.

18 Heidegger, M. (1996) Holderlin’s Hymn ‘The Ister’,trans. W. McNeill, p. 54. Bloomington: IndianaUniversity Press. Quoted in Bambach, Heidegger’sRoots, p. 177.

19 Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, p. 163.20 ibid., p. 5.

21 Quoted in Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, p. 53.22 Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, p. 53.23 Levinas, E. (1969) Totality and Infinity: An Essay

on Exteriority, trans. A. Lingis. Pittsburgh, PA:Duquesne University Press.

24 I have developed this point in my unpublishedmanuscript ‘Against war: views from the undersideof modernity’.

25 Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, pp. 177–178.26 Fanon, F. (1991) The Wretched of the Earth, trans.

C. Farrington, p. 312. New York: Grove Press.Quoted in Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, p. 178.

27 Bambach, Heidegger’s Roots, p. 178.28 See, on this point, Fanon, F. (1968) Black Skin,

White Masks, trans. C.L. Markmann. New York:Grove Press.

29 See Fanon, F. (1965) A Dying Colonialism, trans.H. Chevalier. New York: Grove Press; Fanon, F.(1988) Toward the African Revolution: PoliticalEssays, trans. H. Chevalier. New York: GrovePress.

30 Fanonian Meditations is the title of my bookproject in progress.

31 Scholars who have formed part of theseconversations include Santiago Castro-Gomez,Fernando Coronil, Enrique Dussel, Arturo Escobar,Ramon Grosfoguel, Edgardo Lander, EduardoMendieta, Walter Mignolo, Anıbal Quijano, AnaMargarita Cervantes-Rodrıguez, Jose DavidSaldıvar, Freya Schiwy and Catherine Walshamong others. Walter Mignolo originallysuggested the concept of coloniality of being. Allthe participants in the conversations do notnecessarily share the same enthusiasm with theconcept.

32 See Dussel, E. (1996) The Underside of Modernity:Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy ofLiberation, trans. and ed. E. Mendieta. AtlanticHighlands, NJ: Humanities; Quijano, A. (2000)‘Coloniality of power, Eurocentrism, and LatinAmerica’, Nepantla: Views from South 1(3), pp.533–580.

33 I am referring here to Habermas’s proposal inHabermas, J. (1987) The Philosophical Discourseof Modernity: Twelve Lectures, trans. F. Lawrence.Cambridge, MA: MIT, among others.

34 Blaut, J.M. (1993) The Colonizer’s Model of theWorld: Geographical Diffusionism and EurocentricHistory, p. 15. New York: The Guilford Press.

35 See Mignolo, Local Histories.36 This is true of Edward Said, Gayatri Spivak and

Homi Bhabha, among others. I examine some ofthe limits of post-colonial criticism inMaldonado-Torres, N. (forthcoming) ‘Secularismand religion in the modern/colonial world-system:from secular postcoloniality to postseculartransmodernity’, in M. Morana, C. Jauregui and E.Dussel (eds) Postcoloniality at Large.


37 Quijano, A. and Wallerstein, I. (1992)‘Americanity as a concept or the Americas in themodern world-system’, International Social ScienceJournal 134, pp. 549–550.

38 References to modern Britain and India appear invan der Veer, P. (2001) Imperial Encounters:Religion and Modernity in India and Britain, p. 7.Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

39 See Wynter, S. (1995) ‘1492: a new world view’,in V. Lawrence Hyatt and R. Nettleford (eds) Race,Discourse, and the Origin of the Americas: A NewWorld View. Washington, DC: SmithsonianInstitution Press; Wynter, S. (2000) ‘Africa, theWest, and the analogy of culture: the cinematictext after man’, in J. Givanni (ed.) SymbolicNarratives/African Cinema. London: British FilmInstitute. See also Mudimbe, V.Y. (1988) TheInvention of Africa: Gnosis, Philosophy, and theOrder of Knowledge. Bloomington andIndianapolis: Indiana University Press; London:James Currey.

40 While Wynter’s conceptions of modernity, race andpower emerge from the tradition of W.E.B. DuBoisand Frantz Fanon, Quijano’s theorizing of theseconcepts can be traced back to Latin Americandependency theory and the work of Jose CarlosMariategui. Wynter and Quijano are “heretics” ofpost-structuralism and Marxism, respectively. Moredialogue among these “heretical” traditions ofcriticism is much needed. I use the concept ofheresy in the sense that Anthony Bogues developsit in Bogues, A. (2003) Black Heretics, BlackProphets: Radical Political Intellectuals. New York:Routledge. Among Quijano and Wynter’s workssee especially Quijano, ‘Coloniality of power’, andWynter, ‘1492’. Further references to theemergence of race in the 16th century can befound in Mignolo, W. (2003) ‘Second thoughts onThe Darker Side of the Renaissance: afterword tothe second edition’, in Darker Side of theRenaissance: Literacy, Territoriality, andColonization, pp. 428–433. Ann Arbor: TheUniversity of Michigan Press.

41 Quijano, ‘Coloniality of power’, pp. 532–533.42 See Quijano, A. (2001) ‘Globalizacion,

colonialidad y democracia’, in Instituto de AltosEstudios Diplomaticos ‘Pedro Gual’ (ed.)Tendencias basicas de nuestra epoca:globalizacion y democracia, pp. 25–28. Caracas:Instituto de Altos Estudios Diplomaticos ‘PedroGual’.

43 Mignolo, W. (2002) ‘Jose de Acosta’s Historianatural y moral de las Indias: Occidentalism, theModern/Colonial World, and the ColonialDifference’, in Natural and Moral History of theIndies by Jose de Acosta, Ed. Jayne E. Morgan p.452. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, italics inoriginal.

44 Mignolo, W. (2003) ‘Os esplendores e as miseriasda “ciencia”: colonialidade, geopolıtica doconhecimento e pluri-versalidade epistemica’, inBoaventura de Sousa Santos (ed.) ConhecimentoPrudente para uma Vida Decente: Um Discursosobre as Ciencias’ revistado, p. 632. Porto,Portugal: Ediçoes Afrontamento.

45 For explorations of the coloniality of knowledgesee Lander, E. (ed.) (1993) La colonialidad delsaber: eurocentrismo y ciencias sociales. BuenosAires: CLACSO.

46 Mignolo, ‘Os esplendores’, p. 633.47 See Negri, A. (2003) Job: la fuerza del esclavo,

trans. A. Bixio, p. 33. Buenos Aires: Paidos. I amtranslating from the Spanish translation of the text:‘Porque el libro de Job no es solo una provocacioncontra la seduccion de la razon, sino tambien eldescubrimiento fenomenologico y la declaracionmetafısica del desastre al que conduce lacoherencia de la razon instrumental. La tragediasitia al Ser y el dolor se introduce en sus fibrasmas ıntimas. Lo desmesurado no puedenombrarse, y si uno intenta hacerlo, la razon,encerrandose sobre sı misma, se confunde yenloquece. La tragedia no puede ser vivida ymucho menos manipulada, ni dominada, puesdomina todas las perspectivas, bloquea todas lasvıas de escape, demuele todos los instrumentos desalvacion. Esto es lo que le sucede a Job y se tratade un obstaculo realmente difıcil de superar. Unobstaculo que se renueva incesantemente en lahistoria, exasperado por el presente: como creeren la razon despues de Auschwitz e Hiroshima?Como continuar siendo comunista despues deStalin?’ (p. 33).

48 I have worked through the concept of the limitsand the excess of Being in relation to evil in theConclusion of my doctoral dissertation.Maldonado-Torres, N. (2001) ‘Thinking from thelimits of Being: Levinas, Fanon, Dussel and the“Cry of Ethical Revolt” ’, PhD dissertation, BrownUniversity.

49 See Jones, W.R. (1998) Is God a White Racist?: APreamble to Black Theology. Boston: Beacon Press.

50 Levinas, E. (1982) De l’evasion. Fata Morgana, p.99, translation and italics mine.

51 Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2000) Empire, p. xiv.Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

52 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 190.53 Wynter, ‘1492’, p. 40.54 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 195.55 The case of Tariq Ramadan is of relevance here.

See, among recent others, relevant articles in LeMonde, 23 December 2003 and Sciolino, E.(2003) ‘A Muslim scholar raises hackles inFrance’, New York Times, 16 November.Ramadan’s works include Ramadan, T. (1999)Muslims in France: The Way Towards Coexistence.


Marksfield, Leicester: Islamic Foundation;Ramadan, T. (2004) Western Muslims and theFuture of Islam. Oxford: Oxford University Press.Among his critics count “nouveau philosophes” likeBernard-Henri Levy who, in so many respects,reproduce some of the most problematic aspects inthe project of some other French Jewish thinkers,such as Levinas.

56 See Jones, Is God a White Racist?57 I owe the concept logic of coloniality to Walter

Mignolo.58 See Quijano, ‘Coloniality of power’.59 Hardt and Negri develop the comparison between

the idea of the “people” and that of the “multitude”in Hardt, M. and Negri, A. (2003) ‘Globalizationand democracy’, in S. Aronowitz and H. Gautney(eds) Implicating Empire: Globalization andResistance in the 21st Century World Order. NewYork: Basic Books.

60 I elaborate these ideas in ‘On the coloniality ofBeing’, unpublished lectured delivered at theCenter for Global Studies in the Humanities atDuke University on 5 November 2003.

61 See dedicatory in Levinas, E. (1998) Otherwisethan Being or, Beyond Essence, trans. A. Lingis.Pittsburgh, PA: Duquesne University Press(translation of Autrement qu’etre ou, Au-dela del’essence, 1974).

62 See Levinas, E. (1990) Nine Talmudic Readings.Bloomington: Indiana University Press.

63 Alternatives to these exclusivist tendencies arefound in projects of Jewish figures from theCaribbean, Latin America and the USA like JaneAnna Gordon, Lewis Gordon and SantiagoSlabodsky.

64 Negri, Job, p. 20, italics mine. The Spanishtranslation reads: “Ahora bien, Spinoza comienzadonde termina Job: comienza viendo a Dios, esdecir, en el punto en que Job termina su recorrido. Setrataba, pues, de insistir en un cuerpo a cuerposemejante al que Job habıa tenido con Dios, ya quenosotros eramos, en efecto y nuevamente, como unosJobs que luchaban contra los poderes que dominanel mundo y lo esclavizan, contra la miseria a la que losometen los mandatos de los mas fuertes y los mascrueles. Bien se comprende entonces hasta que puntofue importante la prefiguracion de Cristo que losPadres Cristianos de la antiguedad reconocieron enJob: tambien el, como nosotros, atraveso el desiertoa fin de reconquistar la vida en un nivel mas elevado,en una redencion absolutamente materialista, lo cualsignifica la alegrıa de revolucionar el mundo”(p. 20).

65 See Gutierrez, G. (1987) On Job: God-talk andthe Suffering of the Innocent. Maryknoll, NY: OrbisBooks; Nemo, P. and Levinas, E. (1998) Job andthe Excess of Evil. Pittsburgh, PA: DuquesneUniversity Press.

66 Brennan, T. (2003) ‘The empire’s new clothes’,Critical Inquiry 29, pp. 364–365.

67 Hardt and Negri, Empire, p. 413.68 See the chapter ‘The “Thrilling Romance of

Orthodoxy” ’, in Zizek, S. (2003) The Puppet andthe Dwarf: The Perverse Core of Christianity, pp.34–57. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press. Zizek’s viewson orthodoxy are related to his conversations withJohn Milbank and other thinkers of the radicalorthodoxy project. For a general view on theproject of radical orthodoxy see Milbank, J.,Pickstock, C. and Ward, G. (eds) (1999) RadicalOrthodoxy: A New Theology. London: Routledge.

69 In the USA it has been more patriotism, thanChristianity itself, which has served as the bedrockfor pragmatist liberalists of leftist leanings likeRichard Rorty and Cornel West. See particularlyRorty, R. (1998) Achieving Our Country: LeftistThought in Twentieth-century America. Cambridge,MA: Harvard University Press; West, C. (1989)The American Evasion of Philosophy: A Genealogyof Pragmatism. Madison: The University ofWisconsin Press. I critically analyse these trends inMaldonado-Torres, N. (forthcoming) ‘Toward acritique of continental reason’, in Companion toAfrican-American Studies. Cambridge, MA:Blackwell.

70 See, especially, Zizek, S. (2000) The Fragile Absoluteor, Why is the Christian Legacy Worth Fighting for?London: Verso; Zizek, S. (1998) ‘A leftist plea for“Eurocentrism” ’, Critical Inquiry Vol. 24.

71 Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 6. This thesiscomplements ideas that Zizek had alreadyexplored in Zizek, S. (1999) ‘The politics of truth,or Alain Badiou as reader of Paul’, The TicklishSubject: The Absent Centre of Political Ontology,pp. 127–170. London: Verso.

72 Zizek, The Puppet and the Dwarf, p. 33.73 Zizek writes “[T]rue monotheists are tolerant: for

them, others are not objects of hatred, but simplypeople who, although they are not enlightened bythe true belief, should nonetheless be respected,since they are not inherently evil” (Zizek, ThePuppet and the Dwarf, p. 27).

74 Zizek’s double standard concerning his critique ofthe “Orient” and the soft treatments of figures likeHegel become clear in reflections on Zen Buddhismin The Puppet and the Dwarf and his defence ofHegel in Zizek, S. (2002) ‘I plead guilty—butwhere is the judgment?’, Nepantla: Views fromSouth 3(3) pp. 579–583. See also William D.Hart’s critical engagements with Zizek in Hart,W.D. (2002) ‘Slavoj Zizek and theimperial/colonial model of religion’, Nepantla:Views from South 3(3), pp. 553–578. See alsoHart’s rejoinder in Hart, W.D. (2003) ‘Can ajudgment be read? A response to Zizek’,Nepantla: Views from South 4(1) pp. 191–194.


75 Levi, P. (1986) Survival in Auschwitz: The NaziAssault on Humanity, p. 89. New York: TouchstoneBooks.

76 Levi, Survival in Auschwitz, p. 90.77 ibid.78 E-mail communication on 2 December 2003.79 Mignolo, ‘Jose de Acosta’s Historia’, p. 466.80 On the problem of the rebordering of the US

Homeland see Andreas, P. and Biersteker, T.J. (eds)(2003) The Rebordering of North America:Integration and Exclusion in a New SecurityContext. New York: Routledge. I thank Jose Palafoxfor the reference. See also the video The NewWorld Border (2001), produced and edited byCasey Peek, associate producer Jose Palafox(Berkeley, CA: Peek Media, 28 min).

81 Habermas, J. and Derrida, J. (2003) ‘February 15,or what binds Europeans together: a plea for acommon foreign policy, beginning in the core ofEurope’, Constellations 10(3), p. 295, emphasismine.

82 For critical analyses of Kant that take intoconsideration some of these issues see Coles, R.(1997) Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory andthe Politics of Caritas. Ithaca, NY: CornellUniversity Press; Eze, E.C. (1997) ‘The color ofreason: the idea of ‘race’ in Kant’s anthropology’,in E.C. Eze (ed.) Postcolonial African Philosophy:A Critical Reader, pp. 103–140. Cambridge, MA:Blackwell.

83 Habermas and Derrida, ‘February 15’, p. 297.84 Fanon, The Wretched, p. 312.

85 To their credit the mostly European- and LatinAmerican-based Academy of Latinity, whosemembers include Candido Mendes, Mario Soaresand Gianni Vattimo, among several others, hasbegun to focus on questions of interculturaldialogue. The group has already met in Tehranand will meet in Alexandria, Egypt to exchangeideas on this topic with Muslim scholars. Importantmoves in this direction also include Buck-Morss, S.(2003) Thinking Past Terror: Islamism and CriticalTheory on the Left. London: Verso. Buck-Morss hasparticipated in meetings of the Academy ofLatinity. The Academy of Latinity has forged in thisway a refreshing relationship among European,Latin American, Middle Eastern and US scholars.

86 References to diversality appear in Glissant, E.(1998) ‘Le divers du monde est imprevisible’,Keynote address at the conference BeyondDichotomies, Stanford University, Stanford, CA,8–10 May. See also Mignolo, Local Histories, pp.26, 244, 273.

87 Heidegger, M. (1998) ‘On the question of being’,in McNeill, W. (ed.) Pathmarks, pp. 311–312.Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

Nelson Maldonado-Torres is Assistant Pro-fessor of Comparative Ethnic Studies in theDepartment of Ethnic Studies at UC-Berkeley.

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Geopolitics of Knowledge