Revista Crítica de Ciências Sociais (Mar 2008)

A topologia do Ser e a geopolítica do conhecimento. Modernidade, império e colonialidade

  • Nelson Maldonado-Torres

DOI
https://doi.org/10.4000/rccs.695
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 80
pp. 71 – 114

Abstract

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This essay examines the conjunction of race and space in the work of several European thinkers. It focuses on Martin Heidegger¹s project of Searching for roots in the West. This project of searching for roots is unmasked as being complicit with an imperial cartographical vision that creates and divides the cities of the gods and the cities of the damned. Maldonado-Torres identifies similar conceptions in other Western thinkers, most notably Levinas, Negri, Zizeck, Habermas, and Derrida. To the project of searching for roots and its racist undertones, he opposes a Fanonian critical vision that highlights the constitutive character of coloniality and damnation for the project of European modernity. The author concludes with a call for radical diversality and a decolonial geopolitics of knowledge.

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