Marina Grini DE-LINKING EPISTEMOLOGY FROM CAPITAL AND PLURI-VERSALITY A CONVERSATION WITH WALTER MIGNOLO, part 1

http://www.reartikulacija.org/RE4/ENG/decoloniality4_ENG_mign.html

Walter D. Mignolo (born in Argentina) is semiotician and professor at Duke University, USA, who has published extensively on semiotics and literary theory, and has worked on different aspects of the modern and colonial world, exploring concepts such as global coloniality, the geopolitics of knowledge, transmodernity and pluriversality (http://waltermignolo.com/).
Marina Grini: Prof. Mignolo, you suggest that one of the most

important processes in liberating ourselves from the grip of neoliberal global capitalism is that of de-linking epistemology from capital. In order to do this, it is necessary to put epistemology under the systematic process of de-coloniality. I deeply agree with you on that point! Therefore, I would like to first ask what the relationship between de-colonization and de-coloniality is? And secondly, which way there is to push this important process of epistemological de-coloniality within the First capitalist World, where it is clear that Western Eurocentrism and Western American imperialism would rather kill than get rid of its male, white, universalist, rationalist foundations, which are intrinsically connected to colonialism?
Walter Mignolo: Let me start in the middle, with the distinction between

decolonization and de-coloniality. Decolonization was the keyword during the Cold War, describing the struggles for liberation in Africa and Asia, mainly from the imperial control of France and England. At that moment, the US was vehemently for the liberation of the colonized people and silently fighting the takeover role that France and England occupied, in the global order, since the eighteenth century. But in order to answer the rest of the question, and build a frame of reference for the subsequent dialogue, I would like to start with a couple of points quite relevant to addressing most of your questions, starting from this, the first one. I will state them succinctly here, as succinctly as I can, and expand whenever and whatever is necessary throughout the rest of the questions. Allow me then to start with these two points: a) How do we work? We refers to the collective project identified as modernity/coloniality/decoloniality. There is a core group of about 14, half of us more or less based in South America (Venezuela, Colombia,

Peru, Ecuador, Argentina and Mexico), and half of us based in the United States (originally from Puerto Rico, Venezuela, Bolivia, Argentina, and Colombia), but working constantly and consistently with our colleagues in South America, including Brazil. The collective gathers people trained in different disciplines: philosophy, sociology, literature, history, anthropology, pedagogy (e.g., Paulo Freires school), political theory and religion. The collective is constituted by nodes of a network. That means that we are not organized as an interdisciplinary team that has an object of study and analyzes it from the perspective of different disciplines. Quite the contrary, what unites us is that we all accept, as our starting point, the concept of coloniality for short, or the colonial matrix of power (the longer version).
b) What are our assumptions, theoretical frame and vision? We (the collective of this project), start from a few basic assumptions:

There is no modernity without coloniality; coloniality is constitutive of modernity. Modernity is not a historical period, but it is a rhetoric grounded on the idea of salvation by the agents telling the story and placing themselves at the last moment of a global historical development and carrying the flag and the torch toward the bright future of humanity. The rhetoric of modernity has been, since its inception, the rhetoric of salvation: by conversion (Spanish and Portuguese mendicant orders), by civilizing missions (British and French agents); by development and modernization (US experts in economy and politics guiding the Third World towards the same standards as the First); and salvation through market democracy and consumerism. President George W. Bush addressed the nation a week or so after 9/11, and the message was: things are under control, go and consume safely. These four movements are not exclusive in the sense that once the second comes, the first goes away. Such a narrative would really be a modern-framed narrative, based on the idea of novelty (that started indeed with the idea of the New World). In our view (we, the aforementioned collective), the four movements co-exist today in diachronic contradictions. What is eliminated by the narratives of modernity (and post-modernity) is not its own past, but all knowledge and life-forms that have to be integrated, marginalized or destroyed, so the salvation mission of modernity can continue, like a juggernaut, to roll over the differences. In other words, the narrative of modernity constructs and invents differences in order to eliminate them or keep them under control (in multiculturalism). During the sixteenth and the seventeenth century, Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, French and British agents of the Church and the monarchy, officers of the state and men of letters were confronted with the marvels and difficulties of vast proportions of land, unimaginable riches by extraction (gold and silver)

and by cultivation (sugar, tobacco, coffee, cotton) and the possibility of enslaving, selling and exploiting Africans. There were different interests in the five aforementioned countries, but for an ex-slave like Ottobah Cugoano (I will come back to this), there frankly, was not any difference between them. Ottobah Cugoano was de-linked in his narrative from the rules of the game established by the first imperial states to control the economy of the Atlantic (Spain and Portugal) and their followers (Holland, France and England). Lets read a paragraph by Cugoano (Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery, London, 1786): The practice of kidnapping and stealing men was started by the Portuguese on the coast of Africa, and as they found the benefit of trading human beings for their own wicked purposes, they soon went on to commit greater depredation. The Spaniards followed their infamous example, and the African slave-trade was thought most advantageous for them, to enable themselves to live in houses and affluence by the cruel subjection and slavery of others. The French and English, and some other nations in Europe, as they founded settlements and colonies in the West Indies or in America, went on in the same manner, and joined hand in hand with the Portuguese and Spaniards to rob and pillage Africa, as well as to waste and desolate the inhabitants of the western continent. But the European depredators and pirates have not only robbed and pillaged the people of Africa themselves; but through their instigation, they have infested the inhabitants with some of the vilest combinations of fraudulent and treacherous villains, even among their own people; and have set up their forts and factories as reservoirs of public and abandoned thievesetc. Cugoanos new history and political treatise was published ten years after the publication of Adam Smiths The Wealth of Nations (1776) and of the American Revolution. The Bill of Rights had already been written in England, after the Glorious Revolution (1688) and in the USA, Cugoano published his book three years before the Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen. It was published a few years before the revolt in Haiti that would end in the Haitian revolution of enslaved and freed slaves, in 1804 and five or six years before Immanuel Kant defined equated enlightenment with emancipation by defining the former in terms of the latter: Enlightenment is mans emergence from his selfimposed nonage. Nonage is the inability to use ones own understanding without anothers guidance. Who speaks for Man? Man is not an essence in the world about which all we Men speak. Kant himself had a clear ranking of Man on the planet. Ottobah Cugoano was doing exactly what Kant preached a few years later, but Cugoano was Black, and for Kant, Blacks were not exactly members of the category Man. In section four of Observations on the Beautiful and the Sublime (1764), he stated, following Hume, that The Negroes

of Africa have by nature no feeling that rises above the triflingstill not a single one was ever found, who presented anything great in art or science or any other praise-worthy quality, even though among the White, some continually rise aloft from the lower rabble and through superior gifts, earn respect in the world. Cugoano published his book, which was an-other history and a decolonial political treatise, before Kant defined enlightenment based on an ethno-class centrism geohistorically located in the heart of Europe, which according to Hegel, was formed by England, France and Germany. However, Cugoano was unthinkable. Kant believed that So fundamental is the difference between these two races of man (White and Negro, additionally mine, WM), and it appears to be as great in regard to mental capacities as in color.
Thus, modernity conceived in terms of a rhetoric of salvation, goes hand in hand justifying the logic of coloniality: control and appropriation of land, exploitation of labor, human lives converted into commodities; control of authority; control of gender and sexuality; control of knowledge and subjectivity. All spheres just mentioned are interrelated and integrated into the logic of domination and exploitation: the logic of coloniality. Modernity and coloniality are not part of a binary structure: they are two sides of the same coin. Together, they engender decolonial thinking and action. Cugoano is one example. There were others back in the sixteenth century. What holds the spheres of life and society, in which the logic of coloniality operates, is a locus of enunciation grounded in patriarchy and racism. The diagram of such relations is as follows:

The colonial matrix of power (CMP) is described in four interrelated domains in which the struggle for control, accommodation, resistance, re-existence, etc. takes place: the control of economy (labor, land, natural resources); the control of authority (government, army); the control of gender and sexuality (control of family life and reproduction of the species based on the Christian/bourgeois family) and the control of knowledge and subjectivity (epistemology, aesthesis). We further assume the colonial matrix of power was formed in the sixteenth century, within the process of Spanish and Portuguese control over the New World and later America. That is, the colonial matrix of power is not a cookie cutter that conquistadores and missionaries used to mold the New World with, but a complex structure, constantly in the making.

Three observations would be helpful to understand how we understand the CMP. First, once put in place in the Atlantic during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, it was continued by the Dutch, British and French imperial expansion from the end of the eighteenth century to the period of decolonization after WWII. Although it is true that colonialism ended with twentieth century decolonization, coloniality was again re-framed by the leadership of the United States. How can we understand the invasion of Iraq if not as a reframing of the colonial

matrix of power, in terms of control of authority, economy, gender and sexuality and knowledge and subjectivity? The entire rhetoric of modernity, development, democracy justifying the invasion, hides the dismantling of local forms of socio-economic organization, knowledge and subjectivity. Secondly, world history is not just the local history from Greece to Rome to the Europe of the sixteenth century to the United States, but the complex and conflictive co-existence of many other local histories that at different times were colonized by EuroAtlantic imperialism (the Americas, India, Africa) or interfered with Russia (since Peter and Catherine); and again with the emergence of the Soviet Union in 1917; China (since 1848, since the Opium War) entangled Japan (since the Meiji Restoration in 1865). The colonial matrix of power remained as a matrix of control, domination and exploitation. Today, the situation is becoming more complex, because of the polycentric characteristic of global capitalism. I have described such co-existence structured by the colonial and imperial differences.1 Third, patriarchy and racism are placed at the center of the diagram because both constitute the epistemic foundation of Western epistemology (e.g., Greek, Latin and the six modern European and imperial languages). The material apparatus of enunciation was structured not only formally (as Emile Benveniste theorized it), but also geo- and body-politically. The epistemic agents were, and have been, male, Christian and European. Ottobah Cugoano, instead, was male but Black-African, captured in Africa, transported to the Caribbean, and then to England. Cugoanos de-colonial move starts from the material conditions and experiences of someone who has been cast in the exteriority of the world. As you can see, I am being quite Marxist in this statement.
Patriarchy was already in place in the sixteenth century, and it was the structure of knowledge that justified the expulsion of the Moors and the Jews from the Iberian Peninsula and offered the epistemic foundation of the Renaissance University. Patriarchal foundations of knowledge invented the notion of woman and imposed it on societies in which such a concept did not exist. Of course, distinctions between male and female or sun and moon, were made and were basic for the organization of society, but women in Western Christianity and its secularization in the bourgeois family, was one dimension of the colonial matrix of power (e.g. a package of economic, political and ethical control and domination). Notice that slavery never stopped. The human being continues to be a commodity, like any other commodity (e.g., dispensable life), but are no longer Black Africans, but women from the ex-Second and Third World. The global trafficking of women, is not a trafficking of women from Norway, France, the US or Germany. Enslaved women are from Moldavia, the Ukraine, East and South Asia, Argentina, Russia and several other non-European locales.

My (and our) idea of de-linking is de-linking from the colonial matrix of power, of which the neo-liberal version of capitalism is one component, both in terms of time and space: in terms of time, neo-liberalism is the latest version we know of the history of imperial modernity/coloniality and capitalism as lifestyle, in which growth and accumulation takes precedence over humans and life in general. The distinctive and most pernicious feature of capitalism is this: making of life, human and life in general, dispensable. First comes economic benefit, reduction of cost, all kinds of legal corruption (as is well known in the pharmaceutical industry and in the uses and abuses of transgenics e.g., Monsanto). De-linking from the colonial matrix of power implies a gigantic, collective and global diversity or pluri-versity not like the global revolution of the proletarians or the global conversion to Christianity or Islam, but in a coordinate diversity of vision towards a society in which the goal is not living to work or living to consume, but instead, working to live and consuming to live. This is, in a nutshell, an orientation of life that President of Bolivia Evo Morales stated as bien vivir (living well) instead of vivir mejor (que los otros) [living better (than the others)]. De-linking from the colonial matrix of power is a subjective and theoretical operation, and it is hard, because it is not just economic transactions we are talking about, but the control of knowledge and subjectivity. The massive cultural industry is one example where control of knowledge and subjectivity go together. Look at what is going on now with the spectacular marketization of Frank Sinatra, like in that famous story by Bioy Casares, La invencin de Morel, that Alain Resnais and Robbe-Grillet translated into a film (Last Year in Marienbad). Frank Sinatra appeared on stage at the recent Grammy Awards (2008), a good decade and a half after his death, singing as he did in the 1950s. Thus, de-linking is also the imagining of a world in which authority is not regulated and controlled by the hegemony of Western political theory. For example, the Zapatistass dictum, extracted from ancient indigenous knowledge (instead of Western knowledge, that is, the political theory from Aristotle, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Leo Strauss, etc.) summarized in terms of to govern, while simultaneously obeying, instead of living in a world in which those who govern do not obey, and those governed do not govern. In a political theory, such as the one expressed by the Indigenous Zapatistas, there is no room for the state of exception. There is no sovereign in that political organization, who can decide on the state of exception. And of course it is hard. But in order to do it, it is necessary to have a decolonial vision and conviction. De-linking from the imperial/colonial control of gender and sexuality (e.g., through the invention of the concept of woman and the Christian, and then of the liberal heterosexual normativity) implies envisioning a world in which gender

distinction and sexual preferences are not determined by a moral code dictated by the truth of a transcendental behavior or by the needs of the market, but basically, by dignity and love not regulated by economic needs of capitalism and the concurrent collaboration of state institutions. The control and reproduction of a type of economy we describe as capitalism, is part of a larger cosmology that we (in the project of modernity/coloniality) describe as the colonial matrix of power. Feminists of all color, including white feminists, as well as queer theorists and activists, are hard at work in that sphere. De-linking, then, means de-linking from that matrix and engaging in a process of decolonial thinking, whose historical origins can be found in the sixteenth century. In other words, the emergence of a regulatory structure the colonial matrix of power engendered by necessity, strives for decolonial responses. Briefly stated, de-linking requires epistemic disobedience (http://subalternstudies.com/?p=193).
Now, to answer the heart of your question, I would say that capitalism is not just capital, but a complex structure that, among other things, controls subjectivities. De-linking begins from there, from being able to de-link from the life-form that capitalism promotes. Capitalism has become the most effective mode of conversion. Suppose three-quarters of the worlds population, coordinated by using new technologies (internet, cell phones) decides to consume to live rather than live to consume, and work to live instead of living to work. That would be a beginning. Imagine Bill and Linda Gates Foundation, with an endowment of $37 billion. The foundation is larger than the budget of Bolivia, and larger that many non-private institutions working on global health and other areas, such as agricultural development in Africa. What would you say? It is a noble cause the foundation is helping many people. But of course, it maintains the non-questioned assumptions of a life-style, of global dimension, that promotes accumulation of wealth not just to exploit and expropriate, but to benefit. Of course, it requires a certain amount of intelligence to achieve what Bill Gates achieved. But the problem is not Bill Gates personal intelligence, but the society in which he grew up and was educated, and the vision such a society encouraged him with.

M. G.: How we understand the process of epistemic de-coloniality, depends not only on how we understand the colonial division, but even more so on where we stand on it. Therefore, can you conceptualize this colonial division further as well and explain what the difference would be in struggles against capital and coloniality by those coming from Europe (which is not one!), for example, being those with exsocialist/communist European backgrounds, and the others, for example, coming from Latin America, being Zapatista peasants and part of the Zapatista struggle? W. M.: Lets start by coming from Europe. There is a persistent

misunderstanding, perhaps due to what Portuguese sociologists describe as lazy reason, which remains in denial, with respect to the distinction between Europe and Eurocentrism. You are right, it is difficult to pin down what Europe is and who Europeans are. The same thing happens with any classification of people by continent. I am not interested in Europe, but in Eurocentrism. However, a few words about Europe are in order. The key point in your question is this not only on how we understand the colonial division, but even more so on where we stand on it. The colonial matrix of power and the particular kind of manage and control of economy that we refer to as capitalist economy has been since the sixteenth century one of the four legs of the CMP. The CMP is not an object to be studied by sociologists, anthropologists, economists, political scientists, historians, and biotechnologists in all the known varieties, nanotechnologists and the like. On the contrary, all the disciplines just mentioned are already embedded in the CMP. It is the CMP that created the conditions for their existence. Thus, it is necessary to shift the geography of reason and the ethics and politics of knowledge (e.g., geopolitics of knowledge in short) and work towards the de-coloniality of knowledge and being. The de-colonial shift consists in de-linking from the hegemony of the epistemology of the zero-point (Santiago Castro-Gmez, Cultural Studies 21, 2-3, 2007) of Christian Theology (sixteenth-seventeenth centuries) and its secularization in philosophy and science from the eighteenth century on. The first step then, is epistemic de-linking, because while knowledge is controlled, as it is now, by the reproduction of the colonial matrix of power in the name of development technological advancement and marvelous gadgets, the privilege of economic and military progress, the last and forthcoming post we will remain within the colonial matrix, engaged in radical internal criticism (like Bartolom de las Casas and Marx, for example), but still believing that there is only one game in town: the game we are in, and that there is no possibilities of de-linking. In other words, it would be impossible to think of getting out of the bubble of The Truman Show. The naturalized belief that has now spread around the world is that progress and development is good for all; the more you produce and the more people consume, the happier they the consumer are. Within that structure, those who are in it, live to work; live to consume. Success is the final horizon. In this sense, Hillary Clintons presidential campaign became a paradigmatic case of this naturalized blindness: the more she advanced in the campaign, and the difficulties in getting ahead increased, it became more and more obvious that what she wants is to be president. The vision, and the concerns of why she wants to be president, was relegated to a second-place position. One wonders

now, if she ever had another goal than just being president, just making it, because she was trained from the early days in her life, in her family, school and college, to succeed. Well, I am not promoting failure. I am just saying that a society whose subjects are encouraged to personal success and the accumulation of wealth and prestige is a sick society. Becoming the president became the ultimate success for her. A paradigmatic example of living to work and be successful, living to consume (commodities or institutional locus); she is the most dramatic example of a philosophy of life that consists as Evo Morales often states in living and doing better than the others, rather than in doing to live well with the others. I believe that in telling you this story in the way I am telling it, I am already in the process of de-linking, of moving away from The Truman Show bubble of modernity/coloniality. And, in the last analysis, the differences in how the CMP is confronted in relation to the place we occupy within it, start with the awareness implied in your very question. Very often, I have white, Anglo-students in my class who ask similar questions. My answer is that they are not guilty of being born into a high middle class family in the United States. And once they become aware of their location within the CMP of power, they have the choice to shift gears and join de-colonial thinking. Since there is a choice, there is not just politics but ethics involved. They, the students, have to understand that they are not students of color who have to join their way of thinking, as progressive as it may be, but the other way round. M. G.: To put it differently, how do we develop an inter-epistemic field between those coming from the Western Eurocentric world, nevertheless aware of a proper colonial past and neocolonial present, that want to work with those on the other side of the colonial difference that had been colonized in the past? W. M.: Pursuing the line of argument that is hinted at in my last paragraph, I would say that in principle, it is by taking the geo-politics of knowledge seriously, which goes hand in hand with de-colonizing knowledge and being. What do I mean by that? That de-colonial projects shall come, are coming, from the non-Euro-American world as well as from the articulation of immigrant consciousness within Europe and the US. See, the accumulation of money went hand in hand with the accumulation of meaning (e.g., knowledge): major banks, major stock markets, major museums and universities are in France, England, Germany, Spain, Italy, Portugal and the US. It is only recently that history has been moving toward a polycentric accumulation of money, although the control of meaning (e.g., knowledge) is still in the hands of Western (countries mentioned above) institutions. Our work (we

scholars, intellectuals of all strands in the media and in the streets) as the dissenting and educated elite, is no longer only of white stock because we come in all imaginable colors: Indigenous of the Americas and Aborigines of New Zealand and Australia; Blacks in Africa, the Caribbean, the Andes and the United States (Kant would be surprised today); Brown Middle Eastern Muslims and Brown Latinos and Latinas in the United State, as well as Indians and Pakistanis; and also Whites from the Caucasus and Iran. And of course we are not only White and heterosexual males but of variegated colors and sexual preferences. That is, a variegated spectrum of subjectivities is what matters under the visible and metaphorical language of the color of your skin and the composition of your blood (in West Virginia one voter was quoted in a newspaper as saying that he will vote for McCain over Obama, because he wants a president of American blood. That is, geo-politics of knowledge goes hand in hand with body-politics of knowledge. How then, can we (all of us around the world, who in one way or another have been touched by the colonial wound, in Europe, the United States, Africa, Asia or Latin America) work together? Taking geo- and bodypolitics of knowledge seriously would be one way. That would mean abandoning the dream of a new abstract universal, which is good for everybody, although such an abstract universal is premised and conceived, based on the experience of my community and interests.
a) Since the sixteenth century and the modern/colonial foundation of racism, certain regions of the world, and people dwelling within it, were classified as lesser. Who was in the position to classify? Not Black Africans, AmericanIndians or Arabic Muslims. No, they were classified, but had no say in the classification. The classification, and success, was invented and implemented by Western Christian theologians, and later on, by secular philosophers and scientists. Thus, knowledge was cast as uni-versal, although it was created and enacted in one region (Western Christianity) and by a particular community of bodies (White Males publicly assuming the rightfulness of heterosexuality). They did not perform such classification as such, as white, heterosexual, Western Christians and males. They did it, because they believe in a uni-versal, non-located and disembodied truth. These men felt that they were just the mediators of a universal and transcendental way of living and being. Santiago Castro-Gmez (a member of the collective modernity/coloniality) has been describing such epistemology as the hubris of the zero-point: the knowledge of the observer who cannot be observed. Today, this principle is at work in all schools of management, for example: looking at the valley from above, seated on a rock on the mountain, planning how to manage the population below.

b) Geo- and body-politics of knowledge are key words in the vocabulary of de-colonial epistemology that operate in two directions: in one direction, they unveil the silenced geo- and body-politics of knowledge

of Eurocentered (remember: Greek, Latin and six modern European imperial languages) modernity. Research had already been done disclosing the hidden geo- and body-politics in Martin Heideggers philosophy. His link with Nazism is already well known (body-politics), but the fact is that his philosophy was built under the presupposition of the centrality of Germany within the global centrality of Europe (cf. Charles Bambachs Heidegger Roots, http://www.amazon.com/Heideggers-Roots-Nietzsche-NationalSocialism/dp/0801472660). On the other hand, geo- and body-politics of knowledge affirm the right and the legitimacy of knowledge disqualified by the imperiality of Eurocentered epistemology as myth, folklore, native, traditional, non-sustainable, demonic, subversive, irrational, etc. Oh, you are talking about situated knowledge is a common response from post-modern colleagues. Sure, but situated knowledge in the colonial matrix of power. Border thinking and decolonial projects shall emerge from the receiving end of Western expansion, as I suggested with the examples of Evo Morales and SunYat Sen. Pluri-versality comes into being as far as connectors can be established and the hegemony of one of the nodes avoided. In a pluriversal world there is no place for one hegemonic node. This is a problem with Ernesto Laclaus empty signifier. Laclau still believes in the need for one hegemonic project, rather than in the hegemony of the connectors, thus avoiding the hegemony of one-and-only abstract universal. Pluri-versal hegemony lies within the connectors that link the global diversity of de-colonial projects.2
Once such principles are accepted, the question is what kind of de-colonial projects can emerge from colonial local histories: from Eastern and Central Europe (that is, the Europe at the margins of the imperial states, and with dense and diverse histories, languages, and religions); from colonial immigrants within Europe and the US and from European (in senso largo, including the Balkans and Eastern Europe) scholars and intellectuals who want to de-link from Eurocentered (senso stricto Hegels heart of Europe) conception of life and knowledge and join the ex-Third World crowd and the mass of migrants from the ex-colonies to the heart of Europe and the US.

c) A more specific way to understand what I am trying to argue is to elaborate on the distinction between objectivity without parentheses and objectivity within parentheses. The distinction was introduced by Chilean neurophysiologist Humberto Maturana. Basically, the argument is the following: Objectivity without parentheses leads to an epistemology of obedience, to a closed political system open to be taken by totalitarian regimes, and to an economy in which increases of production and wealth, take priority over human lives and life in general. Inter-cultural dialogue or inter-epistemic dialogue between

epistemologies, based on the premise of objectivity without parentheses is, on the one hand, limited within a given system, and on the other hand, could be deadly when agencies defending opposite objectivities without parentheses, confront each other. Dialogue becomes unsustainable. Objectivity within parentheses, on the other hand, opens up the doors for true inter-epistemic (and intercultural) dialogues. Its realization, however, had the difficult task of overcoming objectivity without parentheses. In a world where objectivity-inparentheses is hegemonic, the observer accepts explanatory paths, political organization, economic philosophy that is secondary to life, human lives, as well as life in general. If the final horizon is the flourishing, creativity and well-being, and not the control of authority and the control of the economy, which are predicated as the primary ends to insure the flourishing of life, then objectivity in parentheses would be the necessary path to insure true inter-epistemic and intercultural dialogues. I quote Humberto Maturana: There are two distinct attitudes, two paths of thinking and explaining. The first path I call objectivity without parentheses. It takes for granted the observerindependent existence of objects that it is claimed can be known; it believes in the possibility of an external validation of statements. Such a validation would lend authority an unconditional legitimacy to what is claimed and would, therefore, aim at subjection. It entails the negation of all those who are not prepared to agree with the objective facts. One does not have to listen or try to understand them. The fundamental emotion reigning here is powered by the authority of universally valid knowledge. One lives in the domain of mutually exclusive transcendental ontologies: each ontology supposedly grasps objective reality; what exists seems independent from ones personality and ones actions (Maturana, 2004: 42). The other attitude is defined as objectivity in parentheses. In this attitude: [] the emotional basis is the enjoyment of the company of other human beings. The question of the observer is accepted fully, and every attempt is made to answer it. The distinction between objects and the experience of existence is, according to this path, not denied but the reference to objects is not the basis of explanations, it is the coherence of experiences with other experiences that constitutes the foundation of all explanation [] We have entered the domain of constitute ontologies: all Being is constituted through the Doing of observers. If we follow this path of explanation, we become aware that we can in no way claim to be in possession of the truth, but that there are numerous possible realities [] If we follow this path of explanation, we cannot demand the subjection
of our fellow human beings, but will listen to them, seek cooperation and communication (Maturana, 2004: 42; emphasis added by W. Mignolo).

It would take too long to explore the political and ethical consequences of a world in which objectivity and epistemology in parentheses would be hegemonic. But I could add that Maturanas reflections from the sphere of sciences, states in a different vocabulary the Zapatistas dictum: a world in which many worlds would co-exist. The realization of that world, built upon intercultural dialogues, will require the hegemony of an epistemology in parentheses. Maturana has conceived it as multi-verse, the Zapatistas as a world in which many worlds will co-exist. In our project, modernity/coloniality, we talk about pluri-versality as a uni-versal project. No need to debate which one is the best, the correct, and the right one. Such a debate will place us squarely into the epistemology without parentheses where each of us wants to win. Notice also that multi-verse and pluriversality are quite different from the idea of pluralism in the vocabulary of the liberal political theories critiqued by Carl Schmitt. And both concepts are quite different from Schmitts pluri-verse, which he conceives as a plurality of states. Both liberal political theory and Schmitts, are based on the paradigmatic example of modern-imperial societies (England, France, Germany), while Maturanas multi-verse, our (the collective) pluri-versality and the Zapatistas, are based on the experiences of modern-colonial societies. The first takes the modern states as a model, the second, the colonial state. I suggest a thought experiment: take both, the pluralism of liberal political theory and apply it to Bolivia, and see what you get. And take Schmitts pluri-verse and apply it to Latin America and see what you get. The option is the de-colonial one: shift the geography of reason, think from the experiences of Bolivia and Latin America, and confront the regional and limited scope of liberal political pluralism and the Schmitt pluri-verse.

Go to the second part of the interview (Reartikulacija no. 5).

Go to the third part of the interview (Reartikulacija no. 6).

For instance, Theorizing from the Borders; Shifting to Geo and Body-Politics of Knowledge, http://est.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/2/205, 2006.
1 2 An extended argument on the topic can be found in Walter D. Mignolo and Madina

Tlostanova, Theorizing From the Borders; Shifting to the Geo- and Body-Politics of knowledge, in European Journal of Social Theory, http://est.sagepub.com/cgi/content/abstract/9/2/205.

Part 2:

Marina Grini: You emphasized that colonial epistemology is a universalist project that repeats and cements western Eurocentric colonial logic. Instead of uni-versality you suggest therefore to take the path toward pluri-versality. This formulation may be understood as

leaving a terrain open to your critics that will say that this pluri position leads to pluri localizations and to immense fragmentation of struggles, while capital will continue to exercise universal expropriation? Walter Mignolo: First of all, my emphasis is not in that colonial epistemology is a universalist project but on the contrary that decolonial epistemology points toward pluri-versality as a universal project; quite different indeed. Colonial epistemology would be another way to refer to the colonial side of imperial epistemology. Or in other words, colonial epistemology will be the space of coloniality in the equation modernity/coloniality. However, you are right in the last observation. Capital has continued to exercise universal expropriation through the publications of all ieks, Negris, Harveys etc., books attacking capitalism, globalization, and the like. So, pluri-versality joints the crowd of inefficient discontents who protest and dream while capital continues to exercise universal expropriation. And remember the example of Bill and Melinda Gatess Foundation and the cultural industrys expropriations of subjectivities. But lets put the problem into perspective. In what sphere of the social is our work (yours, mine, of those mentioned in the previous paragraphs, and of others you mention yourself below like Badiou, Agamben, etc.)? I am not sure if Berlusconi reads Agamben or Sarkozy reads iek. Perhaps he reads Badiou who wrote about him. If we take the classic liberal triangle of the State, the Market and the Civil Society, and we add a fourth, the Political Society (Partha Chaterjee), of which liberals may not be too happy, our work is located basically in the sphere of the Civil and Political Society, and more specifically, in the sphere of Education (school, universities, colleges, the media). Our (your, mine, and other names mentioned in this interview) influence on the State and the Market is very limited, if we have some. Contrary to political scientists, economists, mainstream media and journalism, our (the same as above) sphere of influence is again that of the civil and political society. In fact, I see our (the same as above) contribution in trying to enlarge the political society since the active civil society is mainly taken by NGOs. The legacies of W.E.B Dubois, Frantz Fanon, Gloria Anzalda, among many others, is to have created a space in which many of us (same as above), who did not find our place in the existing canon of Western knowledge, have now a place to dwell. Let me put it differently. Agnes Heller stated, in the introduction to her A Theory of Modernity that Europeans dwell in the house of Being while Americans (she means Anglo-Americans), dwell in the house of Democracy. When I read that I asked myself, where is my house? And which one is the house of the large minorities in the US and European immigrants? And in which house is the rest of the world dwelling? Minorities in US and

Europe, immigrants in both places (but also in China and India) and many others around the world, dwell in the house of Coloniality. Well, what we (this time we refers to the collective modernity/coloniality) are doing is to affirm the existence of the house of Coloniality and, from there, to forcefully enter into the conversation with those inhabiting the fenced house of Being and Democracy. But perhaps I am wrong and pluri-versal conversations are irrelevant and inefficient in front of the juggernaut of capitalism. Perhaps a renovated international revolution of the proletarian, or the global multitude; or perhaps if we can write more books on Lenin, Saint Paul and Spinoza we would be able to stop the global march of capitalism. But, if we succeed in stopping capitalism, what is next? What kind of world would we (all of us concerned with this question) like to build? Pluri-versality as a universal project is the anchor of a non-capitalist and totalitarian struggle to impose one form of life and of domination. As for the universal projection of de-colonial epistemology, it is not exactly but just the opposite of what we (the collective of the project) are talking about. We aim at a global projection of de-colonial epistemology, and not necessarily universal. Global projection is predicated on pluri-versality and objectivity in parenthesis. Universal projection is predicated on the uni-versality of objectivity without parenthesis. The epistemology I (and others) advocate, border epistemology, is not colonial but de-colonial. On the other hand, it moves away from the abstract universals predicated by Christian Theology (but also by some Islamists), by liberals (civilizing mission), by neo-liberals (market democracy) and by Marxists (proletarian revolution, the rising of the multitude). Border epistemology promotes pluri-versality as universal projects. At this point of our conversation (yours and mine) it should be clear what I mean by that. Nevertheless, lets push it a step further. Pluri-versality requires as said above connectors, connectors among projects (see the question about who are the revolutionary subjects today, below) moving, advancing, unfolding in the same direction (departing from the colonial matrix of power), but following singular paths emerging from local histories. Consequently, pluri-versality as a universal project is not another new abstract universal that claims the ultimate truth above all the previous abstract universals. Connectors are necessary to avoid fragmentation. And I would say that capital is not exercising universal but global expropriation. Certainly, China is short in land to produce enough food for its population. Consequently, China is buying land in Africa and Latin America and banks in Africa. The Bill Gatess and the Rockefeller Foundations are helping African farmers

to develop agriculture (http://waltermignolo.com/2007/11/01/bonocontra-china/), while the variegated global left (another we) have no more to do than run behind trying to guess how this time the colonial matrix of power is being reshaped. The institutions controlling, today, knowledge, authority and economy are constantly renovating the technology of control. Davos and the G8 are just two examples. The World Social Forum, The Americas Social Forum, the Continental Summit of Indigenous Peoples and Organizations (http://www.cumbrecontinentalindigena.org/index_guate_en.php), the Pacific Coast Federation or Fishermens Association, Mujeres Creando (in Bolivia, http://www.mujerescreando.org/) etc. etc. etc.), La Via Campesina, Food Sovereignty have initiated a different modus operandi: the proliferation of nodes around the globe with the intention of thinking forward and creatively not only against. Both organizations are gaining importance today when predators of all sorts are making enormous amounts of money in food speculation. Once again, profit comes first, human beings second. If people have to die, let it be. We (the corporations and its agents) accumulate money. The crisis in Argentina today between land-owners who want to increase their profit by just growing soya and exporting it, and the government who is pushing agricultural diversification by increasing their taxes to force them to diversify. For land owner, diversity may be good for society in general but not for profit, and they do not want to loose this opportunity to jump in the band wagon of food-predators. This is, as you know, the beauty of capitalism of Western civilization: a world of successful winners in accumulation of wealth at the cost of dispensability of human life. All these are sign-posts of the pluri-versal global march de-linking from the colonial matrix of power (or capitalism, in your vocabulary). Border epistemology and pluri-versality are two necessary horizons in that endeavor. Unless one still believes that all these movements need to study Marx, Lenin, Spinoza, iek, Deleuze, Gramsci, etc. These thinkers and activists are all great, but the de-colonial project responds to a myriad of experiences, desires, dreams, traumas, etc. etc., that are not those embedded in the regional history of Europe; and this time I mean Hegels Europe, divided in South, the Heart and the North-East. Lets examine a modest case (and this very moment [May 9, 2008] in a difficult situation after the referendum of Santa Cruz passed with a wide margin, legal or not). The government of Evo Morales (with all the expected difficulties) is a good example in both, its possibilities and difficulties. The fact that the province of Santa Cruz is forcing its autonomy makes evident the paradoxical situation that in order to rule over communities controlling the land, natural resources and capital, it

is necessary to have a state that is stronger in possessing lands and natural resources and capital. It seems that the rule of Capital cannot be overruled by the rules of the State. We are facing a new and paradoxical situation. During the Cold War, the State sent the army against the workers and university students supporting the claim of the union. Today, the army if it is to be sent it has to be sent against the landowners, both in Bolivia and in Argentina. One may think that capitalism (as a civilization structured by the colonial matrix of power) may be difficult to defeat playing by the rules established (e.g., the colonial matrix of power) to make capitalism work. The bottom line is the paradigmatic experience Bolivians and the world at large (we) are going through. There are three contending forces and projects in Bolivia: the State-MAS (Marcha hacia el socialismo) project; the interests of the agro-industrial bourgeoisie of South East (the Media Luna) and the indigenous political society. None of these three forces is hegemonic. What are the possible features? And what are the unavoidable roads toward the future? If we remain in the hegemonic ideal modeled by abstract universal, the situation will be explosive because each of the three projects will claim their legitimacy to be the best model for all. The alternative is inter-culturality (in the sense the concept has been introduced and used by Indigenous intellectuals in Ecuador and Bolivia, which is not equivalent to multiculturalism but, once again, exactly the opposite) and border epistemology. However, inter-culturality and border epistemology would/could be endorsed by the actual State and by the indigenous political society, but would hardly be accepted by the agro-industrial bourgeoisie, that is, by the Bolivian agents of global capitalism (this statement comes from a conversation with Javier Sanjins, in the collective modernity/coloniality). Inter-culturality is not the same as multiculturality. The former operates in a world ruled by an epistemology in parenthesis; the latter in a world ruled by an epistemology without parenthesis. The colonial matrix of power, or in a more common parlance, the expansion of Western civilization to control the economy, authority, gender and sexuality, subjectivity and knowledge, has been gradual since the 16th century, and has encountered many different local histories, languages, religions, economies, epistemologies etc. The responses to Western expansion were and are variegated. There are the promoters in different parts of the world of Western civilization (lately modeled on the US), there are anti-Westerns responses from manifestations to armed violence responding to the violence of Western incursion (in all the spheres mentioned above), and de-colonial. Decolonial responses have, of necessity, to be founded on border

epistemology. Imagining that Western political economy and political theory (in their right or left versions) will be helpful in imagining and creating the future of, say, Bolivia or Iraq is, in my view, an Eurocentric illusion. When the government of Evo Morales, as well as Bolivian intellectuals (and also in Ecuador) talk about the decolonization of the state and of the economy, of the re-foundation of the state, they are already enacting border epistemology. That is to say, Western political theory and economy is there, has been there since the foundation of the republic. But Bolivia and Ecuador are colonial states, and not modern states like France or England. Thus, liberal democracy has a tradition in Bolivia, for sure. And also the ayllu (indigenous ways of life, political and economic organization, knowledge grounded in Aymara and Quechua language). There is no reason, except imperial reason, to argue that liberal democracy is the way to go and Indians have nothing to say. That said, it is not a question of going back to the past or of transforming Bolivia into a big ayllu (as Felipe Quispe, El Mallku would like to do). For the same reason, it is no longer sustainable to imagine Bolivia as big liberal-colonial state. Simultaneously, and since there is around 60% of indigenous population, it is no longer possible to have a liberal (even less neo-liberal) state. Just analyze this case: the conflict between Ronald Larsen (an American rancher in Bolivia) and the government of Evo Morales (http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/09/world/americas/09bolivia.html?p agewanted=all). This is not a conflict between liberals and Marxists. It is a conflict between liberal and ayllu democracy. Thus, border thinking (or epistemology) and inter-culturality implies the epistemic leadership of Indigenous epistemology in conflict with White (European descent) modern/colonial epistemology in which economy, politics, education, subjectivity, etc. is formulated and enacted.1 And let me offer another example of the inevitability of border epistemology as creative response to Western intrusion and the global reproduction of capitalism. Much has been written about Sun Yat-sen. He has been portrayed as pro-communist and pro-capitalist, as conservative and traditionalist, as close to the Jesuits, etc. No one thought that what Sun Yat-sen was doing was to think in the borders of Western liberalism and Marxism on the one hand, and Chinese long lasting history and civilization on the other. At the point he was thinking, it was like in Bolivia impossible and imaginable to pretend that China could go back to its past, before the Opium War. On the other hand, it was unthinkable also to get a blue print of liberalism or communism; to erase Chinese past and supplant it with the history of the Western world from Greece and Rome until the Western capitalist imperialism and the aftermath of Industrial Revolution. He had then to

theorize by dwelling in the borders. He himself was not yet ready to imagine that it was possible to detach from the duality between theory and facts, so that he opted for facts instead of theory to frame and argue for the three principle of livelihood as a vision for China. Given space constraint here I just want to underline his fundamental difference between the Principle of Livelihood and capitalism. Since the principle of livelihood is also used within the economic principles of capitalist economy (e.g. profit at the expenses of life in general and not only human life), Sun Yat-sens Principle of Livelihood points toward a different direction. Like Evo Morales distinction between buen vivir and vivir mejor que otros (to live well rather than to live better than the other), Sun Yat-sen sees capitalism as a civilization of death: The fundamental difference between the Principle of Livelihood and capitalism is this: capitalism makes profit its sole aim, while the Principle of Livelihood makes the nurture of the people its aim. Unfortunately, it is not in this direction that the history of China, in the past 60 years, seems to be heading. The lesson seems to be that there is no way out of capitalism without de-linking from Western epistemology (in its variety) and from all pretense of achieving a new abstract uni-versal that will correct all the errors and limitations of previous ones and will be good for the planet and its six billions plus people. And the lesson seems to be also that the desire for wealth, accumulation and control is stronger than the desire for vivir bien and Sun Yat-sens principles of livelihood. The modest claim of de-colonial thinking is that without de-colonizing knowledge and being (e.g., nonconsumerist subjectivities), reading Lenin and cheering the global multitude will not take as very far. M. G.: Especially harsh is your attack on emancipation that in European leftists circles seems to be the last fetish not to be questioned. Instead of emancipation, you talk about liberation, grounding both concepts in a historical overview, and showing that emancipation is just a process inside the colonial mechanism of western rational episteme, while liberation has a different genealogy of struggle. Can you reflect on the radical difference between emancipation and liberation? W. M.: The distinctions I am trying to draw are the following: emancipation belongs to the vocabulary of the enlightenment. As I mentioned before, Kant equates enlightenment with emancipation. As such, emancipation became the key-word to describe the projects and visions of the secular European bourgeoisie emerging in England from the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and in France from the French Revolution of 1789. Within the same logic, but with reverse content, emancipation entered the vocabulary of socialism. Marx himself

conceived emancipation as the march toward humanness: Every emancipation is a restoration of the human world and of human relationships to man himself. Human emancipation will only be complete when the real individual man has absorbed into himself the abstract citizen; when as an individual man, in his everyday life, in his work, and in his relationships, he has become a species-being; and when he has recognized and organized his own powers (forces propres) as social powers so that he no longer separated his social power from himself as political power, (quoted by Wolfdietrich Schmied-Kowarzik, http://www.thur.de/philo/emanc.htm). In this genealogy of thoughts, Ernesto Laclau wrote a book titled Emancipation(s) (1996). The fact that Laclau illustrates his thesis with the case of Juan Domingo Pern, in Argentina, is telling. Instead, the national left in Argentina that emerged in the late fifties after the fall of Juan Domingo Pern, as a critical response against the oligarchy and the communist party that collaborated in his fall, used the world liberation. One of the books written by J. J. Hernndez Arregui (a leading figure of the nationalist left, is significantly titled Nacionalismo y liberacin. In Latin America, Theology and Philosophy of Liberation were founded in the late sixties and early seventies. No one claimed Theology of Emancipation or Philosophy of Emancipation as a better name. All the movements toward decolonization during the Cold War were labeled Ejrcitos o Movimientos de Liberacin Nacional. No one was baptized ejrcito o movimiento de emancipacin nacional; the same with EZLN, Ejrcito Zapatista de Liberacin Nacional. Of course it is not a nominal question that is at stake. In the domain of abstract universals, you can say that emancipation and liberation are the same. In history, however, they carry the weight of different experiences: emancipation described the dreams and experiences of the European bourgeoisie while liberation describes the struggles of the damns (Fanon), the racialized and colonized people of the ex-Third World. Liberation in other words is linked to de-colonization both during the Cold War and after the collapse of the Soviet Union that is the meaning of de-colonial in the project modernity/coloniality, which I will clarify below. So, the de-colonial option that emerged from such experiences, the armed struggle for liberation, was paralleled by intellectual weapons of liberation. Beyond theology and philosophy of liberation were projects of de-colonizing rather than opening the social sciences (c.f., Wallerstein). Decolonizing the social sciences was a contemporary project launched by Colombian sociologist Orlando Fals-Borda. Our (in this case, the collective modernity/coloniality but also Afro-Caribbean and Indigenous intellectuals) critique of the European left and its version in South American and the Caribbean is grounded on its

Eurocentricity on the fact that the emphasis on changing the content of the conversation made them blind to the necessity of changing the terms of the conversation. Why should a Black or an Indian intellectual endorse the vision of the European left if their experiences and locations in the colonial matrix of power are so different? Besides, the Eurocentered version of the European left in South American and the Caribbean has always been blind (if not blind, like in Bolivia today, at least still inhabiting white Creole consciousness) to Indians, Blacks and women and particularly to women of color as if no real transformative projects could come from their needs and experience without the help of the European Left and its local agents; which indeed parallel the relationship, on the right wings, of the IMF and its local agents. The decolonial option brings to the foreground (through the pioneering works of Dubois, Csaire, Fanon, Anzalda) and many others a genealogy of thoughts that has been blocked by the Eurocentered right as well as the Eurocentered left. The de-colonial option emerges as an option next to the variegated versions of Marxism as well as of Theology of Liberation. It emerged as an analytic and transformative project in the academia (in the US and in South America and the Caribbean) as well as in the public sphere, joining forces with similar and compatible projects advanced by Afro-Andean and Caribbean, Latinas and Latinos, Native Americans and Aboriginal in New Zealand and Australia; immigrants of the ex-Third World in Europe and the US, gay and lesbian struggle, women of color, etc. This is the most immediate context of the decolonial option as formulated by the collective modernity/coloniality. And in this genealogy of thoughts and activism, liberation is akin to decolonization. M. G.: Your criticism of the western modernity and western rationality and Eurocentric institutions of knowledge is so systematic that nothing is left here in Europe for a process of liberation and a systematic process of de-coloniality on which to base ourselves in order to proceed today in struggles against the Eurocentric institutions of knowledge. Am I wrong? Can you list, besides Horkheimer, some other important names, practices, positions, resistance? W. M.: You may be right. Eurocentrism was so harsh and systematic in asserting its supremacy and humiliating people that generated a significant amount of harsh energy and mistrust against. Remember Fanon? Europe has taken over leadership of the world with fervor, cynicism and violence. And look how the shadow of its monuments spreads and multiplies. Every movement Europe makes bursts the boundaries of

space and thought. Europe has denied itself not only humility but also solicitude and tenderness [..] So, my brothers, how could we fail to understand that we have better things to do than follow in that Europes footsteps? [] Come, comrades, the European game is finally over, we must look for something else. We can do anything today provided we do not ape Europe, provided we are not obsessed with catching up with Europe (The Wretched of the Earth, 1961, Conclusion). I do not want to hide myself behind Fanon. By quoting him I want to put forward, to make visible, the sensibility of the colonial wound that you have in Fanon as well as in others in similar circumstances, with respect to western modernity and rationality.2 The response to your observation that nothing is left here in Europe for a process of liberation and a systematic process of de-coloniality could be reversed in this direction. What would it mean for you, in Europe (senso largo), to shift the geography of reason, to think decolonially and from the experiences and conceptualization of de-colonial thinkers, and to reimagining political theory and political economy from the experiences of the damns? Why not? For a long time, people in the third world were exposed to European emancipating ideals. Well, perhaps a shift in the geography of reason is thinkable and doable. After all, the damns like Fanon had to learn the European canon in order to articulate, against it, his de-colonial critique (border epistemology). Lets follow Fanon again: The Third World (today we will include immigrants in Europe and the US, my addendum, W. M.) is today facing Europe as one colossal mass whose project must be to try and solve the problems this Europe was incapable of finding the answer to (The Wretched of the Earth, Conclusion). Fanons observations were written just at the moment when the US was on its way to global hegemony. Today Euro-America would most certainly be included in his reflections. It is not just among Blacks, Indians or Jews that the colonial wound is felt. It is also among whites of European descent in South America and the Caribbean, and I suppose in Australia, New Zealand and South Africa. And obviously among Irish people. There is a tradition, in Argentina, of intellectuals, sons (mainly sons) of European immigrants, lower or middle class, that have written many pages about that feeling of being European at the margin, which is, not being European; being looked as inferior or behind by Europeans visitors to Argentina, hosted by the Argentine Creole elites, grounded in Spanish (and some time German or British) intellectual and family traditions. The point is here that many of us, in South America and the Caribbean, grew up in that atmosphere. This is one of the reasons why, with a growing awareness,

the link and solidarity with Indians and Afro-Caribbean, Afro-Brazilian and Afro-Andean intellectuals came naturally: we have all experienced coloniality, although at a different scale. We share the colonial wound at different level of intensity. The colonial wound is one of the consequences of Eurocentrism and it operates, basically, at the epistemic and ontological level. At the epistemic level, the Western notion of rationality became a universal measuring stick and a model of a rational human being. At the same time, it spilled over ontology, as those who are not quite at the level of Western notion of rationality are lesser being. This is, simply, the logic of racism: the invention of epistemic and ontological colonial differences to secure the supremacy of Western rationality and devalue what cannot be assimilated. And it is basically epistemological because it is invented and created rather than representing epistemic and ontological differences in the world. It is true, though, that many people think differently and not according to Western criteria of rationality, which really and only means that they think differently, not that they are less rational.3 This may be one of the reasons why I (as well as others in Latin America, like Enrique Dussel) felt connected with Jewish European intellectuals (Marx, Freud, Horkheimer, Benjamin). Remember that one of the first, if not the first, Marxs publication was titled The Jewish Question. The emergence of the secular idea of Jewishness in the eighteenth century displaced the religious identification of Jews and their specific history in the modern/colonial world, when they were expelled from the Iberian Peninsula at the same time as the Moors were. In the 18th and 19th century, when the modern-nation state was in its inception in Europe, it was more or less simultaneous with the emergence of the colonial nation state in the Americas. Jews, Indians and Afros became the targets of the first radical transformation of the colonial matrix of power: the emergence of colonial internal minorities. That is, minorities of the nation state, modern in Europe or colonial in the Americas. I needed this explanation to respond to other aspects of your question. Certainly we could think of many movements in the internal history of Europe, significant for the history of Europe, like France 1968. The problem always is that what happens in Europe could be taken as an event of global significance. Thus, Immanuel Wallerstein took 1968 as the first sign of the crisis of the geo-culture of the modern/colonial world that he traced, alas, in the French Revolution of 1789, and not in the Haitian Revolution, for example, of 1804. French Revolution is no doubt crucial in the history of Europe and the European imperialism. The Haitian Revolution is fundamental in the global history of decoloniality. If we come back to 1968, it was not just France. It was Mexico, it was Beijing, it was Czechoslovakia. The crisis was indeed in

the geo-culture (respecting Wallersteins vocabulary) of the modern/colonial world. More recently, I think the crucial moment of Europe are the emerging branches of The World Social Forum that originated, as you know, in Brazil. And, in the same vain, I found extremely interesting the contribution that Europe can make to the decolonial process with recent events like La marche dcoloniale du 8 Mai 2008. Ramn Grosfguel, one of the members of the collective modernity/coloniality, who lives between Paris and San Francisco, California, attended the march and told me that the march went in pitching with a gigantic photo of Aim Csaire and with thousands of people with photos of: Yassin Sheik; Hasan Nasrallah, Geronimo; Angela Davis, Frantz Fanon, James Baldwin; W.E.B. Dubois, Nasser, Nkrumah, Shariati, Zapata, Ghandi, etc. And some other 12 or so photos of African-Muslims whom I do not know and have not yet heard their names although they seem to be related to liberation movements. The march was integrated by a significant number of young Black and Arab youths (personal communication). The march has a name; identification: La marche dcoloniale. So, there are two ways of responding to your question. One is to name the canonical critical thinkers of Europe who have been and still are extremely relevant for the history of Europe itself and for all current debates about European identity after the European Union. I would say that this is your business to which we (non European in senso largo) can contribute from the perspective of our (as defined above, non-European) concerns. Another answer to your question would be to say that the time has arrived, for European intellectuals, to follow the guidance of non-European de-colonial thinkers, illustrated by all those names whose pictures were honored in la marche dcoloniale. After all, we (in the colonies and ex-colonies) had to suffer and endure Aristotle and Saint Thomas, while ignoring Waman Puma de Ayala, in the Andes, and Ottobah Cugoano, in the Black Atlantic. If Beck or Badiou are being translated, read and discussed in Mexico and Buenos Aires, for example, why not do the same with Csaire, Fanon, Anzalda, Du Bois and Sylvia Wynter in Paris, Ljubljana, London and Frankfurt? Once European intellectuals master the de-colonial genealogy of thought as we master the Western (both imperial and dissenting) genealogy of thought, then we can start talking and working together. If we (the variegated array of intellectuals I mentioned before in the Americas) and you (in Europe, in senso largo) are to work together de-colonially, we have to begin by redressing coloniality of knowledge and working toward epistemic democracy. Otherwise, who would be interested, beyond the self-colonized mentality of the left in South America or Africa or Asia, to receive orders and instructions on how to

do the revolution? And to embrace a subjectivity that is grounded in the history that is not ours (that is, colonial histories)? Evo Morales said in another context, addressing the IMF: We do not need experts telling us what to do, we need people to work with. Perhaps the moment has arrived, the moment of epistemic democracy and of redressing the geo-politics of knowledge. I am neither a missionary nor a functionary of the IMF to tell you what to do in Europe. I can only tell you what we are thinking, what we are doing, and what are the possible roads where we (a collective you and a collective we) can meet each other and sing together epistemic and decolonial chants. Basically, what is necessary is to shift the geography of reason and to look at Europe (imperial Europe and the US) from the experiences, needs and perspectives of the ex-colonial world and of immigrants in Europe and the US rather than looking at the ex-colonial world from the experiences and perspectives of Euro (American) observers (from the left and from the right).

1 You can find this argument when Evo Morales nationalized the gas in Bolivia; see about this at http://www.counterpunch.org/mignolo05082006.html. This logic applies to the conflict between liberal ideals of private property among landowners and Evo Moraless idea of interdependence between land and life among indigenous communities.

2 Another instance can be found in this dossier on post-continental philosophy by a Fanonist, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/wko/dossiers/1.3/1.3introarchive.php 3 A detailed argument on the epistemic and ontological difference, in Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Cultural Studies, 21- 2/3, 2007.

Part 3:

Marina Grini: iek, Badiou, Laclau, Beck, etc., are those intellectuals that are part of your harsh criticism as they repeat and reproduce western rationality and the Europocentric institutions of knowledge. On what ground is based your criticism? What is with Agamben and Deleuze? How about the western feminist or lesbian or queer positions? Walter Mignolo: Let me select three cases to address the complex set of issues prompted by your question. I will start with quoting a paragraph from one of my blog-postings, when the King of Spain and President Jos Luis Rodrguez Zapatero reacted violently to remarks

made by Venezuelan President Hugo Chvez. A while ago, Slovenian philosopher Slavoj iek stated that when someone says Eurocentrism every self-respecting postmodern leftist intellectual has as violent a reaction as Joseph Goebbels had to culture: to reach for a gun, hurling accusations of proto-fascist Eurocentrist cultural imperialism. However, he asked himself, is it possible to imagine a leftist appropriation of the European political legacy. What for? A self-respecting de-colonial intellectual would ask. Would leftist European presidents (like Jos Luis Rodrguez Zapatero) instead of postmodern leftist intellectuals ask themselves if a leftist appropriation of the European political legacy is possible or desirable? And what about non-European leftist presidents (like Hugo Chvez) or non-postmodern leftist but de-colonial intellectuals? How relevant would be for self-respecting but not postmodern leftist intellectuals, to imagine a leftist appropriation of the European political legacy? (http://waltermignolo.com/2007/11/29/eurocentrism-21st-century-theking-and-the-serf/) 1) The paragraph, and what you call harsh criticism of European leftist intellectuals by myself as well as by others (Cf. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, The Typology of Being and the Geopolitics of Knowledge, in http://www.afyl.org/nelson.pdf ; William Hart, Slavoj iek and the Imperial/Colonial Model of Religion, in http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/nepantla/v003/3.3hart.html) intent to make clear that there are several games in the global town. Postmodern intellectuals is a regional brand of intellectuals that, of course, have branches around the world. For de-colonial Afro and Indigenous intellectuals as well as for many intellectuals of European descent in the Americas and also for radical and progressive Muslim intellectuals (see for example, Al Shariati, Marxism and Other Western Fallacies: An Islamic Critique, originally published in the early 70s), Eurocentrism (or Westernism) is a necessary word. So, it depends on what sphere of the modern/colonial divide is your skin, and how your skin and your heart articulates conceptual and theoretical dissenting arguments. 2) My take on Giorgio Agamben has been two-fold. One is on his reflections on human rights where he takes as paradigmatic examples refugees after World War I, and I elaborated on that in my article on The Zapatistas Theoretical Revolution. The other, most recently, takes on his elaboration of bare life (bringing Hanna Arendt and Michel Foucault in conversation). Lets think for a moment of dispensable life. Again, I have to indulge in an example. Ottobah Cugoano, whom I mentioned in the first part of this interview (published in Reartikulacija no. 4) wrote in his Thoughts and Sentiments on the Evil of Slavery and

Commerce of the Human Species (1787) several pages on the economic aspect of slavery and the dispensability of human lives. One among many observations is the vast carnage and murders committed by the British instigators of slavery; it is attended with a very shocking, peculiar, and almost unheard of conception, according to the notion of the perpetrators of it: they either consider them as their own property that they may do with as they please, in life or death; or that the taking away the life of a black man is of no more account than taking away the life of a beast. A very melancholy instance of this happened about the year 1780 as recorded in the courts of law; a master of a vessel bound to the Western Colonies, selected 132 ofthe most sickly of the black slaves, and ordered them to be thrown overboard into the sea, in order to recover their value from the insurers, as he had perceived that he was too late to get a good market for them in the West Indies (italics mine, WM). In 1944 Eric Williams recast the making of enslaved Africans dispensable lives and re-framed the legacy of the racial/colonial wound in a context that was not visible at the time of Cugoano. For Cugoano, Christian ethics was the weapon available to him. And Christian ethics served him well to built two complementary arguments. One about the barbarian attitudes he found in colonizers from Spain and Portugal to Holland, France and Britain. The other was the Christian struggle against the growth of an economic horizon that transformed human subjectivities into predators who will go any length in order to obtain economic benefits. Williams, instead, had the Marxist analysis of capitalism to replace the ethical dimension that Christianity offered to Cugoano. However, both Cugoano and Williams introduced a dimension that was alien to both, Christianity and Marxism: they introduced the radical critic of racism which means the radical critique of the imperial/colonial foundation of capitalism. A telling paragraph by Eric Williams brings together the bottom line of racism in the modern/colonial world and by the same token an opening to the de-colonial option that both critical Christianity and Marxism are missing. The de-colonial option has been opened by subjects who either suffered directly the consequences of racism (Cugoano) or its enduring legacy (Williams). One of the most important consequences of the Glorious Revolution of 1688 and the expulsion of the Stuarts was the impetus it gave to the principle of free trade. In 1698 the Royal African Company lost its monopoly and the rights of a free trade in slaves was recognized as a fundamental and natural right of Englishmen. In the same year the Merchant Adventurers of London were deprived of their

monopoly of the Muscovy Company was abrogated and trade to Russia made free. One in particular did the freedom accorded in the slave trade differ from the freedom accorded in other trades the commodity involved was man (Williams, Capitalism and Slavery).
Slavery, as a particular form of exploitation of labor, is consubstantial to capitalism. While slavery in the form it acquired in the economy of the Atlantic since the sixteenth centuries officially came to an end during the first half of the nineteenth century, it never ended in reality. Not only people from African descent continued to be enslaved; when they were not, they continued to be racialized and marginalized from society. On the other hand, new form of slavery developed until today. More so, what never ended was the commerce of human bodies and, today, the commerce of human organs. Dispensable lives are those that become dispensable when they become commodities.

In a nutshell: bare life is a category in the sphere of law, the state and human rights. Bare life that is consubstantial with capitalism is a category in the sphere of economy and, of course, human rights. The former affected European internal others, while the latter is consubstantial to the historical foundation of capitalism, and of European external others. The distinction is crucial. Aim Csaire made a remark, in his Discourse on Colonialism(1955), that is today taken seriously by de-colonial intellectuals and post-colonial scholars. What the very distinguished, very humanistic, very Christian bourgeois of the twentieth century [] cannot forgive Hitler for said Csaire is not the crime in itself, the crime against man, it is not the humiliation of man as such, it is the crime against the white man, the humiliation of the white man, and the fact that he applied to Europe colonialist procedures (italics mine, WM), which until then had been reserved exclusively for the Arabs of Algeria, the coolies of India, and the niggers of Africa.
Once again, I am reversing the gaze, shifting the geography of reason, unveiling the geo-politics of knowledge. 3) Now the question on Western feminists, lesbians and queer positions. The same logic that I explained in 1) and 2), above, applies in current debates between white feminists and women of color and, by extension, to the debate between white queerness and queerness of color.

I have not addressed these issues personally. However, I have been following the debates and finding and capitalizing on those arguments that resonate with my own work, those which are framed in the colonial matrix of power (like the work of Mara Lugones, on heterosexualism and the colonial/modern gender system (http://muse.jhu.edu/login?uri=/journals/hypatia/v022/22.1lugones.htm

l http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/wko/dossiers/1.3/contents.php; and her project on Decolonial Thinking http://cpic.binghamton.edu/decolonial.html). I should add that although I did not addressed personally issues of gender, feminism and queer theory, I have been framed so to speak in the late 1980s by the ground-breaking book of Gloria Anzalda, Borderland/La Frontera. The New Mestiza (1987), as well as by other prominent Chicana writers, scholars and activists like Cherrie Moraga, Sandra Cisneros, Chela Sandoval, Sonia Saldvar-Hull. A land-mark book, The Bridge Called My Back. Writing by Radical Women of Color (published in 1992 and reprinted for its ten anniversary), co-edited by Cherrie Moraga and Gloria Anzalda has been also very influential in my own thinking. There are two chapters in my book Local Histories/Global Designs (2000) where you can see the reflection of these debates in my own thinking, chiefly the chapter titled Bi-languaging love, which is set up at the intersection of Anzalda new mestiza, Abdelkebir Khatibis double critique and Humberto Maturanas concept of languaging. Lately, I have been very interested in the theoretical potential of the concept of intersectionality introduced by Black legal theorist and feminist Kimberley Crenshaw. Just to put one more point of reference on the table, Latina philosopher and feminist Linda Martn Alcoff has addressed recently many of the issues concerning the debate between white feminism and feminism of color in her splendid Visible Identities. Race, Gender and the Self (2006).
Furthermore, significant work is being done, that some times resonate and others are in direct dialogue with the thesis of the collective modernity/coloniality, in the arena of third-world women (cf. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, edited by Chandra Talpade Mohanty, Ann Russo and Lourdes Torres, 1991.) More recently, Dialogue and Difference, Feminisms Challenge Globalization (2005), edited by Marguerite Waller and Sylvia Marcos, the later one doing magnificent work with Zapatistas women. And she, Marcos, is also the author of a historicalethnographic-political study Taken from the Lips: Gender and Eros in Mesoamerican Religions (2006). Madina Tlostanova has advanced similar arguments in the context of feminists responses in Central Asia and Caucasus (http://www.jhfc.duke.edu/wko/dossiers/1.3/documents/TlostanovaWKO2.2_ 000.pdf). Well, now you know more or less where I am coming from, and how I understand your reference to Western feminism as equivalent to White feminism in the North Atlantic, from, say, Luce Irigaray to Judith Butler and Nancy Fraser. White (or Western Feminism) and Feminism of Color (or ThirdWorld Feminism) differ in the way they situate themselves across the colonial difference divide. As I said above, the colonial difference is a construction of

imperial epistemology at two interrelated levels: the epistemic colonial difference and the ontological colonial difference. Feminism of color and Third World Feminism dwell at the intersection of patriarchy and racism (see the diagram of the colonial matrix of power), while White feminism (or Western feminism) locate itself in confronting the dominance of patriarchy. The divide between the two strands of feminism parallels the divide, I attempted to illustrate in other spheres, between de-colonial thinkers and intellectuals, on the one hand, and iek and Agamben (in spite of the differences between the two of them), on the other. As for Queer theory, the racial component is also a factor. Perhaps the distinction between Western Queers and Queers of Color is not as strongly manifested yet as is in the domain of feminism. However, the debate has been already put on the table. Beyond the intersection between feminism, queerness and racism in the work (literary, theoretical, activist) of Anzalda and Moraga, is present the idea of Queer communities that are manifestations of internal colonialism (cf. Maura Ryan, Queer Internal Colonialism: Aiding Conquest Through Borderless Discourse, 2007). Sociologist Maura Ryan engages the topic of racism in queer communities, arguing that white gays and lesbians are active participants in a larger US internal colonialism of people of color with their denial of race differences along sexual orientation lines and by their use of racist political rhetoric to further sexual rights for their group. The raced dimensions of queer theory and of mainstream gay and lesbian politics are linked to the idea of internal colonialism, making the argument that sexual communities aid the US nationalist project of racism (available in the web). What I briefly depicted here refers to the US. Looking at the larger picture, parallel to Queers of color or Third World Queers, it had been argued in Postcolonial and Queer Theories. Intersections and Essays, edited by John Charles Hawley, that Since the 1960s American and Western European gays have set the agenda for sexual liberation and defined its emergence. Western models of homosexuality often provide the only globally recognizable frameworks for discussing gay and lesbian cultures around the world, and thus Western interpretative schemes are imposed on non-Western societies. At the same time, gay and lesbian lifestyles in emerging countries do not always neatly fit Western paradigms, and data from those countries often clash with dominant Western models. So too, the literature of emerging countries often depicts homosexuality in ways which challenge the existing tools of Western literary critics. As you see, epistemic and ontological differences, built in imperial epistemology, is being contested racism, in the last analysis, and the racist colonial wound, is not felt by White feminists and queers while it is the ground in which women and queer of color built their theories. Let me add one more point. Queer was a term originally used to refer to gays and lesbians. Although still holds this meaning, it has been extended to situations of queerness beyond sexuality. Black philosopher David Ross Fryer

put it this way: The term queer needs to be broken down in two categories: (1) Queer as an anti-normative thought; (2) Queer as post-normative thinking. The desire to fight the norm manifest itself in both of these (Cf. Fryer, On the possibilities of Post-humanism or How to Think Queerly in an Anti-Black World, in Not Only the Masters Tools. African-American Studies in Theory and Practice, edited by Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, 2006). Once again, we encounter the above mentioned racial divide when Fryer confronts Judith Butler inadequacies, in his words. Although Fryer acknowledges Butlers subversive contributions, he found her poststructuralist account of performativity inadequate for the lack of thinking gender beyond a binary construction. When thinking queerly in an anti-black world, Fryer also criticizes Butler on her reliance on an appeal to natural sciences and as such her project fails to go beyond the positivist assumptions that inform the positions that she is herself opposing. In a nutshell, for Fryer, Butler accepts scientific discourse and contests it in its finding, while Fryer questions the very assumptions upon which scientific discourse is founded. Such question, in Fryer, comes from the crucial concern of Black philosophers and intellectuals (common among Afro-Caribbean like C. R. L. James, Frantz Fanon, Sylvia Wynter) with the concept of human that scientific (biological, biotechnological) arguments are reifying. In other words, sciences start from a metaphysical concept of human which is basically an Eurocentered construction (modeled on the white male), and attempt to describe and explain its features. While Black intellectuals, particularly Sylvia Wynter, built her argument as After Man, Toward the Human, from the experience of a Black Caribbean women. Fryer thinking queerly attacks the normative of scientific thinking and critiques Butler for falling into the trap of scientific discourse, contesting its content but not its ideological foundation.

M. G.: You especially emphasize the moment of race; the racial is to be

taken along the class struggle as only in such a way it is possible to connect class struggle with the de-colonial moment and therefore to empower them both. What is so blatantly named primitive accumulation is in fact the process of obscene expropriation realized through brutal colonialism, but not analyzed as such, not even by Marx. Your criticism turns against Marx, who was not capable of reflecting on surplus value based directly on colonization. Can you elaborate further on this point?

W. M.: Lewis Gordon (a leading Afro-Caribbean philosopher) noticed a while

ago that Europe smells like class while the Americas smells like race. What did he mean? That from the very historical foundation of the Atlantic commercial circuits, mainly in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, social classification grounded in Christian theology, was a racial one. Allow me to explain this with another diagram:

Christian Theology is in the upper angle of the first triangle and at its base you see Islamic Theology/Muslims or Moors on one end and the Jewish Theology/Jews on the other. On the other triangle Moriscos and Conversos designate the religious mestizaje, the mixing of Christian and Moorish blood on the one hand and Christian and Jewish blood on the other. That was clear in the Iberian Peninsula, or, if you wish, in the heart of the emerging empire.

In the colonies, the situation was different since there was no religious thought and therefore no theological-based knowledge. Christian Theology became more and more displaced by Spaniards or Castilians. On the lower base of the second triangle we have then Indians and Blacks/Africans. Religious blood mixtures that engendered non-existing categories until then as Moriscos and Conversos, in the Iberian Peninsula, were replaced by Mestizos/as and Mulatos/as in the New World. But while in the Iberian Peninsula the blood mixture between Moors and Jews was not accounted for (and probably physically not very common), in the New World the mixture of Mulatos and Mestizas or vice-versa engendered a new racial category, Zambos and Zambas. From here on, classification multiplied but all of them were displayed under the purity of Spanish/Castilian blood (Cf. the text by CstroGmez in the special edition of Cultural Studies 21/2-3, 2007 with the title Globalization and the Decolonial Option). Racism is a theological invention in the framing of the modern/colonial world. Today when trying to count genes to find out the mistery of race, we forget that race is a racist theological invention. Isnt that interesting? Theologians and men of letters were not of course supporting conquistadores, encomenderos and plantation owners to exploit and enslave Indians and Africans and, as we know, the Church was against greediness for material wealth. However, the social classification of Indigenous and African population in Indias Occidentales (or New World, and later America) enacted by Theological thinking, played in the hands of the agents in the construction of capitalist economy. The panorama was clearly in the heads and writing hands of British colonial administrators and plantation owners. Sir Dalby Thomas was one of them and belonged to a significant number of influential officers, at the

end of the seventeenth century, supporting mercantilism (or mercantile capitalism). An economic structure that later on Adam Smith will attack in defense of free-trade, particularly in the superb section On colonialism that is the less read section of Smiths book. Sir Dalby Thomas was plantation owner, historian, and governor of Jamaica in 1690. He left a monograph titled An historical account of the rise and growth of the West-India colonies. And of the great advantages they are to England, in respect to trade (1690). There you can see free-trade capitalism in full blown. The history was told in detail by the classic book, Capitalism and Slavery (1944), by Eric Williams, scholar, Prime Minister of Trinidad and Tobago and an influential public figure. You can see in Williams work, as well as in the work of his mentor, C. L. R. James, the tension between Marxism and de-colonial thinking, a tension that has been very well analyzed lately by de-colonial historians and philosophers who have been following Frantz Fanons dictum: You are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich. This is why Marxist analysis should always be slightly stretched when it comes to address the colonial issue. It is not just the concept of precapitalist society, so effectively studied by Marx, which needs to be reexamined here. [] It is not the factories, the estates, or the bank account which primarily characterizes the ruling class. The ruling species is first and foremost the outsider from elsewhere, different from the indigenous population, the others (The Wretched of the Earth).
Briefly, a new type of economy emerged in world history in the Atlantic, in the sixteenth and seventeenth century. Two features, mainly, characterized this economy: 1) extraction (gold, silver) and production (sugar, cotton, tobacco, coffee) of commodities for a global market (Quijano); and 2) a technology of investment of capital that made possible to reproduce resources for the foreseeable future that allowed Western Atlantic European emerging empires to end the constraints of agrarian civilizations, economically based on land and taxation. None of the emerging socio-economic formations of the time (Ottoman Sultanate, Mughal Sultanate, and Russian Tsarate) and the long lasting existing ones (e.g., China during the Ming Dynasty) initiated such kind of economy. The type of economy today we call capitalist economy. Exploitation of labor and appropriation of land, in the New World, went hand in hand with racial classification. In Europe, racial classification legitimized the expulsion of Moors and Jews. In the New World, racial classification legitimized expropriation of land from Indians, the massive trade of enslaved Africans, and the brutal exploitation of labor. This new type of economy went also hand in hand with the transformation of other spheres of the colonial matrix of power. From then on, it was capitalism (hand in hand with racism) all the way down.

M. G.: Coloniality and modernity are working together; they cannot be understood separately, as one is dependent upon the other. You

connect the logic of coloniality and the rhetoric of modernity, and show that they are co-substantial in reproducing coloniality. How would you define the function of rhetoric and of grammar in such a relation? W. M.: In the monographic article titled The Rhetoric of Modernity, the Logic of Coloniality and the Grammar of Decoloniality, I opted for the metaphorical use of three disciplines of the Trivium, in the Renaissance University. The title is in dialogue with my previous book, The Darker Side of the Renaissance. Modernity is not an historical period but a discursive rhetoric, that is, a persuasive discourse promising progress, civilization and happiness. Or, if you wish, is the historical period as defined by those inhabiting and benefiting from it. Coloniality is invisible (like Freuds unconscious or Marx plusvalue) and hides the carnage implied in the advances of modernity. De-coloniality as I said before, have been one type of responses to the imperial expansion of the colonial matrix of power, responses of resistance as well as of reexistence (a concept introduced by Colombian painter, cultural critique and activist, Adolfo Albn in his understanding of the survival and creativity of Black communities in Colombia from the eighteenth century to today). It is a grammar in the making both in its local particularities as well as in global connections that are at work (for example, this very interview is a modest example of the grammar of global de-coloniality). Modernity/coloniality describes the double side and double density of imperial expansion. De-coloniality refers to the global historical diversity of responses to the monotopic diversity (Spain, England, France, Germany and the US, diverse in their sameness) of Western imperialism. Today it is necessary to analyze the radical transformations the colonial matrix of power is going through in a world order of pluricentric capitalism. But this would be for another conversation. M. G.: You are professor in one of those imperial academic structures in the USA that systematically reproduces and sustains rational western epistemology as a colonizing system. How do you de-link your work from such an institution? Moreover, is it not true that the American corporative educational system (that basis its work on efficiency, competition and fake struggles) wants from their professors to (re)produce instead of a critical discourse, a theater of it, that is an assurance to the system that nothing will really change? W. M.: Yes indeed, I am. And the scenario you depict is a viable one. The other scenario would be to just leave the university and to go fight an epistemic struggle in the forest. Sub-comandante Marcos did it. Or, to put it upside down, leave the university to those who want to promote la pense unique. In the middle, would be the illusion of being an independent intellectual or scholar, who is immune to the

corporate educational system, here in the US, in Europe (Western and Central/Eastern, China, India or Argentina). It is a matter of choice, after all, among the possibilities that are open to you. Fred(ric) Jameson is a professor in the same imperial academic structure of Duke University. And there are many other professors at Duke and elsewhere, of Marxist persuasion or de-colonial conviction (e.g., University of California at Berkeley). Thanks to the Civil Right movement, the academic structure of the US changed radically. While geo-politics of knowledge was articulated in the Third World (e.g., Enrique Dussels first chapter in his book Philosophy of Liberation, 1977 is titled Geopolitics and Philosophy), body-politics of knowledge had a strong hold in the US after the Civil Rights Movement. A shift from disciplinary knowledge to knowledge helping the liberation of women, queers, gay and lesbians, Native and Afro-Americans, Latinas and Latinos is at stake; we witness, more general, the proliferation of Ethnic Studies that present the transformation of disciplinary into de-colonial knowledge(s). It is truth that the de-colonial turn contributed to identity politics. However, two disclaimers: 1) there is an identity politics in the discipline hidden under the pretense of objective knowledge and 2) identity politics shall be distinguished from identity IN politics. The MAS (Marcha hacia el socialismo) in Bolivia and Hammas in Palestine are not political party formed in the frame of Western political theory. In Western political theory it is as if Republican and Democrats in the US are except from identity politics while the truth is that political party are belle et bien grounded in identity politics. However, the public faade is that they are not. Therefore it was necessary to create socio-political organizations like MAS and Hamas to occupy official positions in the government through democratic and clean elections. Without MAS and Hamas it would have been necessary to joint the already existing parties to whose identity politics did not belong all of those who created MAS (Marcha hacia el socialismo) and Hamas (Harakat al-Muqwama alIslmiyya) and all those who voted for them. My point here is that in many US universities it has been possible, and beneficial, to create spaces of knowledge not directed toward Washington and the Corporations but to contribute to decolonization of knowledge and being (e.g., decolonization of the mind as Ngugi wa Thiongo has it). Now, a large proportion of scholars and intellectuals involved in generating this kind of knowledge, decolonial knowledge, are in several ways involved in some sort of activism outside of the University; activism which is entangled with the kind of knowledge being produced and disseminated at the University. So, that is one way of proceeding. The other is the work myself and others (South American based in the US, Afro-Caribbean, Latinas and

Latinos) do in collaboration with de-colonial oriented institutions in South America. For example, the work many of us (Ramon Grosfguel, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Catherine Walsh) and others from the Caribbean Philosophical Association (Lewis Gordon) do with Fabrica des ideais (http://www.fabricadeideias.ufba.br/apresentacao.php), in Salvador de Bahia, Brazil, where the Afro-Brazilian movement has its hub. Many of us, based in the US, collaborate with a PhD at the Univesidad Andina Simn Bolvar, Quito, Ecuador, where most of the students (if not all) are scholars, intellectuals and activists; pretty much like those who attend the seminars in Fabrica des ideais. In the US, around 150 scholars and intellectuals, in major imperial academic structures, began already the creation of a Latina/o Academy of Arts and Sciences (which I already mentioned), a supra-structural institution, with many nodes of a net, all over the US. The goal of the Academy is to create an institution, lead by Latinas and Latinos but open to all (like the Democratic or Republican party, you know, they are open to all who want to join and vote; they are not exclusivist) to intervene in the public sphere as well as in the academic realm. By calling it Latina/o Academy of Arts and Sciences we are already unveiling the fact that the American Academy of Arts and Sciences is simply White without saying it. On the other hand, our aim is to dispute the control of knowledge and its imperial consequences. And you are right; those are the values of the corporate university. The question is, and this is one of the principles of the Latina/o Academy, to educate students from undergraduate on to succeed (since you do not want failed revolutionaries, right?) at the same time that questioning and philosophy behind the idea of success. In other words, being in the institution doesnt mean that you go literally with the institutional goals border thinking one of the strategies to be inside and against, to be inside and moving in a different direction. Institutions like Duke and Berkeley, Michigan and North Carolina, etc., are complex institutions. While they have to compete and endorse corporate values, they also value the Humanities and free thinking. The President of Duke and of the University of North Carolina in Chapel Hill (one private the other state university), 10 miles from each other and collaborating in many fields, stood up in defense of professors who were accused by right-wing extremist, after 9/11 2001 of being proIslam. So, as people like to say, things are more complex than that. There is no ideal place to struggle. On the other hand, imagine that Fredric Jameson was not at Duke all this year. Some one else would have occupied his place. And that some one else could have been a disciple of Samuel Huntington instead of Karl Marx.

M. G.: Prof Mignolo, thank you very much indeed for your answers!

Marina Grini, philosopher and artist. She is researcher at the Institute of Philosophy at SRC of SASA in Ljubljana and professor at the Academy of Fine Arts in Vienna.