Santiago Castro-Gómez at the Critical Genealogies Collaboratory

We were honored to be joined by Santiago Castro-Gómez, who was invited to give a Philosophy Colloquium address (where he discussed his account of "transmodern republicanism") and to have a public discussion with undergraduate students. This also took place in the context of the symposium Decolonial Perspectives on the Becoming of Our Present, organized in his honor by Cintia Martínez Velasco, Miguel Gualdrón Ramírez, and Alejandro Vallega at the University of Oregon.

The CGC read “Latin American Philosophy as Critical Ontology of the Present: Themes and Motifs for a 'Critique of Latin American Reason'” and the interview that was published as an appendix to Critique of Latin American Reason, where Castro-Gómez revises his philosophical journey.

QUESTIONS

1. If critique is not being governed in this way, by these people; does a critical ontology of the present involve/presuppose a normative commitment that is implicit in the non-normative ontology?

2. Technologies of social control to create the Latin American intellectual (p. 72). What is the relation between opacity and a critical ontology of the present?

3. Critical ontology of the present involves a detachment from the sovereign model of power. However, SCG uses it in relation to processes of nationalization. How do we understand the relation of subjectivation and the nation today?

4. How does the “nation” operate as a concept?

5. Peripheral modernity (p. 69) – what is its relation to  “imagined communities” and technologies of writing? How do we understand it?

6. Considering Castro-Gómez’s move from “history of ideas” to “genealogy of practices," how do we define “practice”? How do we conduct inquiry into practices? 

1. Exemplar for us? Or in SCG’s work?

2. Research strategies? – Building an archive?

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Nation as a concept. In Latin America (19th century) building a nation was a task of the State (Spanish speakers; property-owners, who behaved like “civilized people”). Produce a community of people around language as a language of the nation and who could read and write in the proper was (“citizens”) who could obey the law and norms. 

Today: multinational/plurinational states – ex. Bolivia, Spain. Much more difficult task.

Arendt – nation vs State: in every location there are multiple identities (nations) vs legal regimes (State). Even in a multinational context, does the State overrule. Problem of the stateless: not part of the nation and not captured by the State.

There are other conceptions; for example, the State is expressing the values of the nation (volk) in Germany. 

Community of identity = expression of belonging, destiny? And in that sense, construction of modernity. Contrary to Asian culture where belonging is linked, eg, to dynasties. 

What about nations without States? For example, the Kurds.

Processes of nationalization

Processes of citizen-cifiation?

Both processes of inclusion and exclusion – Writing, and also administration. 

Oppressed people sometimes explain their commonality in terms of “nation” (and a reclaiming of that) but as a counter-conduct, resistance to the State.

Issue of translation: nations cannot be translated into another. This connects to the issue of opacity: what if we think of translation and the right to opacity (for example, the deaf community refusing technologies of legibility). Resistance to “full legibility” or “transparency”.

Do we see counter-conducts as sufficient for normativity? – Resisting power in this way is/is not a positive articulation or a new vision or a new practice. 

Counter-conduct presupposes some kind of normativity? – There has to be a positive notion of what you want to be (not only what you do not want). Counter-conducts presuppose normativity. Decolonial theory or Foucault do not give us a positive view of how to live without dispositifs. 

Can we think of a positive in terms of symmetry? – If genealogy of power = genealogy of practices, then do we need the same for normative: practices of a normative vision?

Ethical vs political normativity – ethical view is incapable for providing something beyond an ethical duty and participating in the political struggle and the building of power. Does there need to be, in some way, a grasp of power? How not to fall in the vices of previous forms of power?

Could we find minimal values shared by everyone? Values that do not depend on cultures or nations for the sake of fighting power. There is something that we all share (humans and non-humans) – vulnerability; not death. We can have a positive view of politics in this way by looking at the past and finding it. 

Maybe this could be thought of through the idea of ability/disability and how that is not ontological but produced and within political frameworks.

A possibility would be expanding the view of counter-conduct: what if practices of resistance (negative) are also simultaneously a practice that bring for a (positive) form of life. This could relate Foucault to a vision of “concrete utopianism” (Ernst Bloch, José Esteban Muñoz). 

How do we seek compliance with others that will not accept the new vision or the new form of life that is imagined? – How to seek compliance to the goals we have designed?

We fave forgotten to consider “universalizability” as a commitment we accept even if it is not exhaustible. We could, in this context, adopt different values like equality or vulnerability. There is this loss in Foucault: it is not the universal as such (Habermas, transcendental) but a commitment to it. 

We should remember that normativity has to do with the body (Foucault in volumes 2 and 3 of History of Sexuality) – for example, dietetics. But he still thinks of individual bodies with special characteristics. Could we think of this in more universal terms? The body itself without the particularity of the self; could we universalize something shared by any living thing and that is not anthropocentric? Maybe: care; is this an ethics of care? Could this be “love”? “Interdependence of the living”?

How to study practices? – Action that is governed by rules. Breathing vs yoga (in the latter you have norms and this may be unconscious). 

How to do a genealogy of practices? – Past practices: resources of a historian. However there is an opacity: you do not know if people actually behaved like the manuals enforced. Role of testimony?

To study practices of the present: resources of the anthropologists/ethnographer. It is necessary to build an archive from many sources (newspapers, magazines).