Myth Of Modernity Research Articles

The Ego Conquiro as the Paradigm of Modern Imperialism and its Violence Against the Struggle for Epistemic Justice

This article begins with a discussion of the implications of Enrique Dussel’s “I conquer, therefore I am” (ego conquiro) thesis as the paradigm of modern imperialism. According to Dussel, underlying the “myth of modernity” (mito de la modernidad) is an epistemological structure of a substantive ego that naturalizes European colonial expansion. Dussel admits that the “I conquer, therefore, I am” thesis began earlier than Descartes’s account of the cogito, which was theorized after the Spanish colonization of the Americas, but the substantive “I” that constitutes the ego conquiro nonetheless represents a theory of knowledge that served and continues to serve the political domination of bodies that have been historically victimized. Couched within the epistemic structure of Descartes’s cogito is a duality between soul and matter, where the former represents an immortal substance detached from the body, taken to be the recipe for rational truth, while the latter is reduced to a quantifiable object occupying a “zero-point” geometrical space. But the cogito became the epistemological standpoint that allowed for the justification of the many hidden forms of domination around the world, because it masks the social, economic, and geopolitical contexts and their history to the modern subject. This article will investigate the ego conquiro thesis and its link to epistemic violence, namely, epistemic racism and epistemicide, and will argue as a concluding point for a method of resistance that foregrounds philosophical pluralism to disrupt the internalization of the epistemologies of the Global North as the common-sense position(s) of today.

The Images and Metaphors in Death Fugue

Paul Celan's Death Fugue is one of the most important poems of the 20th century. The obscure and profound metaphors and images in the Death Fugue have always attracted people's attention. In addition, his poetry is seen as the product of a world in transition. After the Holocaust, the myth of modernity was destroyed so that the past experience was considered questionable on a poetical level. The Death Fugue was written in a way that had never been written before. This paper analyzes the text from the perspective of metaphor and intention and explores the potential meaning of words. This paper selects three main images and interprets them in combination with history and philosophy. The author analyzes how metaphors and imagery in the poem reproduce the Holocaust scene and responds to literary criticism of poetry after the Holocaust. Through these rare metaphors and images, Paul Celan created a new paradigm of poetry and made readers read it in a new way.

THE UNDERSIDE OF TECHNOLOGY: LIFECYCLES OF LIBERACIÓN IN THE DIGITAL AGE

In The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation (1996), Enrique Dussel prescribes a philosophical pushback to what Eduardo Mendieta calls the ‘discourses of Modernity.’ Emanating from the global south, as both proximate and philosophical situations, Dussel elegantly unravels a metaphysical prescription of Modernity as the blueprint of empire articulated via political, religious, and cultural hegemonic universality. The goal is to reimagine the ethics of liberation outside of Modernity’s stranglehold on philosophy. Dussel’s thesis is simple: resistance to dominant hegemonic frames which center Western Modernity as that which must be repelled passively accepts those frames as a starting point. In other words, framing resistance as negation (i.e., postmodernism) upholds a binary of dominance/resistance wherein the myth of Modernity remains dialectically centered. What Dussel advocates for is a lens enabling us “...to stand outside the reality within which we live in order to critically understand it” (Burton & Osario, 2011, p. 26). To this end, he proposes a ‘transmodern’ position that privileges practices of the ‘Other’—on outskirts of the Modern colonial scheme—as focal points of liberation philosophy. In his ‘analectic’ method, Dussel decenters the Modern as a starting point of investigation and/or resistance, privileging the material realities of the ‘Other’ as locus of cultural knowledge. In the vein of decolonial inquiry, the ‘Other’ is of the anterior of hegemonic frames, a subject on/of the outskirts that, when face-to-face with dominant hegemony, presents a new way of understanding systems, universalities (which Dussel believes exist, just not as prescribed by Modernity), and the very prescription of the Modern subject. In defining liberation as praxis, the analectic method accounts for the complex realities of the colonized as targets of, and transgressors to, systems of colonization, depending upon material context. Our panel draws inspiration from the analectical approach and includes papers that elucidate the material realities of Otherness on the underside of technology. In an age of technological globalization tethered to neoliberal market principles, we argue that approaching questions of technological expansionism via traditional ‘discourses of technology’ that perpetuate the dominance/resistance binary is insufficient if the aim of decolonizing the internet, the systems which support it, and the artefacts which connect us to it is to be achieved. By focusing instead on individual acts of resistance to totalizing technological systems, we investigate the complexities of living within the landscape of technological hegemony from the lens of the user. From migrants of the global south who both rely upon, and transgress, mobile technologies and the critical infrastructure which supports it, to everyday consumers of technology that often universalize and therefore industrialize lived experiences, the metaphor of existing within and simultaneously reacting to systems of colonization persists. Specifically, we clarify the lifecycle of technological expansionism, from the act of occupation to individual acts of resistance in specific panel presentations that discuss: - Imagined infrastructures of the ‘smart’ (neo-colonial) city. - The push and pull of maintaining Latinx identity within homogeneous digital platforms. - The emotional and physical labor of Asian American women in countering Western narratives which totalize “Asian” identity as monolithic. - The South American migrant experience as dependent upon and reactionary to critical infrastructure. - Corporeal memorialization as resistance to industrialized memory. Each panel topic identifies technological systems, platforms, and/or infrastructures as modern-day instantiations of colonialism as a basis of investigation. For example, multiple papers clarify technological systems and infrastructures as conduits of cultural imperialism, evident in global urban transformation projects and the industrialization of memory, while others query the role of platform affordances in perpetuating inequity and encouraging monolithic identity. As pushback to this totalization, multiple papers highlight the liminal experience of ‘Otherness,’ caught between the tensions of material reality and the opacity of dominant technological systems that often shape, steer, and ultimately universalize human experience. Centering the lens of the individual, we investigate the necessary utility of global technologies (the ‘realities within which we live’) while articulating how actual experience with, and consumption of, these technologies by those on the periphery (those who ‘stand outside’ that reality) can inform a critical understanding of their socio-technical impact. These research topics identify the importance and relevance of decolonial philosophy as a primary framework for understanding the path to liberation from the enveloping forces of global technological systems. In encouraging an analectic, transmodern approach to questions of technological hegemony, we decenter the discourses of Modernity, and by extension the circular dominance/resistance feedback loop which informs much traditional critical scholarship. This panel offers a glimpse from the outskirts, from the periphery of the colonial horizon, situating praxis as foundational to clarifying our socio-technical ontologies.

A myth of modernity: the market hall reforms in China, 1900s–1940s

AbstractAs a result of the new approach to municipal food supply adopted in European cities, the market hall first appeared in China in the foreign concessions in Shanghai in the late nineteenth century. While some municipal governments across China had stimulated an increase in the number of market halls constructed from the beginning of the early twentieth century, the introduction of market halls did not achieve the effects that the authorities expected. Although market hall reforms in Suzhou, Hangzhou and Chengdu were different in detail, they were similar inasmuch as market halls did not become a regular feature of the daily life of the three cities. However, municipal governments continued to promote the market hall reforms despite their limited achievements and resistance from the public. The main purpose of Chinese municipal governments to promote market halls was not to solve practical problems, but to establish the market hall as a symbol of modernity. While the concessions in Shanghai managed by the westerners had already initiated a form of modernity, other Chinese cities responded by exhibiting a particular appreciation of the myth of modernity, and Chinese cities underwent as swift a process of modernization as the foreign concessions.

Toward decolonial globalisation studies

ABSTRACT This article draws on the epistemologies of the South, namely decolonial theory, to point to the analytical and interpretive limitations of northern theories of globalisation. It gestures toward decolonial globalisation studies to provide an alternative reading of global justice movements, including university student movements in Latin America. Moreover, it maintains that situating university student movements geopolitically provides a valuable way out of the theoretical limitations of critical globalisation studies informed by northern perspectives. By adopting a geopolitical perspective, decolonial globalisation studies unsettles and provincialises the central myth of modernity, which portrays the emergence of modern institutions and globalisation as endogenous European and Anglo-American phenomena subsequently diffused to the Global South. Finally, this article addresses the need for decolonial globalisation studies to ground its theorisation in alternative sites of knowledge production.

Epistemological resistances and the search for alternatives to modernity in intellectual history

The violence of modernity has led to epistemological resistances around the world and the search for alternative ways of reconstructing philosophy. Among the Frankfurt School and early Kyoto School thinkers, for instance, the problem of modernity is framed as an excess of objective rationality, but among the decolonial thinkers of Latin America, the problem is conceptualized as the very myth of modernity itself that has legitimized the colonization and exclusion of non-Europeans. In the search for alternatives modernities, the Kyoto School and Latin American philosophy agree to a vision of inter-civilizational dialogue, which amounts to an engagement of alterity or differences, whereas with the Frankfurt School, albeit struggles to find consensus on how to overcome modernity, aims to merely preclude the problem of reproducing the impulses toward the domination of oneself and others. Nonetheless, all these paradigms have a theoretical point of convergence: that is, since we are all participants of modernity, we are both victims and executioners of its violence, and thus compelled to negate it. This article will discuss how the violence of modernity is experienced, theorized, and then challenged around different continents in order to make visible not just how the violence of modernity is reproduced in different ways but to force ourselves to engage in self-critique in the pursuit to make explicit our own assumptions that repeats the violence of modernity.

Talk between Dussel and Forner-Betancourt: dialogue between philosophical knowledge, interculturality and indigenous school education

Summary The article focuses on Enrique Dussel's Philosophy of Liberation, with the aim of reflecting on the articulation between modernity, the Eurocentric paradigm and the world paradigm. In this sense, the article develops the discussion on rationality and irrationality of modernity (myth of modernity) and its transmodernity (overcoming), as it is directly related to the question of the negative dialectical method with the negation of otherness - of indigenous populations - in philosophical systems. Eurocentric totality and points out the analytical movement as overcoming, expanding and liberating the negative dialectical method. It also outlines the intercultural philosophy of Rául Fornet-Betancourt, which aims at a symmetrical dialogue between philosophical knowledge. It is inferred, from the Liberation of the Other as Alterity and Interculturality, the concrete existence of a dialogical relationship between philosophical knowledge, enabling greater cosmological, philosophical and educational enrichment, as well as the teaching of intercultural philosophy in indigenous schools. In this study, the bibliographic review is the methodological strategy used.

Martin Luther and the Creation of the Myth of Modernity

Martin Luther and the Creation of the Myth of Modernity

Una actualización de la Disputa de Valladolid, o acerca de cómo se ingresa en la comunidad de comunicación

Resumen La Disputa de la Valladolid, llevada a cabo entre 1550 y 1551, buscaba resolver los parámetros de humanidad de los pueblos originarios, en función de su consecuente evangelización. ¿Tenían alma los indígenas? ¿Podían entonces evangelizarse? ¿De qué modo? Fueron los interrogantes de los pensadores de la época. Nos interesa, sin embargo, poner en consideración la lectura de la Disputa que realiza el filósofo Enrique Dussel, en torno a dos cuestiones que consideramos relevantes. Una es la vinculación con la comunidad de comunicación que plantea el filósofo alemán Karl Otto Apel y otra es su denuncia de lo que denomina el mito de la modernidad y su correspondiente crítica. Pretendemos pensar cómo el análisis que hace Dussel, cobra mayor vigencia día a día ¿Quiénes son considerados humanos hoy? ¿Con quiénes podemos dialogar? ¿Quiénes consideramos que tienen algo valioso para decirnos? Son algunas de las preguntas que guían este trabajo.

Psychogeography

The way that humanity both inhabits and views its surroundings directly influences individual and collective thoughts and emotions. Yet in a society that is constantly over-stimulated, taking in the surroundings becomes secondary to consumerism, and the distractions inherent within the spectacle. The spectacle, according to Guy Debord and the European revolutionary organization Situationist International (SI), diverted the populace from the reality that surrounds it, and the SI deemed themselves the correct ones to re-envision reality. Fifty years after the 1968 Paris riots, the Situationists no longer exist, but new groups have risen from their ashes to explore and view the world in new ways, groups such as those involved in Urban Exploration (UrbEx). UrbEx involves small, often self-guided groups that investigate the ghosts of modernity, and the detritus of capital that remains in the wake of the spectacle. Utilizing the Situationist International's concept of the dérive, the ideas that fuel urban exploration, and conspiracist ideologies, this article explores the urban world viewed through psychogeography: those who seek the new sacred in a gnostic quest to gain a greater insight into what lurks in the shadows of the myth of modernity.

Walt Disney’s Dumbo: A Myth of Modernity

Dumbo is Walt Disney's myth of modernity, a film in which he uses a story about infant-mother separation as a vehicle for assimilating modern technology and management structure to the evolved mechanisms of the human mind. This paper considers psychoanalytic and evolutionary psychology, examines the structure of scapegoating as a means of social contral, considers parallels with the story of Genesis, the role of machines and animals in the modern world, the interplay of nature and culture, the distinction between animals that talk and those that don't, and features extensive descriptive an analytic work on the film, with many frame grabs.

The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni

Reviewed by: The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life by Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni Nick Mdika Tembo (bio) The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni Berghahn Books, 2016, 186 pp. ISBN 978-1785331183, $150 hardcover, $24.95 paperback. Using decolonial philosopher Nelson Maldonaldo-Torres's conception of the "third humanist revolution," and the fundamental principles of decolonial humanism and pluriversalism, Sabelo Ndlovu-Gatsheni's The Decolonial Mandela: Peace, Justice and the Politics of Life proposes the "Mandela phenomenon" as an Afrocentric episteme that could help reposition Africa in the world. The author avers that since time immemorial blacks have been pushed by the consequences of imperial reason—imperialism, colonialism, apartheid, neocolonialism and underdevelopment (xv)—to inhabit what Frantz Fanon calls the "zone of non-being." Imperial reasoning is a constitutive part of what Ramón Grosfoguel once described as the myth of modernity, a self-generated and insulated Eurocentric modernity, "which develops on its own without depending on any one else on earth" (89). Grosfoguel reinforces his argument by stating that imperial reasoning is solipsistic in nature: Without solipsism, there can be no myth of a subject with universal rationality that confirms itself as such. We see here the beginning of the ego-politics of knowledge [. . .], which is nothing less than a secularization of the Christian cosmology of the theo-politics of knowledge. In the ego-politics of knowledge, the subject of enunciation is erased, hidden, camouflaged by what Santiago Castro-Gómez has called zero-point philosophy. (89) Understood from a critical decolonial perspective, the myth of modernity is the nerve center of Cartesian logic, an ego-politics of knowledge in which the nonwhite/black seems to have, according to Ndlovu-Gatsheni, "endured the consequences of being a racialized and dehumanized subject as well as being written out of the human ocumene and being reduced to dispensability" (12). [End Page 426] From its emergence, decolonial humanism quickly registered on the radar of critical theorizations of Blackness, Africanness, and Black solidarities, and Ndlovu-Gatsheni's monograph is only the latest in a long list of Afrocentric "initiatives and ideological/intellectual/political creations [such] as Garveyism, Ethiopianism, Négritude, African Personality, Conscienscism, Pan-Africanism, African Socialism, and Black Consciousness Movement (BCM), right up to the revived African Renaissance, [that] were produced within the context and course of African decolonial humanist struggle" (13–14). This critical thinking is from the Global South in general and Africa in particular, led by thinkers whose societies have experienced what Enrique Dussel calls "the underside of modernity." Ndlovu-Gatsheni's narrative is in harmony with decolonial perspectives in several respects. Central in The Decolonial Mandela is what Catherine Walsh calls decoloniality's ability "to make visible, open up, and advance radically distinct perspectives and positionalities that displace Western rationality as the only framework and possibility of existence, analysis, and thought" (17). Ndlovu-Gatsheni advances radically distinct perspectives and positionalities through his proposition of an analytical standpoint and coordinates that can galvanize an African decolonial body of thought, called the "Mandela phenomenon," which, in essence, is a "new reading of Mandela's political life and legacy informed by a critical decolonial ethics of liberation" (xvi). In Ndlovu-Gatsheni's view, this critical decolonial ethics of liberation, privileges [the] paradigm of peace, humanism, and racial harmony as opposed to the imperial/colonial/apartheid paradigm of war and racial hatred. At the core of critical decolonial ethics of liberation is the unmasking of an imperial/colonial/ apartheid system that was driven by the logic of racial profiling, and the classification and hierarchization of human beings. It resulted in the denial of the humanity of black people and enabled enslavement, conquest, colonization, dispossession, exploitation, and notions of impossibility of co-presence of human races. (xvi) Ndlovu-Gatsheni asserts that the "Mandela phenomenon" is "an authentically African invention and achievement that emerged and crystallised in the course of the anti-imperial, anti-colonial, anti-apartheid and anti-global coloniality struggles" (2; emphasis added). I revisit this assertion shortly. My point for now is to show that the author regards Mandela as an exceptional personality fit for scholarly discourse, and that therefore his book...

Vegetating Life and the Spirit of Modernism in Kafka and Beckett

Vegetating Life and the Spirit of Modernism in Kafka and Beckett Joseph Anderton (bio) Belatedness and recommencement are inherent to modernism’s pursuit of the now and the new. As an artistic sensibility dedicated to the ephemeral and elusive flux of modernity, modernism can be conceived as a contradictory spirit that enacts an auto-defeating and therefore auto-sustaining rapid cycle of attempt and failure, purpose and obsolescence. In this essay I argue that the unachievable, self-perpetuating aspiration that modernism contains is refigured as despondent, late modern “vegetating life” in the works of two limit-modernists, Franz Kafka and Samuel Beckett. Despite producing the bulk of their most memorable work over thirty years apart, both Kafka and Beckett repeatedly offer comparable expressions of endlessness—through purgatorial narrative conditions encapsulated by the continuous recontextualization of deictic language—that resonate with the inevitable belatedness and creative recommencement of modernism. Although deictic language is not especially frequent in Kafka or Beckett, it acquires great significance in their evocations of “vegetation,” an underexplored state identified by critics such as Georg Lukács, Walter Benjamin, and Theodor Adorno that encompasses a series of related binaries: activity and stasis, desire and passivity, life and death. In Kafka’s protoform and Beckett’s later-form, each writer conveys what Shane Weller calls the “paradoxical experience of endless ending, an experience that is alien to the Enlightenment conception of progress that underlines the powerful myth of modernity, and that lies at the heart of the late modernist conception of history.”1 Through portrayals of such interminable vegetative states, Kafka anticipates and Beckett epitomizes a virtually exhausted [End Page 805] late modernist life, undergoing the throes of modernism’s drive for novelty and immediacy while subject to the pervasive negativity and failure that replace the possibility of achievement. If modernism’s intrinsic tardiness fuels its invention of ever-new forms, the lateness in late modernism manifests as futility, burden, and nostalgia. The vegetating life narratively and linguistically evident in Kafka’s “The Hunter Gracchus” (1917/1931) and Beckett’s Texts for Nothing (1950–51), for example, demonstrates the purgatorial condition of modernism habitually starting anew, and converts it into late modernism’s protracted ending. The Spirit of Modernism It is common for the critical distillation of discrepant modernisms to result in an elemental dynamic spirit that goes back to its etymological roots: modern, modo, “just now.” In his essay “Modernity: An Unfinished Project,” first published in German in 1981, Jürgen Habermas portrays modernism as a persistent rebellion kicking against the normative past: “With a different content in each case, the expression ‘modernity’ repeatedly articulates the consciousness of an era that refers back to the past of classical antiquity precisely in order to comprehend itself as the result of a transition from the old to the new.”2 As an agent of change, modernism appears necessarily retrospective to disturb sedimented cultural traditions legitimately and repeatedly. Likewise, in an earlier 1967 essay, “The Culture of Modernism,” Irving Howe discerns the intense reactivity of modernism, arguing that “no matter what impasse it encounters in its clashes with the external world, modernism is ceaselessly active within its own realm, endlessly inventive in destruction and improvisation.”3 Howe accentuates the energetic versatility of the modernist spirit to the point of infinitude, underlining its restless originality in defiance of shifting historical contexts. More recently, Gabriel Josipovici summarizes his book Whatever Happened to Modernism? (2010) with the claim that modernism “will always be with us, for it is not primarily a revolution in diction, or a response to industrialisation or the First World War, but is art coming to a consciousness of its limitations and responsibilities.”4 Rather than a specific aesthetic, historical, or ideological understanding, Josipovici articulates the enduring spirit of modernism: a diffuse sense of modernist art as an aggressive, resistant dynamic. His present tense phrase, “coming to,” suggests that modernism is a continual process, one of reflection and renewal. Susan Stanford Friedman describes such conceptions of “modern/modernity/modernism” as the “relational definition” which “stresses the condition or sensibility of radical disruption and accelerating change wherever and whenever such a phenomenon appears, particularly if it manifests widely. What is modern or...

Martin Luther and the Creation of the Myth of Modernity

Martin Luther and the Creation of the Myth of Modernity

Punishment and Penitential Practices in Medieval German Writing by Sarah Bowden Annette Volfing

 Reviews decades-old data does not help here (e.g. pp. , , , ). While the inevitable misrepresentations are compounded by factual errors, there are not enough of these to be too off-putting. e linguistic issues are more niggling. No clear rationale is offered for the selection of historical forms of names, for example. Sanders’s provision of cross-language tables of comparative examples is commendable, but when illustrating Icelandic and Faroese, does it really make sense to use passages of Bible editions from different centuries ( and : p. ) or to compare relatively contemporary registers of Norwegian with English from the deliberately archaic King James Bible of  (p. )? To summarize, this short book is packed full of information, much of which is relevant, well presented, and entertaining. e ‘intersections’ chosen to illustrate the interplay and cross-fertilization of (some of) the languages of the Nordic countries are broadly representative of the topic as a whole. And their presentation, using relatable, family-based metaphors and Romantic imagery, will no doubt enhance their appeal to the intended audience. e book is not without its issues. To the lay reader, very few of these, beyond the lack of explanatory detail and up-to-the minute statistics, will be apparent. From an academic perspective, however, even if intended for consumption in general or non-advanced studies, it must reluctantly be considered an opportunity missed. U  E A M Punishment and Penitential Practices in Medieval German Writing. Ed. by S B and A V. (King’s College London Medieval Studies, ) London:Boydell&Brewer. . pp. £. ISBN ––––. at the medieval period was one of torture, dungeons, hanging, drawing, quartering , and burning at the stake is a popular view of our past. e scholarly version of this foundational myth of modernity is Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (), which argues that by overcoming this pre-modern era of violence and replacing it with state-controlled discipline, the modern legal system and more peaceful society was born. As with all grand narratives, its success is based on the fact that it is not only flattering to our modern age and memorable, but also that despite its huge simplifications and generalizations, it captures a lot of truth. is is at least the impression that comes out of this collection on punishment and penitence in medieval German writing, edited by Sarah Bowden and Annette Volfing on the basis of a conference at King’s College London in . e Middle Ages does seem to be ‘a deeply penitential period’, as Bowden writes in her Introduction (p. ), however much nuancing this needs, and a time in which punishment was a ‘phenomenon deeply embedded in everyday life’, as Jamie Page puts it (p. ). e collection takes the innovative and eye-opening approach of discussing legal punishment and Christian penitential practices together. Religiously motivated self-inflicted harm, Bowden rightly points out, has much in common with legal MLR, .,   or social punishment, as both aim at absolving humans of wrongdoing through physical and psychological pain. More precisely, this book focuses on written, predominantly literary descriptions of punishment and penitence in German in the twelh to sixteenth centuries, rather than on actual practices, on law or theology, or on a broader context beyond German-speaking lands. is means that the volume provides a good complement to existing studies that focus on legal practices or on visual representations. Bowden’s Introduction elegantly summarizes the state of research and the rationale for the volume along such lines. e ten chapters together give a sense of the surprisingly wide range of contexts in which punishment and penitential practices are discussed in late medieval German literature. Henrike Manuwald shows that the Middle High German term for revenge, râche, in its literary uses, especially in Rudolf of Ems’s Alexander romance, is much less clear-cut and encompasses controlled punishment by the king rather than just referring to the personal tit-for-tat violence oen assumed, thus further undermining the narrative of linear development from a society of personal revenge to one of state-controlled punishment. e significant gendered aspects of punishment are investigated in Wolfram’s Parzival by Annette Volfing as...

Mito da Modernidade e Alucinações Eurocêntricas: colóquio entre Enrique Dussel e Achille Mbembe

O presente trabalho ensaístico pretende, a partir das ideias de Enrique Dussel e Achille Mbembe, explicitar reflexões acerca das categorias modernidade-colonialidade, branco-negro a fim de elucidar, reciprocamente, como cada autor critica a narrativa hegemônica de superioridade europeia/moderna. Com Enrique Dussel, salientamos o Mito da Modernidade como recurso ideológico para fazer da Europa o centro cultural do globo. O objetivo da Modernidade é a tentativa de fazer a sua regionalidade se tornar universal. Com base nos pensamentos de Achille Mbembe, apresentamos as suas críticas ao princípio de raça, alucinação eurocêntrica, construção ideológica para definir papéis sociais entre colonizador e colonizado, entre branco e negro.

The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences by Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm

Reviewed by: The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences by Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm S. M. Mendel Bindell KEY WORDS Mendell S. M. Bindel, Mendell Bindell, Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, Jason Josephson-Storm, Magic, modern magic, philosophy and magic, modernity, Disenchantment jason ā. josephson-storm. The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2017. Pp. xvi + 412. In his pioneering work, The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences, Jason Ā. Josephson-Storm, exposes the multivalent, deeply fascinating narrative of disenchantment—a variable and changing narrative that can nonetheless be widely conceived as an interpretation of history that sees the “modern” world as having lost a sense of wonder, enchantment, and magic—as a pervasive myth that has come to structure historical and contemporary conceptions of modernity and European culture. Josephson-Storm argues the myth of disenchantment has played a central role in shaping various historical, philosophical, and sociological accounts of modernity, the Enlightenment, religion, science, and the death of God. Complicating this narrative, however, Josephson-Storm illustrates how the myth of disenchantment is entwined with various revivals of magic, occultism, and mysticism. Although he begins his work on a conceptual level, critiquing the rigid binary understanding of disenchantment and modernity as polar opposites of enchantment, myth, magic, and the occult, the thrust of Josephson-Storm’s argument unfolds in his meticulous intellectual and cultural history of the genealogy of disenchantment, or “the myth of mythless modernity” as he frames it. In articulating this genealogy, Josephson-Storm invokes the bimodal nature of attempted disenchantments and disenchantment narratives, as they ultimately slip into that which they either oppose or argue is in decline: the world of enchantment and myth. In demystifying the myth of disenchantment and the logics of “occult disavowal” (the disavowal or repression of enchantment, magic, and the occult for various reasons), Josephson-Storm uncovers how which certain narrators of disenchantment were themselves engaged in an array of enchanted and occult milieus to varying degrees (19). His work thus highlights the stakes and significance of the narrative myth of disenchantment in a wide array of ostensibly disconnected intellectual, aesthetic, cultural, and religious movements. Josephson-Storm demonstrates the ways that the myth of disenchantment—and its reversion into its antitheses—fundamentally [End Page 120] shaped theoretical and philosophical accounts of modernity and enlightenment. Insofar as this work serves to demythologize the myth of disenchantment, therefore, it also functions as an immanent critique of theories of modernity and enlightenment that pivot on the myth of disenchantment by positioning disenchantment as the defining other through which these categories are conceived. Displaying an encyclopedic knowledge of European intellectual and cultural history, in his work, Josephson-Storm pushes the reader to question not only the grand narratives of disenchantment, modernity, enlightenment, and the “Death of God,” but also to radically challenge these very categories. This sort of paradigm-shifting intervention in historical and theoretical discourses on disenchantment, modernity, and enlightenment grows out of the author’s dialectical genealogy of the birth and proliferation of “the myth of mythless modernity.” In their disenchanting drive to either demythologize and disenchant the world, or to narrate its already disenchanted state, Josephson-Storm argues, theorists and narrators of disenchantment in effect revert to the very logic they argue is progressively disappearing from the “modern” world. Paradoxically, Josephson-Storm eruditely illustrates how the narratives of disenchantment, of “mythless modernity,” are self-defeating myths (i.e. insofar as they ultimately constitute the perpetuation of myth), that often emerge bimodally, as narratives of enchantment and reenchantment. In this way, Josephson-Storm proffers a critical genealogy of the myth of disenchantment as it was conceived and developed by a wide range of thinkers and movements from the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries to the present. Before he begins this genealogy, Josephson-Storm reveals the narrative of disenchantment as myth by evaluating an array of sociological sources providing evidence of the extent to which the ostensive “heartland of disenchantment”—Europe and the United States—is rife with people who still believe in enchanted, occult, magical, paranormal, or supernatural phenomena (304). After demonstrating the enchanted backdrop of the...

Legal Philosophy of Pancasila as The Paradigm of The Criminal Justice System: A Philosophical Criticism for the Loss of a Sense of Humanity

Since 1981, marked by the enactment of law number 8 of 1981 on criminal procedure law, it has become a consensus to abandon the Cartesian paradigm embodied in the inquisitoire principle. The inquisitoire principle sees any person drawn into a criminal justice struggle as an object. The Criminal Procedure Code (CPC) through the philosophical foundation of Pancasila, commands to adopt the accusatoire principle, in honor of the withdrawn party as a person entirely. However, the KUHAP/CPC formers forget the institutional legal culture of the thrown (gowerfen-sein) criminal justice system in the myth of modernity that is the objectification of human being. So that the law enforcement officers (investigators, public prosecutors, judges) always ignore Pancasila as the philosophical foundation of thought in carrying out the law.

Brasília em A Idade da Terra: apontamentos para uma análise figural

Este artigo pretende apontar elementos para a leitura e interpretação de três sequências do filme A Idade da Terra, de Glauber Rocha, a partir do método de análise figural, tal como desenvolvido por Philippe Dubois. As sequências selecionadas são aquelas que têm a cidade de Brasília como locação no filme. Analisaremos a presença da cidade no discurso fílmico enquanto construção de um mito da modernidade e a interação dos personagens com o espaço circundante. Este ensaio abre caminho para a leitura de outras sequências do mesmo filme e a comparação entre os eventos de imagem de A Idade da Terra e outros filmes do diretor.

Encountering the Pluriverse: Looking for Alternatives in Other Worlds

Abstract The lack of ontological pluralism in International Relations has been a strong determinant of the general scope of the discipline and its objects of study, as well as all that is rendered irrelevant to the study of the international. IR has marginalized difference not only by disciplining epistemologies, but also by rejecting other ontologies, particularly those which belong to indigenous peoples, by relegating them to the realm of myths, legends and beliefs. The roots of ontological marginalization are deeply seeded, so much so that they are present in virtually every field of science (social or not). In order to understand this concern with ontology, we need to refer to the modern age, specifically its Western and now liberal manifestations. The main objective of this article is to put the ontological question on the table. It is argued that the truth of one-world, one reality and one universe is also a myth, showing how it has hidden many worlds and many realities. The concept of the pluriverse is used to show how - from different ontological positions, particularly relational cosmovisions like the Andean worldview -, alternatives actually appear. The text is divided into three parts: the first one depicts the pluriverse and what it implies and enables, the second describes how the pluriverse has been occulted by the myth of modernity, and the third part is an attempt to illustrate how relational ontologies contribute to the theoretical constitution of the global.