Abstract
This chapter discusses the theoretical rupture originated with the epistemological turn in the realm of the sciences produced by Latin American and Latinx theories of decolonization, and its impact on theology. The Epistemological decolonization of Christianity requires the relocation of theological thinking moving its epicenter from imperial Christendom to the oppressed colonial subjectivity. Epistemic decolonization is important not only because it unmasks the racism hidden in the universalistic claims made by Eurocentric epistemologies, along with the distortion it causes, but also because it brings to the fore other knowledges and ways of knowing hitherto made invisible. Dussel identifies the Latino-Germanic Christendom as the spine of Eurocentrism. Therefore, the decolonization of Christian theology is central for the task of decolonization.
Translated by Néstor Medina
An earlier version of this chapter appears in Concilium 2013/2, Postcolonial Theology, edited by Hille Haker et al., 24–34.
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Notes
- 1.
See A. Quijano. “Coloniality of Power, Eurocentrism and Social Classification”, in M. Boraña, E. Dussel and C. A. Járegui (Eds.). Coloniality at Large (Durham: Duke University Press, 2010), pp. 181–223; “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality”, in W. Mignolo and E. Escobar (Eds.). Globalization and the De-colonial Option (London: Routledge, 2010), 22–32.
- 2.
See the electronic publication www.Transmodernity.com (especially Linda Alcoff’s contribution).
- 3.
See E. Dussel, E. Mendieta & C. Bohórquez. El Pensamiento Filosófico Latinoamericano, del Caribe y Latino (1300–2000), (Mexico: Siglo XXI, 2010).
- 4.
In other words, “Christianity”.
- 5.
See the book by G. Agamben, Il Regno e la Gloria. Per una Genealogía Teológica dell’e\Economía e del Governo (Vicenza: Editizione Neri Pozza, 2007).
- 6.
See Karl Loewith, Von Hegel zu Nietzsche, II, V: Das Problem der Christlichkeit, Kohlhammer, Stuttgart, a Nietzsche, cap. V (Stuttgart, 1964), 350 ff. It is impossible to understand the critique of religion in S. Kierkegaard and K. Marx without regard to this inversion of Christianity. Both writers put things in their place, even from the point of Messianic (authentic) Christianity.
- 7.
What will happen centuries later in the Anglo-Saxon Christianity of the United Kingdom or the Lutheran countries of Northern Europe, which Thomas Hobbes will justify theologically in his work El Leviatán (FCE, Tercera Parte: México, 1998), 305–498, on “Of a Christian State” (modern fetishization of politics).
- 8.
A China that will begin in the eighteenth century the Industrial Revolution before England (see Kenneth Pomeranz. The Great Divergence. China, Europa and the Making of the Modern World Economy, Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2000).
- 9.
Giovanni Arrighi. Adam Smith in Beijing (London: Verso, 2007).
- 10.
See this problem in my work, The Invention of the Americas. Eclipse of the Other and the Myth of Modernity (New York: Continuum, 1995), 142 (just like all my works, it can be downloaded from www.enriquedussel.com).
- 11.
It is not so strange then that modern theology and philosophy (before Luther and Descartes) begin in the Caribbean. On this beginning of theology and modern philosophy, see my work, Der Gegendiskurs der Moderne. Koelner Vorlesungen (Berlin: Turia-Kant Verlag, 2013).
- 12.
See Franz Hinkelammert. The Ideological Weapons of Death (New York: Orbis Books, 1986).
- 13.
M. Heidegger would say: “being-colonial-in-the-world” (in-der-Welt-kolonial-Sein).
- 14.
See this problem in my work Politics of Liberation. A Critical World History (London: SCM Press, 2011), pp. 182ff.
- 15.
See my work E. Dussel. “Encuentros, Métodos Evangelizatorios y Conflictos”, in Introducción General a la Historia de la Iglesia en América Latina, t. I/1 de Historia General de la Iglesia en América Latina (Salamanca: Sígueme, 1983), pp. 336 ff.
- 16.
I remember in my childhood in Argentina that in March or April we celebrated Easter, the feast of the resurrection of life. However, it took place in the autumn, when the leaves fell from the trees and nature dressed the sadness of the next winter. It was a sad Easter, which in the Northern Hemisphere was celebrated in the spring. In the same way in September, when life appeared after the harsh winter in the South, there was no celebration of life, but bland Sundays of Pentecost. A liturgical disaster! A ritual imposition of a fossilized Christianity of the North was forced on the South. The time will come in the Southern Hemisphere to change the liturgical year in six months in order to restore its meaning as among the Aymaras, Quechuas. and Mapuches, celebrating the Eucharist in the South with potatoes and chicha (and not bread and wine as in the North).
- 17.
The path followed by philosophical renewal is a good example. Aristotle was rediscovered by Islamic thought through the influence of Byzantine Christians, and Al Kindi already practiced the thought of the stagirite in the ninth century. From there he passed to Samarkand, Buchara, and other cities, arriving in Córdoba in the eleventh century, and through translators from Toledo to Paris in the thirteenth century. Aristotelianism was anticipated in the Arab world in comparison to Paris by four centuries. Since the ninth century, Baghdad was the center of the study of mathematics (even the numbers are Arabic), of astronomy and other empirical sciences, which also came from China to Italy, along with the great technological discoveries (which have been taken in the West as inventions of Leonardo da Vinci, being that he simply copied drawings of books printed on paper in China in 1313 and that came to the hands of Pope Eugene IV, and from there to many publications of the Renaissance). See Dussel, Politics of Liberation, vol. I (London: SCM Editor, 2011).
- 18.
Hegel. Vorlesungen ueber die Philosophie der Geschichte, IV, 3, 3, in Werke, vol. 12, (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1970), p. 538.
- 19.
See Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno. Dialektik der Aufklaerung (Frankfurt: S. Fischer Verlag, 1969).
- 20.
In the Renaissance, the painters first traced the horizon and fled all the objects they would paint to one point. That “point zero” will be, inadvertently, the very eye of the painter, but as his negative. That spot does not appear in the painting, but the whole picture is orchestrated from that vanishing point, not seen as the eye of the painter, although in reality it is omnipresent in the work. It is the absence of the cogito ego of all cogitatum. The cogitatum, of course, is the colonial being.
- 21.
See “Der Begriff der Kunstkritik in der deutschen Romantik“, in W. Benjamin. Abhandlugen: Gesammelte Schriften, vol.I/1 (Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1974), p. 116: “Erst jetzt faengt es wie der Antike; sie ist eigentlich nicht gegeben –sie ist nicht vorhanden- sondern sie soll von uns [Novalis and the romantics] erste hervorgebracht werden”.
- 22.
E. Mendieta, “The Ethics of (Not) Knowing: Take Care of Ethics and Knowledge Will Come of Its Own Accord”, in A. M. Isasi-Díaz and E. Mendieta (Eds .). Decolonizing Epistemologies: Latina/o Theology and Philosophy (New York: Fordham University Press, 2012), p. 261. On a non-Eurocentric ethic, see my work, Ethics of Liberation (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).
- 23.
Enrique Dussel. Filosofía de la Liberación (Mexico: Edicol, México, 1977) (translated into English, German, Italian, and Portuguese). The hypotheses were generated in 1969, years before the works of Edward Said and J. F. Lyotard. By using the category “center” (the metropolitan) and “periphery” (the colonial) the epistemological decolonization process would begin.
- 24.
Immanuel Wallerstein. The Modern World-System: Capitalist Agriculture and the Origins of the European World-Economy in the Sixteenth Century (New York: Academic Press, 1976). Two other volumes on the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries would follow. It is true that Wallerstein still did not know the importance of China that André Gunder Frank will begin to indicate in 1998 with his important work ReORIENT: Global Economy in the Asia Age (Berkeley: University of California Press).
- 25.
Enrique Dussel. Towards an Unknown Marx: A Commentary on the Manuscripts of 1961–63 (London: Routledge, 2001). See especially cap. 13: “The Manuscripts of 1861–63 and the concept of dependency” (pp. 204–234).
- 26.
See W. Mignolo. De la Hermenéutica y la Semiosis Colonial al Pensar Descolonial (Quito: Ediciones del Abya-Yala, 2011).
- 27.
One can take seriously the “pretension to universal validity” at the time in which one honestly tries to prove, on one’s part, their own claim to universal validity. That knowing to leave a time of respect for the Other is necessary as a condition for the possibility of honest inter-religious and inter-theological dialogue.
- 28.
That is why we became aware that the Medellín Conference was concerned with the issue of a peripheral culture, such as Latin America, absent from the Second Vatican Council.
- 29.
F. Eboussei Boulaga. La crise du Muntu. Authenticité Africaine et Philosophie (Paris: Présence africaine, 1977).
- 30.
Ibid., p. 7. This is the danger of the “struggle for recognition” on the horizon of a Eurocentric position proposed by A. Honneth.
- 31.
I insist: the very act of “questioning” was already a problem, because he did not answer the question but rather problematized it in light of the demands of Asian inter-religious dialogue. For a Eurocentric Christian the question itself stands as shocking, whereas in Asia it is obligatory.
- 32.
Asian Christians, as a religious minority, either return to being Messianic , as at the Christian origins, or fail when they try to impose Christendom, which is a culture and not a religion. Mateo Ricci sought to clearly separate the two, but he was persecuted by Rome and his project failed. However, the question must be raised again, because it is at the heart of future evangelization.
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Dussel, E. (2019). Epistemological Decolonization of Theology. In: Barreto, R., Sirvent, R. (eds) Decolonial Christianities. New Approaches to Religion and Power. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-24166-7_2
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