Humanism after colonialism
I will argue that the modern can be viewed as a stage of apprenticeship in an ethics of responsibility. The debates on racial slavery in the Americas reveal a fractured modernity, where a counter-discourse of domination coexists with a totalising impulse. The complicity of humanism and oppression marks the consolidation of a racialized, autonomous and rational modern subject defined against its âothersâ. However, I suggest that Derridean critiques of humanism, such as those presented in Robert Youngâs White Mythologies, perpetuate the links between humanism and colonialism. The âgame with Hegelâ is kept in play through a rigid dichotomy between modernity and post modernity. By reducing modern discourse to a synthesis between thesis and antithesis, they do not allow for the possibility of non-coincidence between two contraries. Fanonâs emphasis on lived experience, Arendtâs enlarged mentality, and Levinasâs non-ontological transcendence provide a break with the complicity between humanism and colonialism. While Fanon articulates the perplexities inherent in finding a path from the universal to the particular, Arendt and Levinas give two solutions, one political and the other ethical, to this
Alvares, Maria Claudia
Modernity
Humanism after colonialism. I will argue that the modern can be viewed as a stage of apprenticeship in an ethics of responsibility. The debates on racial slavery in the Americas reveal a fractured modernity, where a counter-discourse of domination coexists with a totalising impulse. The complicity of humanism and oppression marks the consolidation of a racialized, autonomous and rational modern subject defined against its âothersâ. However, I suggest that Derridean critiques of humanism, such as those presented in Robert Youngâs White Mythologies, perpetuate the links between humanism and colonialism. The âgame with Hegelâ is kept in play through a rigid dichotomy between modernity and post modernity. By reducing modern discourse to a synthesis between thesis and antithesis, they do not allow for the possibility of non-coincidence between two contraries. Fanonâs emphasis on lived experience, Arendtâs enlarged mentality, and Levinasâs non-ontological transcendence provide a break with the complicity between humanism and colonialism. While Fanon articulates the perplexities inherent in finding a path from the universal to the particular, Arendt and Levinas give two solutions, one political and the other ethical, to this
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