Los avatares de la crítica decolonial: entrevista a Santiago Castro-Gómez

Los avatares de la crítica decolonial: entrevista a Santiago Castro-Gómez

GESCO: We would like to start this conversation, asking you a little about your intellectual journey and your research processes. From the outside, three central products can be seen for now: Criticism of Latin American reason, The hybris of the zero point and Dreamlike fabrics. Could you describe these three moments?

Santiago Castro-Gómez: Maybe I should start by saying that my basic education is in philosophy, but that in addition to the study of the "classics" of Western philosophical thought - and especially of modern ones - I received training in a very little appreciated record, and in any case ignored, by professional philosophers: the "Latin American philosophy." I believe that this double record in my basic training as a philosopher has definitely marked my career. So, when they talk about "three moments", I would say that it is not a gradual ascent, a progressive overcoming, but a continuous entry and exit to themes that are marked from the beginning by that tension between modern European philosophy and Latin American philosophy In fact, my first book Critique of Latin American reason is already an attempt to account for the problems resulting from this tension: how to find an alternative to the false universalism-particularism dilemma in which the discussion around many decades was caught whether or not a Latin American philosophy is possible? How to think of and from specific local circumstances without having to choose between falling into the arms of the abstract universalism of the philosophers, or in the arms of Latin American autochtonism? I think that the search for a way out of this dilemma is what has marked all my research