What's Left of Philosophy 140 | What is Modernity? Part II: Decoloniality
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Aug 19, 2026 A deep dive into how modernity and colonialism are tangled together. They trace Eurocentric claims, exclusions, and stages of modernity. The conversation explores alterity, conquest as a modern subjectivity, and whether Latin America is constitutive of modernity. They end by weighing modernity’s emancipatory promise against its instrumental and mythic uses.
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Modernity Defined From The Excluded Outside
- Modernity should be read from the excluded outside, not as an internal European evolution.
- Lillian explains Dussel and Quijano reposition modernity as constituted by what Europe excludes, reframing modernization as boundary conflict.
Levinas Makes The Outside Ethically Irreducible
- Levinasian alterity blocks simple dialectical subsumption because the excluded other makes demands that exceed recognition.
- Gil and Lillian stress Dussel inserts Levinas to insist the outside resists being fully absorbed by Hegelian recognition.
Latin America As Founding Site Of Modern Capitalism
- Quijano locates modernity's founding moment in Latin America, where modern and pre-modern elements coexisted and shaped capitalist development.
- Owen highlights Quijano's political-economy focus on peasant/informal labor as persistent mixed systems.
