“Other” Knowledges, “Other” Critiques: Reflections on the Politics and Practices of Philosophy and Decoloniality in the “Other” America

Guillén, now known as Subcomandante Marcos, described philosophy as a kind of muddle or mess, an embroilment in which theory, ideology, and knowledge are intricately wrapped up with science and politics: "Philosophy.I am doing philosophy, we are doing philosophy.Philosophy of science to be more exact.Theory of theory.Mental masturbation that doesn't even reach an orgasm.Verbiage that does, however, have its affect in science and in politics" (Guillén 6, my translation).As Guillén went on to note:[From this philosophy] it is necessary to take some distance.Leave the discourse.Detect its mechanisms of operation, the places in which it emerges, the places where it has effect, the places where it disappears.It is necessary to speak of philosophy as non-philosophy, to turn philosophical discourse against itself… to change the problematics…to make a political change in theory… [recognize] various forms of "doing" philosophy, various "practices" of philosophy … open up problematics that might produce new theoretical and practical intentions… assume a political position that makes possible an "other" discursive strategy, "other" philosophical work, and opens "other" spaces of theoretical production.(110, my translation) It is these "other" places, spaces, and positions that form the heart of my intervention here; "other" philosophies and "other" knowledges that challenge not only the definitions and boundaries of philosophy's continental-analytical divide, but also the geopolitical ordering of knowledge and the questions of who produces knowledge, how and where, and for what purposes.Specifically, my interest is with situating knowledge production in the local modern/colonial histories and local struggles of the "other America", that is the America of the South-by which I mean the south, or souths, too often obfuscated in "America," including the "souths" within the north as well as in and within the Caribbean, Central America, and South America, and most particularly Andean America.Such interest finds its base in the particular ways Andean indigenous and Afro-descendant intellectuals and movements understand and use epistemic production as a key component of their political projects, 2 projects aimed not simply at confronting the vestiges of colonialism (decolonialization), but rather at the radical reconstruction of knowledge, power, being, and life itself. 3Projects aimed at "decoloniality", understood as the simultaneous and continuous processes of transformation and creation, the construction of radically distinct social imaginaries, conditions, and relations of power, knowledge.