Anthropology and Critique - when the I is the Other

Carvalho Garcia, Luis Fellipe [UCL]

The Argentinian philosopher Enrique Dussel has denounced an ambiguity in the heart of the Enlightenment, on one hand (i) in articulating the idea of thinking for oneself, it contains an emancipatory element, on the other hand (ii) to the extent that it is founded on the notion of a pure Self, it includes the risk of a colonial deflection, as this Self can easily become the image in which all possible alterity will be subsumed. All otherness would thus be hidden behind the Self. To a certain extent, Kant’s Anthropology, especially when read through Foucault’s eyes, is the moment when this problem is first articulated. In effect, when the question of the relation between the Anthropology and the Critique comes to light, it brings with it the very problem of the connection between the a priori and the temporal. As Foucault puts it, Anthropology is the inversed image of the Critique, in as much as it repeats the Critique in a temporal dimension where it is clarified that the Self can only be articulated in and through the experience of oneself, just as language can only be experienced within an empirical spoken language. We would like the advance the hypothesis that this conceptual frame, in which Anthropology is taken to be the inversed image of the Critique, can offer a clarifying framework to articulate a problematic exposed in different terms by some powerful postcolonial thinkers, such as Frantz Fanon, Enrique Dussel and Walter Mignolo, namely: the misidentification of the self of a non-European Other, expressed though a projection of a temporal self in the dimension of the a priori Self, operated by the colonizer (Dussel) or by the colonized (Fanon) as a result of deeply entrenched ego-politics (Mignolo).