Modernity and Its Peripheries: Originary Existence and Decolonization of Thought in Light of Fichte’s Late work

Tangorra, Manuel [UCL]

Fichte’s mature thought has been, for many years, a difficult challenge for Intellectual history, notably when trying to identify the conceptual tradition that would encompass it. The following paper proposes to examine this period of Fichte’s work from an alternative angle, namely, as a peripheral symptom of a crisis of imperial-colonial modernity, a crisis materialized, in the Americas, in the independence processes, and in particular in the development of a revolutionary thought in the Río de la Plata. Thus, firstly, we will analyze how the Fichtean invocation of an originary existence of the people holds unexpected ties with the independence discourse within the context of the constituent process of the Spanish empire. Rather than a doctrinal continuity between these two heterogeneous horizons, we will try to grasp a shared mobilization of the originary dimension of politics,which emphasizes the situational rooting of the realization process of any juridical, social and cultural order. In a second moment, working Fichte beyond his conjuncture, we will identify some clues within his late reflections that will allow us, by highlighting the effective genesis of thought, to conceive horizons of political and symbolic decolonization. This emphasis on the concrete emergence of political horizons does not result in any localism that would make political thought the repetition of the empirical being of a collectivity. Instead, the Fichtean proposal consists in considering the effective situation of thinking and acting as the ground for a peripheral imagination, where the historical subjects, individual and collective, perform a situated image of the absolute freedom of the spirit.