CANNIBALISTIC HACKING OF WESTERN PHILOSOPHY

 

Western philosophy does not give more of itself. It is in an anemic state and barely has enough strength to repeat itself, through studies and scientific articles that review, rework and find the last nuance of each of the philosophers of the canon. It happens to him like most classical music, in which everything is at stake in the best interpretation, in the precision of the reconstruction of a work, in returning to Beethoven, Mozart or anyone else, to point out how it should actually sound. In philosophy too, we are full of these interpreters, of those who are experts in finding what has not yet been said, avoiding recognizing the obvious explanatory wear and tear of theories and concepts.

 Largely Western philosophy has ceased to be useful for understanding and transforming the world, because it is exhausted, in the sense of a constant emptying of itself, by way of redundancy and endless repetition. An exhaustion that seems to be transferred to the entire existence and that faces perpetual agony. Occasionally he tries to compose himself, only to return to his drowsy state.

 Similar diagnoses of the crisis of Western philosophy led to totalizing responses, starting from the assumption that looking at the entire philosophical field would allow us to propose a thought that would escape the impasse. But the overall view also clearly says that there is no outside from which a general ontological alternative would be formulated. Like the universe in which we live, there is no exterior, no beyond in which to locate ourselves in order to understand it. Any understanding of Western philosophy is only possible from within itself.

 The question of the critique of Western philosophy is transferred to another terrain other than the search for impossible exteriority. This thought is far from being a homogeneous sphere; on the contrary, it is plagued by fissures, cracks, breaks, slips, lines of rupture, clinamen, contradictions, fallacies and paradoxes. This is where you have to think, this is the place for the task of hacking Western philosophy, pursuing these lines of cutting the seemingly solid stone of its theories, in every stream, author and work.

 THE PROGRAM

 Fleeing from false totalizations, there is what we call cannibalistic hacking and that must be characterized, in order to avoid misunderstandings and confusion. In any case, this critical approach is given a strictly technical meaning. On the one hand, hacking procedures refer to the ways of unveiling the foundations and postulates on which a philosophical current is based, and which, in general, remain hidden; and, as a consequence, to establish its functioning and its relations with reality.

 But hacking also means altering the course of reasoning, taking arguments to territories other than the originals, making theory say what it does not want to recognize and making explicit the often-absurd consequences of its statements. Of course, this does not exhaust the hacking procedures, which are many and varied; For each philosophy, author, text and even discursive fragments, it will be necessary to point out the type of hacking to which it will be subjected.

 Dialectical nihilism lies at the core of hacking procedures and must be understood as the historical affirmation of Western philosophy's double process of negation. The first negation that comes from outside and that expresses the inability of any philosophy to represent and respond to the problems of humanity, in the gigantic diversity of its manifestations, demands and challenges.

 The second negation corresponds to the internal failures of philosophical systems, which are inherent in them and which originate in the deficiencies of their postulates and arguments. When the factory errors of these philosophies accumulate, they end up leading him to that negativity that inhabits him and that ends up destroying him. The hacking of Western philosophy does nothing more than make the double negativity visible and accelerate it.

 Hacking Western philosophy is a cannibalistic strategy. Cannibalizing is a method of appropriating thought and culture as deeply as possible; that is, to understand the theories, concepts and arguments, even better than the one who has produced them, through a meticulous and rigorous reconstruction of the components of a given philosophy. The next step is the incorporation of those theories that are considered appropriate to our own conception of the world; but and this is crucial, devouring and subjecting that philosophy to our own logic, culture and way of seeing the world.

 One of the central considerations of this project lies in rethinking modern philosophy and seeing it as a product of incomplete secularization. It is true, and it has been studied ad nauseam, that Renaissance and modern philosophy provokes a break with the Middle Ages, with the emergence of theories and systems that are presented as radically different. However, the debts, influences and, above all, the continuities with medieval philosophy are not pointed out with sufficient emphasis.

 Modern philosophy is the expression, at the conceptual level, of constitutional monarchies; that is, of the insufficiency of bourgeois revolutions, which are built on secular constitutions, but maintain the institution of royalty. In some ways, modern philosophy is both monarchical and constitutional. For example, in the case of Kant, the God expelled from pure reason returns with all his force to sustain practical reason; his philosophy is not without the features of a theodicy.

 For this reason, it becomes indispensable to establish a method of reading medieval philosophy that, as we know, is fully fused with theology and is built on the basis of truths that it considers revealed. A method that does not reduce medieval philosophy to a mere ideology that accompanies theology, but asks itself what it is saying about the world, even if it does so in a way that we do not easily understand. For example, how can theological and philosophical considerations about the Trinity help us understand contemporary questions about the shaping of the collective and individual spirit?

 Another particularly relevant aspect lies in the adoption of a comparative approach to philosophy, which should not be understood only as the existence of a subfield of philosophy that deals with the relationship between philosophies, as Alexus McLeod has shown, but as an essential element for the construction of a critical philosophy, which allows us to rethink the great paradigms of Western philosophy. In this way, a reconstruction of Amerindian philosophy or Zen Buddhism is included in cannibalistic hacking, which, in order to establish what it shares with Western philosophy and what differentiates it.

 The cannibalistic hacking of Western philosophy is far from being an isolated event and one can find largely similar perspectives in different fields, which start from different concerns, but which also lead to a critique of impure Western reason. For this reason, she learns and feeds on the currents of blackness, feminisms, intersectionality, environmentalisms and, especially, on theorizations coming from transgenderism.

 In fact, the stripping of Western thought takes from the transgender those fundamental and already generalized conceptual movements, transfers them to the philosophical sphere; for this, the transgender critique transforms itself into the Trans* operator and aims to blow up the Western canon, similar to the effect that transgender has on sexuality and gender. In this sense, it can also be said that transgender people cannibalically hack the field of gender.

 Inevitably, the question of the relationship with Marxism emerges, since one philosophizes in the conditions imposed by capitalism too late. The cannibalistic hack is fed by a close reading of Karl Marx, which shows Marx speaking for himself, before the conversion into what is called Western Marxism. What is the philosophy that Marx uses to analyze capitalism? Does it develop its own dialectic beyond Hegelian influences? If you read it carefully and carefully, since the publication of Mega 2, what essential aspects of your critique of Western reason should be taken up? Any critical proposal must include the emancipatory interest of theory, as Marx points out and practices.

 THE EXAMPLES

 Let us briefly point out some examples of cannibalistic hacking in Western philosophy. Before entering fully into the analysis of a philosophical work, it is convenient to determine the mode of reading to which we will submit it and which derives from the discursive characteristics of the text under consideration. Thus, A Thousand Plateaus by Deleuze and Guattari will be treated as a philosophical fiction, which describes a world foreign to ours, inhabited by other types of intelligent beings, rather close to a science fiction novel.

 Alain Badiou's works on the event should be understood as the realization of a Pythagorean dream, in which an area of mathematics fully coincides with social and political reality and allows it to be fully explained. Baudrillard's reading is not done from the perspective of the veritative analysis of his statements, it is no longer inquired whether they are true or false, and it is transferred to the gaze of the symptom, as an expression of the discomfort of culture, which this author expresses magnificently. Some of Derrida's texts, especially the late ones, instead of belonging to the philosophical sphere, are fragments of a theodicy that he never managed to complete.

 In Foucault's case, it starts from a crucial question about the ability to account for the origin and foundation of his own discourse. Are Foucault's theses applicable to his own writings? Do radical gaps emerge when this procedure is performed? If all knowledge depends on a power, what power does Foucault's knowledge derive from? Or is it an exception that proves the inadequacy of his theory?

 How can we read Lacan from a philosophical perspective without extracting him from the kidnapping of many of the psychoanalysts? Is it possible to analyze and interpret it without reducing it to some kind of Freudian version? What can Lacan say not only about the individual unconscious but also about the constitution of social subjects? Is the collective unconscious also structured as discourse and penetrated by the discourse of the Other?

 In other cases, the crisis of Western philosophy forces us to adopt other strategies. The loss of the explanatory capacity of philosophy in the face of the great social, political and technological transformations of humanity creates the conditions for the penetration of pseudophilosophies. The urgent need for answers to the pressing problems of collective and individual life leads to the acceptance of truly dubious and often toxic spiritual foods. This is the case of Byung-Chul Han, who represents the collapse of philosophy with self-help books, even with elements of a thought that works such as horoscopes or any other divinatory procedure. Why, when choosing a food for the body, do people stop, read the labels, make sure of the expiration date and think for a moment if it will be the right thing to consume; and when one seeks food for the spirit, one takes the first thing that appears or is fashionable, without stopping to reason whether it will be appropriate?

 The epistemologies of the South of Boaventura de Sousa Santos lack content; they do not find the cognitive procedures or methodologies that allow their application to reality, in addition to turning their backs on contemporary science. It is rather an ideological game without much effective support. On the other hand, there is no approximation, even if it were minimal, to the ways of knowing ancestral cultures and native peoples, which are completely ignored.

 On other occasions, which are not few, the cannibalistic hacking of Western philosophy recognizes the validity of various theories and conceptualizations in their eagerness to understand and transform the world. This is the case of Enrique Dussel, who contributed to creating an anti-colonial consciousness and the development of liberating ideas, with a clear emancipatory intention. However, the cannibalistic hack allows us to critically show the Eurocentric elements of his own thought, which is presented as the paradigm of opposition to Eurocentrism. Having lived for long years in Mexico, he was unable to recognize and learn from the philosophies of the Mesoamerican peoples, such as the ancient and modern Maya, the Tzeltals and Tzotzils, or to enter into an open debate with classic and current Zapatismo. For Dussel, these peoples lacked a philosophy of their own. A profound Eurocentric error that will also be characteristic of the theorists of decoloniality.

 DIRECT SOURCES

 It would be too extensive to place here all the debates and readings on which cannibalistic hacking feeds; for this reason, it refers only to the direct sources from which it starts. This project began as a concern to rethink aesthetics and art, especially in Latin America.

 Thus, it begins with the publication of the first volume of Cannibal Aesthetics, which continues with the research program on this subject in the Faculty of Arts of the University of Cuenca and the elaboration of two collective volumes and two individual volumes: Towards a new aesthetics in Latin America and Theory of form; and Cannibal Aesthetics, volume two and three, respectively. Here the dialogue with the work of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro and Philippe Descola, in the formulation of the cannibalistic thought of the Amazonian peoples, and the approaches to Bolívar Echeverría, to investigate the possibility of replacing the baroque ethos with a cannibalistic ethos, is particularly relevant. 

 In this context, cannibalistic aesthetics dialogue with hacker thinking, mainly formulated by McKenzie Wark, to lead to the notion of cannibalistic hacking. Finally, these theorizations go beyond the aesthetic sphere and are applied to Western thought through a series of studies. In a special way, we must refer to the Amerindian Ontology, which reconstructs the philosophical thought of the ancestral peoples of America, and the study that proposes an alternative and non-canonical dialectic through the close reading of Marx in The Scientific Spirit of Karl Marx.