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.
