An International Workshop on Decoloniality, Infrapolitics, and the Anthropocene. Sponsored by the Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research Initiative on Humanities and the Anthropocene. Texas A&M University, November 6-9, 2024
Decolonial theory has become, over the last twenty years, a powerful trend in contemporary critical thought. The decolonial option is premised on the need to emancipate populations and individuals from imperial/colonial remnants that are the historical residue of Western dominance through modernity. But, roughly during the same years, and also emerging out of what used to be called Latin American Area Studies, another critical tendency has been slowly developing: what we call infrapolitics, not to be confused with the kind of infrapoliticstheorized by James C. Scott and allies as modalities of subaltern political resistance. Infrapolitics in our sense—we can also present it as marrano infrapolitics-- thinks of itself as the possibility of developing thought beyond metaphysical constraints, that is, beyond the forms of thought consonant with metaphysical modernity. If decoloniality finds its genealogy in the myriad attempts to reach liberation from social and political oppression and its cultural legacies, infrapolitics is a radicalization of a tradition that may begin with Nietzsche’s announcement of the death of the onto-theological God, which is also the god of secularization and political theology. We do not have to conceal the fact that marrano infrapolitics owes much of its momentum to an ongoing engagement with post-Heideggerian thought, including Derridean deconstruction.
Given the fact that the Anthropocene, in its worst possible outcomes, is conditioned on Western productionism, and given the fact that Western productionism is both the result and the cause of Western metaphysics and its imperial projections, it is not difficult to find a common field of engagement in the destruction of onto-theological presuppositions for the sake of a new clearing and of a new politics of the real. We find consonances between these two theoretical projects and other projects such as Afropessimism/Black Ops, the work done over the years by people associated to the Invisible Committee in France and Italy, and a number of tendencies in third- and fourth-wave feminisms and queer studies. But we want to make it explicit that a good use of all that theoretical energy is now to come from an engagement with the possibility of an exit from the Anthropocene and a new beginning of planetary thought.
It has been all too comfortable for many non-Spanish-speaking intellectuals in the academic sphere to bracket both decoloniality and infrapolitics as critical tendencies confined to their own parochial interests and subaltern positions. Our very division—the fact that decoloniality and infrapolitics rarely talk to each other--has enabled such a state of affairs, which merits correction. The specificity and particularity of this proposal—decoloniality versus infrapolitics versus the Anthropocene—is premised on the need to break a critical impasse in order to open up the field of discussion, so we will welcome any third positions.
The reasons for the mutual silencing are not primarily intellectual: they are rather political in the bad sense of the term. It is fair to say that they have made the life of junior members of the professional field interested in theory more difficult than it would otherwise have been at every level. In fact, at times they have paralyzed theoretical discussion. At its crudest point, people working along the lines of decoloniality reproach infrapolitics, more often implicitly than explicitly, with being Eurocentric and antipolitical; and people working on infrapolitics, also more often implicitly, think that decolonial theory is mostly declamatory and postulated on an arcanum that never comes to light and can never come to light. Those mutual accusations are in our opinion counterfactual and do not respond to the actual discursive reality of any of the tendencies.
The November Workshop will gather together people associated with either one of the tendencies and people who have remained relatively alien to both. We have invited twenty-one outside speakers—namely, María del Rosario Acosta, Angel Octavio Alvarez Solís, José Luis Barrios, Jon Beasley-Murray, MatíasBeverinotti, Laura Graciela Campos, Alejandra Castillo, Federico Galende, Humberto González Núñez, Carlos Gómez Camarena, Miguel Gualdrón, Felipe Larrea, Juan Leal-Ugalde, Gabriela Méndez Cota, Gerardo Muñoz, Eliza Mizrahi, Juan Diego Pérez, Willy Thayer, Nancy Tuana, Sergio Villalobos-Ruminott, Gareth Williams—to come to campus, where they will be received by a group of Texas A&M scholars who are, on the faculty side, Benjamin Davis, Maddalena Cerrato, Don Deere, Alberto Moreiras, Omar Rivera, and Teresa Vilarós and, on the graduate student side, Rafael Fernández, José Ortiz-Angeles, Ananya Ravishankar, Rodrigo de los Santos, Nora Tsou.
They have all been invited to present their work on their own terms, but not eluding conversation and even confrontation with the other panelists and their critical presuppositions. The results, we are hoping, will be lively and productive, and might even turn the tables on the present state of affairs in theoretical discussion.
