Cosmopolitanism to Come: Derrida, Mignolo, and Latin American “Border Thinking”
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.18537/iuris.20.01.07Keywords:
derrida, mignolo, cosmopolitanism, democracy to come, border thinking, cosmos, voicesAbstract
We live in age where diversity is increasingly accepted as a value as well as a fact. But this development is also contested by a global rise in authoritarian nationalism. To help us abet the former and resist the latter, cosmopolitanism must propose a notion of global unity that is composed of rather than imposed on difference. Jacques Derrida and Walter Mignolo offer different versions of this view of cosmopolitanism. Derrida’s is based on his notion of “democracy to come.” He characterizes this idea as an “unconditional” or “quasi-transcendental” injunction. Mignolo’s cosmopolitanism castigates this injunction as an “abstract universal.” He offers instead “a critical and dialogic” view of cosmopolitanism that is based more specifically on the “colonial difference” or “border thinking” of Latin American subaltern groups. I argue that Derrida’s many references to “voices,” and Mignolo’s to the voices of the Zapatistas in Mexico, imply that the dialogic interplay among these discourses simultaneously holds them together and keeps them apart, forming the multivoiced body that we call society. This agonistic interaction produces new voices and resists the “oracles” that would attempt to convert it into a homogeneous discourse. Moreover, my version of the two thinkers’ use of ‘voice’ retains the universality of Derrida’s unconditional injunction but on the basis of the worldly immanency urged by Mignolo’s border thinking. The universality consists in a reworking of Derrida’s idea of “unconditional hospitality” so that we can speak of ourselves, other species, and natural formations – all the inhabitants of the cosmos – as voices with wildly different “tongues.” In Mignolo’s turn, this vocal viewpoint allows us to stretch his ideas of “subaltern” and “border thinking” so that they refer to all marginalized inhabitants of the cosmos and to the commitment that all will be heard by all.
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