Last January, the Minister of Culture, Ernest Urtasun, announced a laudable process of reviewing the collections of the 16 state museums, with the aim of eliminating traces of the colonial past, as well as gender or ethnocentric inertia, all within the framework of an international commitment that Spain has signed. In this delicate area, a revisionist program does not seem easy to draw up. It will be necessary to decide what to show, what to remove, how to curate, how to talk about the relationship of the former metropolises with the colonies and how to give voice to a memory without an archive. In this sense, we have already witnessed a first, and perhaps somewhat lukewarm, incursion, in this case in the Thyssen Museum and its exhibition on the subject of colonial memory in its collections.
In the meantime, we have read statements aimed at relativizing and diminishing the colonial past, which ignore the humiliations, the coercive methods, the massacres, tortures and crimes inflicted on the colonized. I then recalled the words of some thinkers, whom it is worth bringing to the fore. Thus, in 1961, Frantz Fanon wrote in his work The Wretched of the Earth: “The well-being and progress of Europe have been built with the sweat and corpses of blacks, Indians and yellows. We have decided not to forget it.” A few years earlier, his teacher, Aimé Césaire, in his Speech on colonialism, He said: “If we were to bring Europe before the tribunal of reason and conscience, it could not be justified. Europe,” he continued, “permits killing in Indochina, torture in Madagascar, imprisonment in Africa and ravaging the Antilles.” That is why Europe is, he says, indefensible, morally and spiritually. Césaire goes even further, arguing that, in essence, what the twentieth-century bourgeois cannot forgive Hitler for is not exactly the crime that his machinery committed, but the crime against the white man; not the humiliation itself, but the fact that Europe has applied colonialist procedures to Europe, which until then had only concerned the Arabs of Algeria or the blacks of Africa. The thesis is strong, because it affirms the existence of Auschwitz before Auschwitz, which displaces one of the deepest and most paradigmatic European wounds from the chosen place of the unique event to a mere version of human brutality, and, consequently, that Nazism is not an anomaly of Western politics, but a continuation of modern European colonial expansion, which uses on itself the methods always used against the non-European world, inveterate in that dark side of modernity that is coloniality.
Eduardo Galeano reminds us that when Namibia gained independence in 1990, the main avenue in its capital was still called Göring, but not after Hermann, the famous Nazi leader, but in homage to his father Heinrich, who was one of the perpetrators of the first genocide of the 20th century. It was then, he continues, that the word Göring was first uttered. Concentration camp, which was already then the place where confinement, forced labor and scientific experimentation were combined, the latter then in the hands of Mengele’s teachers.
Fanon and Césaire are thinkers. They are not Europeans and they are not white, but black and from Martinique. From them, decolonial thought takes the floor and with it appears the demand not only to denounce colonialist procedures, but to speak from a body and a place other than the hegemonic one. The word of philosophy was from the beginning white, male and European, and it always thought about and from itself. When Descartes pronounces his famous sentence “I think, therefore I am”, he is speaking from and for an abstract and universal reason, which does not contemplate differences. For this reason, it should be replaced by the formula “I think where I exist”, a where that indicates that it is not the same to think about a woman’s body, or a black body, or a trans body, or to think from Latin America, from Africa, from Europe or from the borders. Philosophy, thought, must therefore be a geocorpophilosophy, a decentralized thought, an alternative paradigm. However much one might wish to establish it, there is no zero degree of epistemology: knowledge cannot be objective, neutral or universal, because thought inevitably possesses a geography of flesh. Ontology must be broken into other, peripheral, mixed, racial ontologies, which means that thought must undergo a displacement and a deterritorialization.
It is not Europe that is at stake, but Eurocentrism. We have the opportunity to, in the words of Enrique Dussel, draw up a geopolitics of knowledge. The review that has now begun is on that path, but it must be careful not to repeat Central European sovereignty. It must go beyond mere European do-goodism, make it possible to think from outside the palace and be a true praxis. The task is not easy, and not only because of the management and logistics involved, but also because it delves into an important philosophical problem: that of the consideration of the other, that of the treatment of otherness, and, linked to that, that of how to show it, how to give a voice to that other without speaking for him.
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