Nelson Maldonado-Torres - Against War (Latin America Otherwise)

Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations is a critical series. It aims to explore the emergence and consequences of concepts used to define Latin America while at the same time exploring the broad interplay of political, economic, and cultural practices that have shaped Latin American worlds. Latin America, at the crossroads of competing imperial designs and local responses, has been construed as a geocultural and geopolitical entity since the nineteenth century. This series provides a starting point to redefine Latin America as a configuration of political, linguistic, cultural, and economic intersections that demands a continuous reappraisal of the role of the Americas in history and of the ongoing process of globalization and the relocation of people and cultures that have characterized Latin Americas experience. Latin America Otherwise: Languages, Empires, Nations is a forum that confronts established geocultural constructions, rethinks area studies and disciplinary boundaries, assesses convictions of the academy and of public policy, and correspondingly demands that the practices through which we produce knowledge and understanding about and from Latin America be subject to rigorous and critical scrutiny.

Against War argues that European modernity has become inextricably linked with the experience of the warrior and conqueror, and that contemporary civilization, racism, and other forms of social and geopolitical dynamics in the modern world can best be understood in terms of the idea that war, as Nietzsche affirmed, is the natural state of things. This paradigm of war, Maldonado-Torres shows, conceives humanity, knowledge, and social relations in such a way so as to privilege conflict as a means to create order. Against this paradigm and to offer an alternative to it, Maldonado-Torres asserts the viability of subaltern perspectives and secular/religious thought that he gathers from Jewish, black, and Latin American voices epitomized in the work of three philosophers: Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel.

Certainly many thinkers have addressed the challenges to Western philosophy and political theory posed by two world wars and the Jewish Holocaust, but Against War shifts the terrain of this critique by exploring connections among colonialism, racism, war, and genocide in the long history of European modernity. The book is divided into three parts. The first focuses on elucidating a master morality of dominion and control at the heart of racial policies, imperial projects, and wars of invasiona perspective centered on Levinass notion of the self in Judaic ethics within the context of French liberalism and Nazi racial politics. In the second part, Maldonado-Torres turns to Fanon, first to refine the diagnosis of modernitys war paradigm via Fanons phenomenology of the colonized and racial self, and second through a Levinasian interpretation of Fanon and a Fanonian critique of Levinas, which leads Maldonado-Torres to formulate an ethical conception of subjectivity and de-colonial praxis as consistent responses to the perversities of European modernity. Finally, in the third section, Maldonado-Torres uses Dussel to provide a genealogy of the modern imperial and warring self, and he ultimately offers a theorization of race as a naturalization of the death ethic of war.

Against War constitutes an important intervention in critical theory, critical race theory, area studies, and postcolonial thought. Its analysis of the unfinished projects of de-colonialization and deracialization contributes concepts intended to help undo the legacy of colonialism, racism, and war in the contemporary world.