Prolegomena to Any Future Decolonial Ethics: Coloniality, Poetics and ‘Being Human as Praxis’
| DOI | 10.1177/0305829817704503 |
| Author | Louiza Odysseos |
| Date | 01 June 2017 |
| Published date | 01 June 2017 |
| Subject Matter | Conference Articles |
https://doi.org/10.1177/0305829817704503
Millennium: Journal of
International Studies
2017, Vol. 45(3) 447 –472
© The Author(s) 2017
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DOI: 10.1177/0305829817704503
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Prolegomena to Any Future
Decolonial Ethics: Coloniality,
Poetics and ‘Being Human as
Praxis’
Louiza Odysseos
University of Sussex, UK
Abstract
Decolonial thought has wrought a devastating critique on the Academy and wide-ranging fields
within it. Decolonial critique entails undeniable and multiple ethico-political orientations arising
from concrete struggles within the ‘unfinished project of decolonization’ (Maldonado-Torres), as
well as recent articulations of decolonial ethics. This article argues that, as decolonial critique,
and calls for decolonial ethics, begin to find their way into broader theoretical discussions in
the social sciences and humanities, it may be more fruitful to insist on the question of decolonial
ethics. It encourages retaining the disruptive potential of decolonial critique by resisting its
immediate translations into available ethical registers and traditions that unwittingly reassert, and
remain bound to, forms of ethical expression dependent on generalised narratives, which occlude
their histories of violent and racialised exclusion and masterful figurations of ethical subjectivity.
Outlining Sylvia Wynter’s excavation of prominent figurations of the human as ‘Man’, I argue that
our conceptions of ethical subjects too rest on such figurations. The article, therefore, discusses
three prolegomena to any future decolonial ethics: the decolonial critique and displacement of the
figure of ‘Man’ as ethical subject within racialised coloniality; the development of a decolonising
poetics, whose ethos of irreverence seeks forms of poetic revolt that draw on struggles to
question systems of ethical thought and knowledge; finally, a discussion of the contours of a praxis
of being hybridly human through the development of ‘education’ as an incessant and ‘unfinished’
project.
Keywords
decolonial ethics, poetics, coloniality, sociogeny, struggles
Corresponding author:
Louiza Odysseos, Department of International Relations, School of Global Studies, University of Sussex,
Falmer, Brighton BN1 9SJ, UK.
Email: l.odysseos@sussex.ac.uk
704503MIL0010.1177/0305829817704503Millennium: Journal of International StudiesOdysseos
research-article2017
Conference Article
448 Millennium: Journal of International Studies 45(3)
1. Nelson Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being’, Cultural Studies 21, no. 2–3
(2007): 263, doi:10.1080/09502380601162548; cf. seminal contributions critically drawing
on and reworking key insights of continental thought from Karl Marx, Jurgen Habermas,
Karl-Otto Apel and Emmanuel Levinas through geopolitical and concrete struggles of
decolonisation, see Enrique Dussel, Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization
and Exclusion, ed. Alejandro A. Vallega, trans. Eduardo Mendieta et al. (Durham: Duke
University Press, 2013); Also drawing on Levinas, Fanon and Dussel, see the phenomeno-
logical and ethical discussion in Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the
Underside of Modernity (Durham: Duke University Press Books, 2008).
2. Enrique Dussel, Philosophy of Liberation, trans. Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky
(Maryknoll: Orbis Books, 1985); Dussel, Ethics of Liberation; Maldonado-Torres, Against War.
3. Maldonado-Torres, Against War, 100 and 12.
4. Maldonado-Torres, ‘On the Coloniality of Being’.
5. Dussel, Ethics of Liberation, xvi–xvii.
6. Cf. discussions of this in the essays found in Lewis R. Gordon and Jane Anna Gordon, eds.,
Not Only the Master’s Tools: African-American Studies in Theory and Practice (Boulder:
Paradigm Publishers, 2006).
The Question of a Decolonial Ethics
The multiple and intersecting strands of decolonial thought have wrought a devastating
critique on the Academy and wide-ranging fields within it: historical and contemporary
political economy, history and historiography, epistemology and orders of knowledge,
and aesthetics. Decolonial critique entails undeniable and multiple ethico-political orien-
tations arising from concrete struggles within the ‘unfinished project of decolonization’
and evincing the desire for new forms of relationality.1 Decolonial scholars such as
Nelson Maldonado-Torres have already begun the task of developing a decolonial ethics.2
He critically develops Fanon’s thought to reflect on the ‘forms of critique and practices’
that are needed to enable the unworking of the ‘anti-ethical’ system that is colonialism,
whilst also mobilising Enrique Dussel’s earlier development of the notion of ‘transmo-
dernity’, which ‘transgresses’ the ‘abstract universals’ of colonial modernity.3 Indeed,
his mapping of what he calls the ‘non-ethics of war’ that distinguish modernity as an
epoché, and as a set of colonial practices of violence and dehumanisation, informs the
engagement with the decolonial critique offered below.4
Dussel’s newly translated Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and
Exclusion builds on his earlier philosophy of liberation to articulate an ethics on behalf
of ‘the victims’ and ‘the poor’. Informed by his own broader contributions to decolonial
thinking, Ethics of Liberation is an encompassing and broadly conceived work that
attempts a remarkable synthesis of normative ethics and formal morality. Engaging and
incorporating insights from a vastly diverse range of ethical approaches, ranging from
the ‘formal morality’ of discourse ethics all the way to the varied contributions of utili-
tarianism, communitarianism and American pragmatism, as well as scientific accounts
of affective desires shaping activist praxis, it eclectically combines elements from each
to offer a foundation for an ethics of ‘life… grounded in factual, empirical, and descrip-
tive judgments’.5 Dussel is aware that his synthetic approach opens him up to a range of
criticisms, including that he collapses back onto the canon of Western modernity – onto
the ‘master’s tools’, so to speak.6 He is less concerned with ‘this ethics’ explicit
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