The topology of being and the geopolitics of knowledge

Abstract

This essay by Nelson Maldonado-Torres examines the conjunction of race and space in the work of several European thinkers. It focuses on Martin Heidegger's project of Searching for roots in the West. This project of searching for roots is unmasked as being complicit with an imperial cartographical vision that creates and divides the cities of the gods and the cities of the damned. Maldonado-Torres identifies similar conceptions in other Western thinkers, most notably Levinas, Negri, Zizeck, Habermas, and Derrida. To the project of searching for roots and its racist undertones, he opposes a Fanonian critical vision that highlights the constitutive character of coloniality and damnation for the project of European modernity. He concludes with a call for radical diversality and a decolonial geopolitics of knowledge.