ON THE COLONIALITY OF BEING

The concept of coloniality of Being emerged in discussions of a diverse group of scholars doing work on coloniality and decolonization. More particularly, we owe the idea to Walter D. Mignolo, who reflected on it in writing as early as 1995. I do not remember exactly when it was that I heard or read the term for the first time I believe that it was in 2000 in a talk given by Mignolo at Boston College but I do know that since I heard it, it caught my attention in an unusual way. The reason was that when I heard it I had already spent some time working on the thought of Martin Heidegger and some of his critics who engaged his work from the perspective of questions related to race and the colonial experience. Heidegger, who is considered by many one of the two most original European philosophers of the twentieth century (the other being Ludwig Wittgenstein), left an indelible mark in European philosophy by continuing Nietzsche’s frontal attack of modernity and epistemologicallycentered philosophy with an elaboration of what he referred to as fundamental ontology. Heidegger’s formulation of a new starting point for philosophy consisted in a rearticulation of the question of Being, which influenced many other intellectuals thereafter, the most notable perhaps being the FrenchAlgerian philosopher Jacques Derrida. I was introduced to Heidegger by Joan Stambaugh who spent some time working with him in Germany. She translated several of his works in English, including Heidegger’s magnus opus Being and Time . After I read Heidegger with her, I began to engage the phenomenological tradition and particularly the work of Jean-Paul Sartre, Edmund Husserl, and eventually also Jacques Derrida. I gradually became aware, at least to the extent that a young scholar can be, of the varied accents, the original approaches, and the different questions that were at the center of these and other philosophers who drew ideas from phenomenology. But it was not until I read the work of the Lithuanian Jewish thinker Emmanuel Lévinas that I woke up from what I would call my ‘phenomenological and ontological slumber’. Lévinas’s work was not only a variation of European philosophy or the phenomenological theme. In Lévinas I found a more radical subversion of Western philosophy. He thought through not only Greek and European, but also Judaic sources. Jewish concepts and ideas replaced Greek and Christian concepts in key parts