The ethos of the colonial world’s peripheral territories: thinking from bodies, power and subjectivation

Abstract

Starting from a transdisciplinary approach, this philosophical essay deals with the processes of subjectivation configured in the peripheral territories of the colonial world. It proposes a comprehensive reading of the moral legacy of colonial-slavery relations, with regard to the constitution of the ethos still in force in these territories. It is based on the contributions of thinkers associated with fields such as Recognition Theory, Discourse Analysis, Biopower Analytics and Colonial and Decolonial Studies, to describe historically and politically constituted normative forms through which the full recognition of humanity — enunciated according to European normative parameters — was and continues to be denied to peripheral bodies. It states that the ethical and evaluative profile configured on the peripheries of the colonial world has been updated, since the birth of the Modern Era, by the institution of reiterated discourses and practices that operate to reduce the moral status of countless bodies, relegating them to the condition of non-persons. Thus, it uses the notion of peripheral bodies to describe a mode of subjectivation that can fall on countless corporeality and experiences marked by the experience of colonial violence. It is about imagining a category of ethical-political intelligibility that inscribes all bodies historically marked by modern-colonial domination, even if they no longer inhabit the peripheral territories of this world.Thus, the constitution of this ethos starts to be read through the collective processes of production of social subjects, triggered by typically modern devices of subjectivation, such as devices of race, class, ability and gender, which endlessly reproduce and update the configurations of a colonial biopower.