13 - Philosophy and the Outside: Foucault and Decolonial Thinking

Summary

The title ‘Philosophy and the Outside’ has to be understood as a name given to a confrontation. A confrontation between two outsides, two concepts of the outside, as well as two different philosophies and two different concepts of philosophy. All of them issue from the same problem, namely that ‘the outside’ can only become a philosophical issue if it points to a possible outside of philosophy itself. The first concept of ‘outside’ that I examine here comes from the inside of Western philosophy and gestures towards a new space of thinking that cannot continue to be called philosophy. The second I borrow from some prominent Latin-American thinkers and writers; it appears as the outside of the Western philosophical attempt at producing its own outside. It then opens an outside of the outside. The two approaches to the outside share many traits, but rapidly part ways.

The first concept is to be found in Foucault's text, Maurice Blanchot: The Thought from Outside. Foucault analyses the shift that gave birth, in the middle of the twentieth century, to what he calls ‘modern literature’. Modern literature defines a specific kind of writing that situates itself in a space where truth and falsity are deactivated and have lost their meaning. This writing does not write about anything else but the very act of writing. Its only justification is this simple statement: ‘I speak.’ ‘I speak’ are the first words of Foucault's piece. ‘“I speak”’, he says, ‘puts the whole modern fiction to the test’ (1987: 9). He contrasts the ‘I speak’ with the ‘I lie’ of the Cretan thinker Epimenides, famous for having exposed a paradox.

Epimenides the Cretan says ‘that all the Cretans are liars,’ but Epimenides is himself a Cretan; therefore he is himself a liar. But if he be a liar, what he says is untrue, and consequently the Cretans are veracious; but Epimenides is a Cretan, and therefore what he says is true; hence the Cretans are liars, Epimenides is himself a liar, and what he says is untrue. Thus we may go on alternately proving that Epimenides and the Cretans are truthful and untruthful. (Fowler 1869: 163)