Returning the anti-colonial to philosophy

This essay presents a view of thinking – of the doing of philosophy - as a praxis of anti-colonial encounter. Through this perspective of encounter we bring to view the opposition between the two locations of being-thinking corresponding to the two actualities described above: 1) the (post)colonial location from which are (re)presented and enforced (b)orders of subjectification; 2) the anti-colonial locations from which are confronted frontlines of desubjectification. This counterposing of the (post)colonial border and the anti-colonial frontline serves to demarcate the (post)colonial and anti-colonial as incommensurable philosophical orientations as they stand in enunciative and interpretive confrontation; what this reveals is the function of the “post-colonial” as a discursive category which operates to normalise the (b)orders of contemporary global coloniality. As such, to think from anti-colonial frontlines is to repudiate the assumptions of author-ity inherent in colonial philosophies that continue to organise and narrate the post-colonial World as a (b)ordered totality. From this re-appropriation of philosophical author-ity we might affirm the many insurgent struggles for the material transformation of worlds as indeed continuing the legacy of anti-colonial hope and imagination – to ‘be-otherwise’ – in the face of (post)colonial closure