Deconstruction from the South: On Bruno Mazzoldi and Jacques Derrida

To promote dialogue among different philosophical traditions as equals, I claim here that the world is populated by a plurality of philosophical languages. In so doing, I take the work of Bruno Mazzoldi—Italian thinker who consolidated his work in Nariño (an Andean department in the Colombian south) and Derrida’s translator into Spanish—as a starting point in that direction. Mazzoldi has directly responded to the question of whether there is a Latin American philosophy echoing in indigenous peoples’ languages: ‘Not only one but many. Here and anywhere, more than a philosophy it is worth talking about a plurality of philosophical languages’. Using such a perspective, Mazzoldi mentions that in Andean Quichua, a language that belongs to the Quechua family and which was the South American lingua franca before the Spanish conquest of the Inca world, a ‘philosopher’ is a huakaki—while huaka means the ‘unusual/beautiful/sacred’, the ‘cavern’, the ‘burial’, the ‘sepulchre’ and the ‘monstrosity’, the ‘thief’, the ‘madman’. This attempt at philosophical translation reminds us of the example of Babel which so fascinated Derrida. The book of Genesis relates the story of the tribe of the Shem who ‘wanted to make a name for itself by building a tower and imposing its language alone on all the peoples of the earth’. To punish the ambition of the Shem people, Yahweh destroyed the tower and imposed linguistic differentiation on earth. It turned out in the end to be a valuable gift, which supposed ‘both the necessity and the impossibility of translation’.

Since then, tribes and languages have been dispersed and confused. Nevertheless, as Mazzoldi’s example shows, ‘[a]s absolute confusion is unthinkable, just as is absolute understanding, the text is by definition “situated” in this milieu, and thus every text calls for a translation which will never be finished’. In this sense, Mazzoldi points out that the negation of indigenous philosophers and texts, in this particular case, those huakikuna of Quichua-speaking regions, can be as abusive as denying the value of indigenous concepts.  It also restricts the possibility of having a one-on-one dialogue between different philosophical traditions. There is probably no better way to translate the word deconstruction than to do so as a plurality of philosophical languages following Mazzoldi’s endeavour, or by means of more than one language according to Derrida himself. Thus, the activity of the philosopher as well as the work of the huakakikuna would be neither totally untranslatable nor fully translatable: ‘condemned not to total incomprehension, but to a work of translation which will never be accomplished’.

Mazzoldi, who has held a friendly dialogue with Derrida since the seventies, and one of his most assiduous readers in Latin America, has developed an insightful reading of the Franco-Algerian philosopher located in the time and space of the Andean and Amazonian regions. Remarkably, he has found resonances between the thought of Derrida and indigenous thinkers such as Quintín Lame—a Colombian radical indigenous leader from the first half of the twentieth century. During his residence in southern Colombia, Mazzoldi found inspiration in the Andean world to promote a deconstructive agenda based on popular traditions. Furthermore, Mazzoldi, as huakaki, has incorporated Quichua, an indigenous language that continues to be spoken in Colombia and Ecuador, within his writings, as well as the voices of the indigenous leaders he has encountered.

Connecting indigenous philosophical conceptions of the world with some of the most suggestive ideas of deconstructive practices, Mazzoldi proposes reading Derrida vis-à-vis indigenous knowledge. From his reading of Derrida, there are at least three philosophical and anthropological endeavors that are crucial to comprehending his work. First, the capability of understanding indigenous knowledge as knowledge, challenging Eurocentric thought that continues to label indigenous cosmologies and systems of justice as ‘folklore’. Yet, the possibility of overcoming the violence of this unjust judgment by those who do not understand ‘our language,’ rests on the recognition of the singularity of the idioms. According to Derrida:

The violence of this injustice that consists of judging those who do not understand the idiom in which one claims, as one says in French, that ‘justice est faite,’ (‘justice is done,’ ‘made’) is not just any violence, any injustice. This injustice supposes that the other, the victim of the language’s injustice is capable of a language in general, is a man as a speaking animal, in the sense that we, men, give to this word, language. Moreover, there was a time, not long ago and not yet over, in which ‘we, men’ meant ‘we adult white male Europeans, carnivorous and capable of sacrifice.’

Second, Mazzoldi has related the existence of a plurality of philosophical languages to the possibility of inventing new concepts through interaction between Western and indigenous languages. The reading of Derrida vis-à-vis José María Arguedas has made this endeavor possible. Indeed, Arguedas invented a language for his novels in which the Quechua syntax joined the Spanish: ‘He succeeded in instilling into his Spanish the sentence structure, the rhythm, and even some vocabulary of the Andean people’. In so doing, Arguedas has indigenized the Spanish he used showing the fertility of indigenous concepts. Specifically, the inspiration comes from the novel Yawar Fiesta that is also the name of a complex bullfighting ceremony in which the bull, introduced by the Spanish conquistadors, dies ‘into the hands’ of a condor, a sacred Andean animal. The tying of a condor to the back of the bull connotes the violence of colonization as well as the struggle and victory of indigenous peoples. The celebration begins when the condor, epitomizing the resistance of indigenous communities, triumphs over the bull, embodying the colonizer and plunderer.

Finally, drawing on Andean and Amazonian ontologies where indigenous peoples interact with other animal and plant species as human persons, Mazzoldi critiques the most dominant philosophical traditions where animals have been treated as spiritually dead objects. In Andean and Amazonian ontologies, the only difference between animal and plants species and human ‘humans’ lies in their bodies. ‘In effect, nonhumans regard themselves as humans, and view both human ‘humans’ and other non-humans as animals, either predator or prey, since predation is the basic mode of relation.’ Outstandingly, the ontological trend by which indigenous peoples at large conceive the relationship between humanity—animality appears throughout Derrida’s work. In various passages of Force of Law—sadly forgotten by most commentators—the cutting-edge thinker has criticized the anthropocentrism that has been at the core of the reflections on the just and unjust within Western philosophy: ‘In the space in which I am situating these remarks or reconstituting this discourse one would not speak of injustice or violence toward an animal, even less toward a vegetable or a stone. An animal can be made to suffer, but we will never say, in a sense considered proper, that it is a wronged subject […].’

By the same token, The Animal that Therefore I am, collects key philosophical questions ranging from Bentham’s decisive question about animals: ‘Can they suffer?’ to Kafka’s vast zoopoetics; and of course, the well known episode when Montaigne makes fun of ‘man’s impudence’ regarding his capacity to allocate or refuse specific faculties to the ‘beasts’. Mazzoldi points out that in indigenous cosmologies the experience of being goes far beyond the human world—the same criticism that Derrida posed to Heidegger. This is essential in terms of indigenous thinking because in the Amazonian and Andean cases, among others, humans and non-humans interact as living beings in everyday life.

Paulo Ilich Bacca

Paulo Ilich Bacca is a legal ethnographer. He is lecturing anthropology of international law and indigenous peoples’ rights from the global south at the National University of Colombia. Paulo has had the opportunity to interact with indigenous communities of Australia, Bolivia, Colombia, Ecuador, United States, and Perú. His fieldwork experience in these places has become a key component of his research, and the information gathered in his fieldwork journals has allowed him to include an ethnographical methodology in his work, and to use sources generally excluded from the dominant academic circle in his teaching.