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Meridional. Chilean Journal of Latin American Studies is pleased to invite you to participate in the dossier “Relevance of Latin American Marxism: Thinking from, with, and beyond Michael Löwy’s work”, which consists in our 21st volume, to be published in October 2023. 

Derivations of biopolitics in the current arena: the notions of coloniality and decoloniality according to Michel Foucault

Authors

Abstract

This article proposes to carry out an analysis based on an inverse journey to that of the research works investigating the link between postcolonial studies and Foucault’s thought which has focused on the possible appropriation and the critique that these studies make of the philosopher’s concepts. In contrast to them, this article shows that that matrix of thought offers tools and categories that allow dealing with coloniality and decoloniality, and that these concepts are linked, in the first place, with the strong critique that the philosopher formulates to the ideas of “the human”, truth, history, power, knowledge and language, highlighting the scope and potentialities of these proposals. At the same time, and being consistent with these proposals, we make explicit the notion of coloniality as a phenomenon of power, domination and production of subjectivity of our present time, in which we highlight other figures of “the human” that continue to define the contemporary scene in this same sense. Finally, we propose a series of tentative conclusions about the idea of “the human” in the current scene of postcolonial societies, such as the Latin American ones, as an epilogue to the problems raised.

Keywords:

colonialidad, decolonialidad, Foucault, dominación, subjetividad