Reversing the Load: Thinking from our Exteriority

Abstract

This writing aims to draw attention to the epistemological and ethical-political surveillance that is our duty to avoid migrating to other philosophies as a mechanism to experience what is identified as the other side of modernity and globalization of our time. In this sense, it invites us to think about everyday life from the heterogeneity, fluidity, antagonisms, and hybridity that constitute us as urban-modern subjects, based on the certainty that the decolonial experience is not exclusive to certain groups and territorialities. Of course, this assertion stems from a non-probabilistic sampling. It arises from the observation of colleagues, students, co-workers, to name a few, who express the need to be connected to the history and ways of being in the world/living in an alternative way, as the Andean world inhabitants do. They thus search to feel as part of the history of Abya Yala. Far from attempting to provide an answer as a result, this work invites us to reverse the loading, that is, to stop thinking from the other's exteriority to look from our own, understanding that we come into harmony, affinity and trust with the exteriority of the other from ours. Thus, reversing the load means establishing a non-hierarchical relationship of knowledge based on the recognition of common problems with other people due to having been and continuing to be colonized, even though we live in different places and have dissimilar trajectories. This is how it will be feasible to know and generate another thought and our own from our place of enunciation and habitation, without migrating to epistemes that do not belong to us. Only in this way will we stop seeing the other as different, running the risk of subalternizing it and imposing our agendas and concerns on it.