Knowledge and Corporeality

The epistemologies of the South deal with knowledges present in or emerging from the resistance to and the struggle against oppression, knowledges that are, therefore, embodied in concrete bodies, whether collective or individual. This embodied character of knowledge poses many challenges. The epistemologies of the North are grounded in the idea of the rational subject, a subject that is epistemic rather than concrete or empirical. Kant, the author of the most monumental treatise in the Western philosophy of subjectivity, underscores emphatically this distinction when he writes, in the epigraph to The Critique of Pure Reason, “de nobis sibi silemus” (about ourselves we say nothing). That is to say, the separation of subject from object, rendered fundamental since Descartes, is possible only on the condition that the only relevant subject is the epistemic subject, not empirical ones. The latter must be silenced, not only because they are subjected to the contamination of the object, but also because the German language), the ones conducting the struggles against oppression; they are themselves easily convertible into someone else’s objects.

According to the epistemologies of the South, embodied knowledge comes alive in living bodies (Leib and not Körper, to use an enlightening distinction in they are the bodies that suffer with the defeats and rejoice with the victories.

Both individual and collective bodies are social bodies. Collective bodies, as social groups or classes, castes, sects, peoples, or nations, are the bearers of the struggles but, ultimately, those who suffer or rejoice are the individual bodies.

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Even though we think and know with the body, even though it is with the body that we have perception, experience, and memory of the world, the body tends to be seen as a mere support for or tabula rasa of all the valuable things produced by human beings. This is particularly so as regards Eurocentric knowledge, whether scientific or not, in view of the cultural, Judeo-Christian presuppositions underlying it, saturated as such presuppositions are with the sharp distinction between body and soul.

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The epistemologies of the North have great difficulty in embracing the body in all its emotional and affective density, without turning it into one more object of study. They cannot conceive of the body as an ur-narrative, a somatic narrative that precedes and sustains the narratives of which the body speaks or writes. The fact that the latter narratives are the only ones that are epistemologically relevant is premised upon the concealment of the somatic narrative that grounds them. The body thus necessarily becomes an absent presence.

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The epistemologies of the South cannot accept the forgetting of the body because social struggles are not processes that unfold from rational kits. They are the product of complex bricolages in which reasoning and arguments mix with emotions, sorrows and joys, loves and hatreds, festivity and mourning. Emotions are the door to and the path of life in struggle. And bodies are as much at the center of the struggles as the struggles are at the center of the bodies. The bodies are performative and thus renegotiate and expand or subvert the existing reality through what they do. As they act, they act upon themselves; as they say, they say of themselves and to themselves. Mobility and immobility, silence and the cry, all are vital energies that inscribe marks on the bodies, marks that stay beyond the struggles and their successes.

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Meaning and Copresence

Corazonar and intimate sufficiencies call for a complex articulation between sharing meaning and being copresent in the specific context of struggle. I have been stressing that meaning does not necessarily involve conceptual language and that narrative and storytelling maybe even more powerful tools to make social experiences separated by time, space, and culture mutually accessible, intelligible, and relevant. It is, however, necessary to go beyond this and to show that sharing risks often involves particularly intense moments of copresence, moments in which presence precedes meaning.

Presence is the thingness or materiality upon which meanings are built. It refers to bodies, signs, sounds, and materials in their nonsemantic capacity, that is, in their direct or immediate access to our senses. It is a form of being that, as Gumbrecht rightly states, “refers to the things of the world before they become part of a culture” (2004: 70). It is through meaning that things become culturally specific and often also incommensurable or unintelligible to other cultures. In my view, such things are not outside a culture; they are rather inside but in a different, noncultural way. They have a prerepresentational capacity for being outside thought and consciousness, while grounding thought and consciousness. They are material and operate at the level of instinct, emotion, affect.

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Of the authors that have drawn our attention to the nonsemantic dimensions of interaction and communication, Gumbrecht (2004: 79) is the most eloquent in counterposing cultures that are dominated by presence (presence-cultures) and cultures that are dominated by meaning (meaning-cultures). Of course, in all cultures there is presence and meaning, but the emphasis on one or the other varies across cultures. Modern Western culture and the epistemologies of the North it grounds is a meaning-culture. On the contrary, the epistemologies of the South privilege interculturality. Non-Western cultures are best understood as presence-cultures. In intercultural exchanges specifically, the role of presence is to propitiate the generation of a sense of commonality, of culturally indifferent diversity, and of immediate evidence. A bundle of mutilated bodies in a killing field, the skinny body of a child about to die of hunger, the cry of a woman over the dead body of her young son, the sight of a man’s or woman’s naked body, an ecstatic movement or posture, the body’s movements, the smells, the instruments and the ingredients in the performance of a ritual, all these presences are endowed with a power that seems relatively autonomous in relation to the meanings that may be attributed to them.