Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity

by Nelson Maldonado-Torres

Nelson Maldonado-Torres argues that European modernity has become inextricable from the experience of the warrior and conqueror. In Against War , he develops a powerful critique of modernity, and he offers a critical response combining ethics, political theory, and ideas rooted in Christian and Jewish thought. Maldonado-Torres focuses on the perspectives of those who inhabit the underside of western modernity, particularly Jewish, black, and Latin American theorists. He analyzes the works of the Jewish Lithuanian-French philosopher and religious thinker Emmanuel Levinas, the Martiniquean psychiatrist and political thinker Frantz Fanon, and the Catholic Argentinean-Mexican philosopher, historian, and theologian Enrique Dussel. Considering Levinas’s critique of French liberalism and Nazi racial politics, and the links between them, Maldonado-Torres identifies a “master morality” of dominion and control at the heart of western modernity. This master morality constitutes the center of a warring paradigm that inspires and legitimizes racial policies, imperial projects, and wars of invasion. Maldonado-Torres refines the description of modernity’s war paradigm and the Levinasian critique through Fanon’s phenomenology of the colonized and racial self and the politics of decolonization, which he reinterprets in light of the Levinasian conception of ethics. Drawing on Dussel’s genealogy of the modern imperial and warring self, Maldonado-Torres theorizes race as the naturalization of war’s death ethic. He offers decolonial ethics and politics as an antidote to modernity’s master morality and the paradigm of war. Against War advances the de-colonial turn, showing how theory and ethics cannot be conceived without politics, and how they all need to be oriented by the imperative of decolonization in the modern/colonial and postmodern world.

Genres: Philosophy, Politics, Nonfiction

360 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 2008

Reviews

[Jeremy Garber · Rating 5 out of 5]

Simply put, this is the most brilliant book I’ve read since Deleuze and Guattari’s Capitalism and Schizophrenia. Maldonado-Torres argues that an ontology of war underpins the entire project of modernity. He does so by examining the work of Emmanual Levinas, Franz Fanon, and a theorist with whom I was unfamiliar, a European Latin American named Enrique Dussell. Against the paradigm of war, which privileges conflict and the reduction of individuals to universalities and generalities, Maldonado-Torres advances the de-colonial or transmodern turn, which affirms difference and the importance of those who have transformed their experience of violence into goodness toward the Other. Along the way, he eloquently summarizes Levinas’ “Reflections on the Philosophy of Hitlerism” (unfortunately relevant to the current struggles of 2019) to Otherwise than Being; analyzes Fanon’s existentialism of the relation between Master and Slave; and introduces Dussell’s reflections on the Other not as unknowable but as the concrete person of the marginalized and oppressed.

Maldonado-Torres’ careful yet readable work provides a foundation for those of us committed to the work of liberating the oppressed and marginalized without carelessly replicating the ontology of violence. His work describes clearly the limits of Othering and dehumanizing, which any revolutionary movement can fall into and become the new oppressor. What is at stake, lest we endlessly reproduce the binary violence of modernism, is not seizing the reigns of power but creating a new ontology and epistemology that redefines relationality and power altogether – a task that Maldonado-Torres says is the basic task of the transmodern philosopher of decolonialism. I may very well begin to refer to myself as a transmodern theologian – and I have Maldonado-Torres to thank for that definition.

[Geo · Rating 5 out of 5]

this will be out in a couple of months, but i got to read a lot of it a couple years ago. brings together levinas, dussel, and fanon to construct a thorough decolonial philosophy...

[Salvador Herrera · Rating 4 out of 5]

Maldonado-Torres unpacks the philosophies of Frantz Fanon, Emmanuel Levinas, and Enrique Dussel. His highly complex theses offer an expert critique of modernity and its “master morality” of violence and domination, while articulating a new ethical paradigm for the future in the form of “transmodernity.”

[Sean · Rating 3 out of 5]

This is a lot to take in but does immediately reveal itself as an essential 21st century text

[Minkah · Rating 4 out of 5]

By far the most dense philosophical work I have tried in some time, but worth the work to get through it (so this might not best capture the complexity and nuance of this work). Maldonado-Torres considered Levinas, Fanon, and Dussel, along the way unpacking the western paradigm of war in order to get to a Fanonian decolonial turn toward love that, taken together with Dussel's notion of transmodernity, approaches an alternative to the modern. This involves an intriguing discussion of Levinas that locates ontology, and how notions of the universal lend to concepts of freedom and equality that flatten out the world, and in a train of western thought and politics, ends up at Nazi Germany. Fanon and Dussel offer compelling counterparts to Levinas's efforts to locate Judaic culture and thought as an alternative source of western civilization, by calling into question the investment in the west. I found the structure a bit tough, and would have better enjoyed the section on Fanon had it come after the sections of Levinas and Dussel, as it is where Maldonado-Torres is his most original as a compelling and lucid thinker. I am, however, fully aware that this may be the complaint of a non-philosopher/theologian who does not quite grasp the philosophical method. Great read, but not one to go into light-heartedly.