Extracted from publication La conoscenza negata
5. Violenza epistemica e pensiero decoloniale: la Transmodernidad di Enrique Dussel
DOI: 10.53136/97912218193426
Pages: 141-164
Publication date: June 2025
Publisher: Aracne
Should the West be thanked for all it has done, as Federico Rampini argues in Grazie, Occidente! (2024)? Or not, because it is “rotten”, as the mathematician Piergiorgio Odifreddi affirms (C’è del marcio in Occidente, 2024)? Neither thesis is acceptable, or at least not in their ideological entirety. Certainly, it was, and still is, a West that has imposed its episteme considering it as superior to others and it has often done so in a violent way. A violence denounced by Argentine– Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel, whose theses “deconstruct” a Eurocentric narrative that fails to recognise the existence of other cultures capable of producing their own episteme. These arguments should be fully entitled to recognition in the debate on Modernity and Postmodernity, but this right is still denied. The aim of this paper is to give visibility to such episteme, hidden by Eurocentric arrogance, through Dussel’s philosophical proposal.