Vallega's Article

Vallega's Article

Alejandro A. Vallega

Exordio/Exordium: For an Aesthetics of Liberation out of Latin American Experience

This article identifies temporality as a constructed and elemental level of aesthetic experience, and exposes the elemental role of such aesthetic experience in the unfolding of contemporary Latin American liberatory thought. This particularly with regard to the sense of temporality that underlies the unfolding of the development of modernity, a development that occurs throughout the colonization of the Americas in the construction of a rational European ego cogito and its “other”. Temporality in the westernizing linear sense figures a projective horizon for the perception and understanding of existence and its coming. The key aim and meaning of all existence under this linear temporality is order and progress. However, ultimately in looking at Latin American thought and experience one finds a distinct sense of history and temporality beyond the possible determination of that sustaining westernizing European thought. In the recognition of distinct temporalities space-times open for re-thinking modernity (understood at large now with the inclusion of distinct Latin American experience and thought) and the accompanying senses of humanity, life, freedom, and philosophical thought’s issues and ways of articulating beings.

Volume 18, Issue 1, Spring 2014

125-140