DOI: 10.1111/1467-8675.

12389

ORIGINAL ARTICLE

Decoloniality and decolonizing Critical Theory

Jake M. Bartholomew

Missouri State University, Springfield, MO, USA

Correspondence
Jake M. Bartholomew, Missouri State University, Springfield, MO, USA.
Email: JakeMBartholomew@missouristate.edu

It has become clear that Critical Theory, understood as the tradition originating from and remaining attached to the
Frankfurt School, has to confront questions about its own limitations.1 This has been understood not just in terms
of its project (which, especially in its Habermasian form, appears increasingly unable to deal with the rise of the far
right in Europe and the USA) but also in terms of its own limitations as regards gender and race, and its implicitly
Eurocentric orientation. It is the last limitation, its inherent Eurocentrism, that has been most resisted integration,
insofar as Critical Theory from its inception has retained within it an account of the history of reason that retains a
certain Hegelianism, with Europe being the stage of history, and the location of historical, cultural, and intellectual
progress. While Horkheimer and Adorno criticized the development of reason in this way, they nonetheless tacitly
accepted this formulation of the history of rationality as univocal and distinctly European. Habermas replicates this,
even as he criticizes the univocal conception of rationality found in their work. As many have suggested, the time has
come to take stock of this and see if Critical Theory cannot be revised in such a way as to make it a project that may
still retain a truly universalist character while still recognizing its weaknesses, especially its implicit Eurocentrism.
Decolonial and postcolonial theory have both made a major part of their respective tasks the criticism of this con-
ception of rationality, utilizing the existence of their own respective precolonial cultures as a means with which to
criticize European rationality. That it has taken so long for this critique to be received with more than just resistance
can be read in many ways, of course. One reason is likely due to the theoretical tendencies of those in the postcolo-
nial camp especially, as many of these approaches are influenced by Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze, and others lumped
together under the label of postmodernism. Given the antipathy to these authors of those on the forefront of contem-
porary Critical Theory, at least those who accept the Habermasian critique of postmodernism, this resistance makes
sense. But it would appear that a point has been reached where Critical Theory can no longer ignore such critiques.
This has been made especially clear by the publication of Amy Allen's recent monograph, which attempts to recognize
the salience of the postcolonial and decolonial criticisms of Critical Theory and shows why theorists in the Frankfurt
School vein of thought can no longer afford to ignore these critiques.
However, there is one question that has not been confronted in this discussion, one that can easily be missed and yet
is of utmost important—can Critical Theory engage with decolonial or postcolonial theory in a manner that integrates
the relative insights of each? This article is focused on the first question and leaves aside the postcolonial one. The
answer to this question, as will be seen, is no, at least as far as this is the way the question is put. In effect, to attempt to
integrate the insights of decolonial thought into Critical Theory is to engage in the project from the wrong direction. If
one is to remain faithful to the decolonial approach, it cannot be a matter of integrating decolonial thought into Critical
Theory but rather of integrating the insights of Critical Theory into decolonial philosophy. Thus, if Critical Theory is
to be decolonized it must first take on the decolonial perspective and then see what is left of Critical Theory after the
shift, the decolonial turn, as Walter Mignolo puts it.

Constellations. 2018;25:629–640. wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/cons 

c 2018 John Wiley & Sons Ltd. 629
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This project no doubt appears overdue not merely from the increasing reception of decolonial theory in the USA and
Europe, but as well because its own history is inherently enmeshed with the criticism of Western reason, albeit from the
position of the enunciation of Europe itself. The impetus to acknowledge and attempt to integrate the insights of the
decolonial comes with the recognition of the importance of colonialism for Critical Theory, which has already been rec-
ognized in the work of Thomas McCarthy, specifically his Race, Empire, and the Idea of Human Development. However, he
still remains wedded to a Habermasian paradigm that limits his ability to criticize Critical Theory, especially as regards
the idea of progress.2 Nonetheless, the recognition that this is a problem that must be confronted that shows just how
important it is today. It is because those who would follow Habermas have finally come around to the question of col-
onization that the question of the possibility of the decolonization of Critical Theory must be confronted—criticisms
that could have been ignored previously can no longer to be left to the side. And this means asking the question: can
Critical Theory be decolonized?
To approach this question, one must ask whether Critical Theory itself is amenable to integrating the premises of
decolonial thought and how it might do so, whether this would entail merely recognizing the realities of coloniza-
tion and applying a corrective, or whether the criticisms from decolonial and postcolonial theory require a complete
rethinking of the project of Critical Theory. It is in this that Allen's book is useful in clarifying the stakes for the parti-
san of Critical Theory, as she shows that criticisms from the decolonial cannot be confronted merely by acknowledging
coloniality. This requires, more than anything, a questioning of modernity as concept, which entails a criticism of the
concept of progress itself (Allen, 2016, pp. 8–16). Given the centrality of the concept for Critical Theory, even more
so for subsequent generations starting with Habermas, the reluctance to do this is understandable. And yet, it must
be done if it is to recognize its own limits. This is what animates Thomas McCarthy to push against the universalism
of Habermas and recognize that “the normative status of the resources handed down by our tradition is more modest
and contextualist than” Habermas claims (Allen, 2016, p. 27). But, as Allen suggests, such modesty is an unsatisfactory
answer to the criticisms of the Eurocentric standpoint of Critical Theory. She suggests that part of the answer involves
a willingness to “unlearn certain aspects of our own taken-for-granted point of view in order to engage in a genuinely
open way with various participants in debates about global modernity” (Allen, 2016, p. 27).
It is Allen's contention that this unlearning of the implicit Eurocentrism of Critical Theory must ultimately lead back
to the criticisms of European modernity of the first generation of Critical Theory, especially that of Adorno, as well as
that of his “other son,” Foucault. What appears to Habermas as a totalizing critique can reappear in the eye of the anti-
Eurocentric thinker as a conceptual resource that undermines the pretension of European thought toward uncritically
accepting an idea of progress that puts itself at the center of world history (see Allen, 2016, pp. 166–176; Habermas,
1987a, esp. pp. 114–120). In this, Allen is no doubt correct—it is clear that the best resource within Critical Theory lies
in this criticism of European reason in general, and her suggestion that an altered understanding of genealogy would be
a useful resource in this regard. But, in recognizing this one also realizes the inherent limitations of her book—while she
cites decolonial and postcolonial thought to criticize Habermas, Axel Honneth, and Rainer Forst, and thereby provides
an invaluable resource for those who are unfamiliar with these critiques, she does not thereby turn toward the positive
project of providing a different understanding of the potential project of an altered Critical Theory, except to suggest
that a different path forward would be useful. Ultimately, she leaves us with the suggestion that the way forward that
should involve a return to the specific critical tradition that Habermas believes he has overcome, in the form of a return
to Adorno, with Foucault also seen as an inheritor of the same tradition.
Foucault and Adorno, however, have similar problems of their own, something she herself acknowledges in making
this suggestion. Unfortunately, just as the problems unique to their own projects as regards a decolonial utilization of
their critical perspectives are identified, the book itself ends with the reader wondering what is left to do. There is little
account of how we may utilize and criticize their thought in decolonial and postcolonial contexts, and those familiar
with these debates will likely end up wondering whether the book is about decolonizing Critical Theory as a broad
project or rather exists to make the case that postcolonial and decolonial critiques actually matter to critical theorists
from centers of knowledge in the Global North. That is to say: in such situations, the question of the audience always
must come to mind, especially when one is talking about the utilization of theory produced in areas outside of the global
centers of knowledge that criticize Eurocentric presuppositions and yet are intending to engage with debates within
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those areas from which they are normally excluded. This is not just a question of audience but approach, even language
itself. In The Darker Side of the Renaissance, Walter D. Mignolo asks just this question of himself, explaining that he wrote
the book in English because “[w]riting in Spanish means, at this time, to remain at the margin of contemporary theoret-
ical discussions” (Mignolo, 2003, p. viii; see Eduardo Mendieta, 2005, pp. 188–196). If one is to think decolonially one
must ask oneself what one intends to do with their work, and this means not just looking at decolonizing thought but
also at questions of language, marginalized tendencies of thought, and so on.
Indeed, the confrontation of this problem is what characterizes the decolonial approach as it understands itself and
struggles in its expression of a thought that still relates to European thought even as it pushes against it. This is why
those who engage with and in decolonial thought likely do not see themselves and their concerns reflected in Allen's
monograph, notwithstanding its title. Theoretically, there are two reasons for this. First, there is a lack of differentiation
between the two traditions. While treating them together makes sense insofar as the text serves as an intervention
that aims to make clear the need to address decolonial and postcolonial critiques, in spirit it does violence to both,
given that it ignores the very reasons that motivated the decolonial turn against the postcolonial approach. Key to this
are questions regarding who one is addressing and the resources that one is utilizing. It is this that caused the rifts that
led to the dissolution of the Latin American Subaltern Studies group. As Ramon Grosfoguel put it regarding those who
remained partisans to the Subaltern Studies project

[d]espite their attempt at producing a radical and alternative knowledge, … reproduced the epistemic schema of
Area Studies in the United States. With a few exceptions, they produced studies about the subaltern rather than
studies with and from a subaltern perspective. Like the imperial epistemology of Area Studies, theory was still
located in the North while the subjects to be studies in the South. (Grosfoguel, 2007, p. 211)

Specifically, the sticking point in the conflict between the members of the Latin American Subaltern Studies Group
was the same thing found lacking in postcolonial studies—an orientation toward a “Western epistemic canon” that was
itself seen as a problem.
It is this that is the second reason, intrinsically related to the first and of greater importance, that decolonial thinkers
likely do not see their concerns reflected in Allen's work. As Gurminder K Bhambra says, there is not just a disciplinary
difference between the postcolonial and the decolonial (namely, between the cultural and socioeconomic in the post-
colonial and the sociological, world systems theory, Critical Theory tradition in the decolonial) but also a matter of
geographical, temporal, and cultural difference that itself has led to the greater epistemic critique found in decolo-
nial thought (Bhambra, 2014, p. 115–118). Such differences undergird the different understandings of colonialism that
each has, and to not attend to this difference, as Allen does, is to do an injustice to both traditions.3 This, coupled with
the fact that the intent of the work is to essentially “make the case” to critical theorists in the Frankfurt School mold in
centers of knowledge from the Global North, makes this work one about the decolonial but not of it. In collapsing the
difference between the two and in its intended audience and specific locus of enunciation, she reproduces the same
problems identified by Grosfoguel and other decolonial thinkers in relation to postcolonial approaches, which is what
motivated the decolonial turn. A properly decolonial orientation would, rather, take a different approach, not to make
the case to thinkers from the Global North that decolonial thought and its criticisms are worth taking seriously but
rather to initiate a dialogue within the intellectual milieu of the Global South to judge the adequacy and relevance of
Frankfurt School thought to the decolonial project, to see if its insights would be a candidate for integration into the
decolonial approach.4
Where Allen (following the shift inaugurated by Habermas) focuses on the question of progress and normativity,
decolonial thought goes further in a radical fashion towards the criticism of European epistemology in general and
thus find themselves, off the bat, already aligned with the first generation Frankfurt School in this regard. This is why
her account could be read as a first step for Frankfurt-aligned critical theorists but also one that itself was already
integrated into the general epistemological critique that finds itself expressed in the discourse on the geopolitics of
knowledge that Mignolo concerns himself with. As with Mignolo, those who work in decolonial thought recognize that
the Eurocentrism of the tradition of Critical Theory also entails a lack of recognition of work in other parts of the world
that would bear upon debates in the tradition. Many in this tradition have not bothered making the case that Critical
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Theory should engage with postcolonial and decolonial critiques but rather have focused more directly on doing the
work of decolonizing Critical Theory; that is, they have not asked the question of its possibility but have been pursu-
ing the project in their own fields, asking not whether Frankfurt School Critical Theory can be decolonized but rather
making the case that Critical Theory is useful for their projects.
In this way, Allen's work shows us a possibility as regards the future of Critical Theory for those from centers of
global knowledge, but this possibility has already found expression in positive contributions to decolonization in gen-
eral and are only now being recognized as potentially valuable. Thus, the real problem is that such accounts have not
received their due recognition from thinkers of the Global North and the centers of Critical Theory in the Frankfurt
School mode. The project should not be one of searching for recognition from Europe and the US for theory that has
been excluded but rather pursuing a project that should not need this validation.5 This is what is required to see if Criti-
cal Theory can truly be decolonized, to see if it can stand on its own in the non-European context. The universalism of its
project, combined with the Eurocentrism of academies in the Global South, has made it so that this question was not as
apparent as it is now and, in fact, contributed to the resistance of such approaches, not just in the Global North but also
the Global South. Thankfully, things are changing, and this question is one that now must be confronted. For the person
who wants to see if it is possible, what is needed is a more concrete and concentrated confrontation between decolo-
nial thought and Critical Theory, especially as regards the critique of rationality and epistemology found in the first
generation, which is where such an interaction makes sense, to the extent that the orientation of decolonial thought
can be said to hinge upon the need to do justice to different, othered loci of enunciation.
A possible path forward in this direction, which engages directly with the attempts to utilize the tradition of
Critical Theory in Latin America, is shown by Rocio Zambrana (2015) in her article, “Normative Ambivalence and
the Future of Critical Theory: Adorno & Horkheimer, Castro-Gomez, Quijano on Rationality, Modernity, Totality,”
which gives us an idea of how to do this. In this article she confronts the Adorno and Horkheimer (2002) of the
Dialectic of Enlightenment with the works of Santiago Castro-Gomez and Anibal Quijano. Her main contribution to
its decolonization is to contrast the understanding of the critique of rationality found in Critical Theory, insofar as it
exists in the unambiguous sense that is attributed to Adorno and Horkheimer, with an attempt to think from what
might be called that underside of modernity (to borrow a phrase from Dussel). The recognition of a thought that
exists as underside, exteriority, margin, or otherwise entails the denial of a univocal manner of understanding the con-
cept, as Habermas does, but approaches this in a historicized fashion. As opposed to utilizing the sort of transcendental
argument that Habermas uses in rethinking reason, the historical reality of different existing cultures is recognized,
and with this the concomitant difference in forms of rationality to be found within each.
Such an interpretation is implicitly critical of Eurocentrism both in terms of the developmental picture of Europe as
the motor of world history and in terms of its seemingly rational development (for example, of that iron cage of reason,
which comes with social differentiation under modernity). Adorno and Horkheimer are useful resources insofar as the
critique in the Dialectic of Enlightenment illustrates the ambiguity of the concept of Enlightenment, showing that myth
contains enlightenment and enlightenment myth (Zambrana, 2015, p. 103). This ultimately serves to reveal the seem-
ingly irrational characteristics of what should ideally be progress—enlightenment means especially rationality as mas-
tery, of nature foremost, and yet this same mastery becomes domination of ourselves and others (p. 104). In this anal-
ysis, there is a clear critique of European thought that is entailed, and one that can be magnified by the non-European.
To do this one must deny the univocity of reason, which is implicit in the criticism found in Dialectic of Enlightenment,
but in a manner different from that of Eurocentric philosophers, that recognizes the resources in other countries,
with Latin American and especially indigenous resources in the case of decolonial thought—it is not that there is more
than one form of reason because of the sorts of reasons outlined by Habermas in his Theory of Communicative Action
(1984, 1987b) but because reason has a social-historical existence. It is not a matter of myth versus enlightenment but
rather their coexistence, if not identity. As Zambrana says, myth is enlightenment and enlightenment is myth (2015,
pp. 102–103). This is to be contrasted with the relationship between the two expressed in Adorno and Horkheimer,
wherein myth is already enlightenment and enlightenment reverts to myth (Zambrana, 2015, p. 104). Whereas the
first suggests a sort of inherent mythic element to reason, the second implies a sort of developmentalist framework
wherein the mythic could and should be overcome. This is not, however, to deny the reality of social change or
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even development as such; it is rather that universal history must be held to ambivalently, “constructed and denied”
(Adorno, 1973, p. 320). As Adorno says, “[n]o universal history leads from savagery to humanitarianism, but there is
one leading from the slingshot to the megaton bomb” (1973, p. 320). It is this that finds expression in Latin American
philosophy, especially in the work of Enrique Dussel. The Invention of the Americas, for example, can be understood as
a sort of speculative retelling of that sort of horror that leads from the slingshot to the atomic bomb in the context
of the colonization. And it also contains its own negation of split between myth and enlightenment, with his retelling
of human history emphasizing that “a rational world of myth flourished in the great urban civilizations reaching from
Mesopotamia to the Southern Andes” (Dussel, 1995, p. 76).
This sort of thinking is contrasted with the other form of positing a different form of rationality or the possibility of
multiple rationalities in Latin America that uncritically accepts Adorno and Horkheimer's narrative about the fate of
a univocal reason. In these sorts of approaches, which are exemplified for Santiago Castro-Gomez by Pedro Morande
and Cristian Parker, there is a risk of affirming a sort of “radical alterity” or “absolute exteriority” that would be an
unintentional reinscription of the colonial difference in different terms in their “seek[ing] to articulate a genuinely
Latin-American rationality in order to confront the colonial legacy” (Zambrana, 2015, p. 107). All invocations of
otherness and exteriority, motivated as they are by the rejection of a Hegelian totalizing logic (that is precisely what
Adorno and Horkheimer attempt to resist) risk hypostatizing that other as untouched, as immediately perceived,
as absolute “others” of rationality (Zambrana, 2015, p. 108). This is what is at stake in Castro-Gomez's critique of
Morande and Parker to which Zambrana draws our attention—both seem to consider the specific rationality found
in Latin America as “sub-modern,” insofar as its “rationality is a matter of ‘religious ritual’” (2015, p. 108). There are,
obviously many arguments that could be made against this sort of characterization of specifically Latin American
reason, but the most important is that that colonization was, after all, a form of contact that did not leave either
side intact: both are “mutually albeit asymmetrically transformed by their encounter” (2015, p. 108). The difference
between the encounter between the different cultures must not obscure the fact that there was, after all, colonization,
which was characterized by a blending.
The problem is that the encounter was less a meeting and more a misrecognition. As Dussel reminds us, Columbus
was convinced that he was in Asia, and this discovery was less an uncovering in the etymological sense of the word,
but rather an initial “covering over” that thereby did not even recognize the people of the Americas as properly Other
(Dussel, 1995, p. 32). The uncovering of the reality of Latin America before the conquest as having its own legitimacy
was thus an important part of reconsidering the history of Latin American thought in a way that would recognize the
reality of indigenous traditions of thought, such as that of the Aztecs, on which Miguel León-Portilla focused his ener-
gies. This is part of what might motivate such a characterization of a distinctly Latin American rationality, especially as
it has become a major issue in Latin American philosophy for a large part of the 20th century, with one of the major
themes of this debate being the problem of the seeming inadequacy and denial of a Latin Americanness in favor of an
attachment to Europe as the bastion of progress.6 It is thus not surprising that such a tendency would lend itself to the
far stronger claim of a sort of absolute difference to be found in Latin American thought, which ends up reinscribing
colonial difference yet again.
In this regard, Castro-Gomez “helps us reformulate their [Adorno and Horkheimer's] understanding of immanent
critique,” in that he questions the image of a univocal reason that would thereby relegate Latin American to either com-
plete integration or complete exclusion from modernity (Zambrana, 2015, p. 111). Myth is enlightenment and enlight-
enment myth—there is no absolute other that is confronted by an absolute reason. The misrecognition of the indige-
nous by Europe therefore becomes a meeting not of reason and its other, but a reason that could not recognize the
other as other. This does not alter the main factors motivating European rationality but rather takes away its “tragic”
element, of its lament that the potential of Enlightenment has itself fallen prey to this reversion to myth (Zambrana,
2015, p. 109). It has always been mythic, and there has been no fall from a height or potential expressed at the moment
of the high bourgeoisie. This, of course, was unfortunate for the colonized who could not fit into the model of the human
that Europe had erected.
Here we can see that the critique of the tragic reading is not sufficient, as it requires a different model of histori-
ography, a different story about the rise of modernity as a global phenomenon and thus must be supplemented by a
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different formulation of social totality, one that pushes against the European image of a totalizing modernity. This is
where Zambrana brings in a specific reinterpretation of this Eurocentric experience in terms of Anibal Quijano's con-
cept of the coloniality of power. As Zambrana notes, Adorno and Horkheimer miss what Quijano calls “the historical-
structural heterogeneity of power,” which must be corrected, as “[h]istorical experience teaches us that, far from a
monolithic totality following a single logic, the global pattern of capitalist power ‘is a matter of structural articula-
tion between historically heterogeneous elements’” (Zambrana, 2015, p. 114). This altered form of totality, instead
of merely concerning itself with the world-historical fate of Europe, paints a picture drawn from world systems the-
ory, whereby the power of capital originated or “established” coloniality “as a global pattern (patron) with America”
(Zambrana, 2015, p. 112).
What makes the concept of the coloniality of power unique is not just that is pushes against Eurocentrism by linking
the birth of modernity with the colonization of the Americas, but also that it in doing so also integrates the imposi-
tion of racial hierarchy into the domination that is established at the moment of its birth (see Enrique Dussel, 2002,
pp, 227–233. See also Anibal Quijano, 2000, pp. 533–549). Zambrana (2015) describes the specifics of coloniality as
such:

Coloniality thus refers to (a) the racial classification of the world's population via the racialization of relations
between the colonizer and the colonized; (b) the configuration of a new system of exploitation that articulates
under one pattern, namely, capitalism, all forms of control of labor—wage labor, slavery, indentured labor, small
commodity production; (c) Eurocentrism as a new mode of production and control of subjectivity; and (d) the
nation state as the new system of collective authority that excludes populations racialized as inferior. (p. 112)

The coloniality of power, as is clear, provides a seemingly less pernicious image of totality in its avoidance of a presup-
posed Eurocentrism as it not only reinterprets the world-historical integration that was constituted by the colonization
but also shows the essential Eurocentrism that characterizes and constitutes it from the very beginning as presuppo-
sition. That is, it reveals the means by which Eurocentrism itself could be materially constituted and thereby puts the
problem at the forefront instead of hiding it.
As Nelson Maldonado-Torres (2008) notes, this moment is constitutive of modernity, suggesting that

[t]he “myth of modernity” is therefore simultaneous with the emergence of modern subjectivity itself: freedom
and the ensuing sense of rationality that emanates from it were tied to a peculiar conception of power that is
premised on the alleged superiority of some subjects over others. (p. 213)

One does not have to squint very hard to see similarities with Adorno, albeit in a context that has taken into account
the colonization of the Americas in its critique. Francis Bacon, who expresses the mastery of nature in the Dialectic
of Enlightenment, was born less than 100 years after Columbus's famous voyages, and the link between control and
knowledge that fills the first pages of this text could very well be seen as reflecting from the European perspective the
same process described by Maldonado-Torres and other decolonial thinkers (Horkheimer & Adorno, 2002, pp. 1–12).
What the decolonial does, however, is supplement this by a recognition of the victims of the process outlined in the
Dialectic of Enlightenment, showing how that same reason led to the famous debates between Juan Gines de Sepulveda
and Bartolomeo de Las Casas on the moral status of the indigenous peoples of the Americas, that the same reason
led to racialization as a naturalized justification for slavery, and that same reason also led to a recognition that “the
colony—long before the concentration camp and the Nazi politics of extermination—served as the testing ground for
the limits and possibilities of modernity, thereby revealing its darkest secrets” (Maldonado-Torres, 2008, p. 217).
Just as the reassessment of European history in terms of the coloniality of power finds the roots of Eurocentrism at
the moment of the birth of colonization, it find itself in a similar valence as the criticisms of Adorno and Horkheimer, as
as the root of domination is, after all, inherent in enlightenment and therefore in modernity itself. And yet Zambrana
and all the decolonial thinkers we have cited have already moved us very far afield from this. It is, after all, one thing
to deny the hard distinction between enlightenment and myth, as one might do this and still remain Eurocentric.7 It is
another thing to argue for a different model of totality, because to do so is to change completely the project of Critical
Theory. This is not to suggest such a project is not valuable; far from it. What it shows, rather, is that the decolonial
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method of pursuing a critical project would necessarily entail a shifting of the geopolitics of knowledge toward Latin
America, that means that it would not be a matter of decolonizing Critical Theory, but rather recognizing potential
resources in Critical Theory that themselves must be heavily revised and utilized altered to create new understandings
of concepts such as totality (Mignolo, 2010, pp. 304–307).
Thus, to decolonize Critical Theory is to miss the point of the decolonial moment—it is not the job of decolonial
thinkers to fix the errors of European philosophers insofar as they are Eurocentric. This merely reinforces a sort of
theoretical dependency on Europe that must, after all, be overcome. To the extent that Horkheimer and Adorno are
useful to decolonial thought it makes sense to utilize them. This is what Dussel has done. He has identified what is
valuable in the different iterations of Critical Theory and taken them up in the philosophy of liberation:
From the first generation of Critical Theory we must recover:

a) Materiality (corporeal, affective, ecological, economic, and cultural), and

b) Negativity, as part of that materiality a critical negativity.

From the “second generation,” we assume:

c) Discursivity, implanted within

d) the intersubjective community gives us a more adequate and complete understanding of social reality, from
which consensus legitimates the given order. (Zambrana, 2005, p. 199; translation mine)

Dussel, however, goes beyond this and integrates other useful concepts (exteriority and critical discursivity) and claims
in this to not just go beyond both, but also go beyond the so-called “third generation” of Critical Theory. Indeed, as he
makes clear:

In effect, this is beyond even the “third generation” [of Critical Theory], because the Philosophy of Libera-
tion located the material exteriority of victims following the 1970s in the globalization of the metropoli-
tan/postcolonial world, the center/periphery, the masculine/feminine, etc., which overcomes the skeptical
Eurocentrism of the “third generation”—who, following Adorno, I believe did not understand that “falsehood”
(Unwahrheit) is, in respect to all of these poles of domination, also global. (Pp.199–200)

In effect—Critical Theory and its failings have already been overcome in the selective application of its concepts in the
discourse of Latin America.
Thus, in her “Shifting the Geopolitics of Critical Knowledge,” Catherine Walsh (2007) identifies one major contribu-
tion of Critical Theory that is applicable in Latin America; namely, the distinction made by Horkheimer in “Traditional
and Critical Theory” that can define the very project of Critical Theory. According to her, his contribution is important
to decolonial thought because

[b]y placing attention to the structures in which social reality, as well as the theories that seek to understand
this reality, were constructed, Horkheimer challenged the positivism of his era, establishing a relation between
critical theory and issues of social justice and transformation. (p. 227)

It is this imperative that is behind decolonial thought, and this in a given geopolitical location. We can understand this
better by looking at Santiago Castro Gomez's (2000) essay on the same article, where it is taken similarly as providing
a model for postcolonial theory. Castro Gomez says that such a Critical Theory argues that “social life does not depend
entirely on the intentionality of consciousness but rather on the dialectic of between subject and structure” and is
understood as a sort of “second nature” (2000, p. 508). Such a critical perspective can thereby be transferred to other
contexts, such as the Americas, where it is then recognized that “the set of historic objectifications of human activity
we call ‘culture,’ are not rooted in the species’ transcendental abilities, but rather in relations of power that are socially
construed and which have acquired a ‘global’ character” (2000, p. 509). What these understandings of the project of
Critical Theory do is shift the locus from which one looks at questions such as culture and totality to a marginalized
global position. It is the marginal position that defines decolonial thought's attempts to find its own unique form of
expression, and therefore requires the elucidation of its own project.8
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The task, then, for those who continue to be adherents of Critical Theory is to recognize that, in a way, the call to
decolonize it quite easily falls back into Eurocentrism as long as it remains anchored to a project that is fundamentally
European in nature. Not only are there local sources to draw upon that can be used to further the critical project in gen-
eral, which thereby tacitly find themselves aligned with the motivations of Critical Theory (opposition to domination
and so on), but the project itself must aim at liberation in attending to its own marginalized context. In this way, the most
properly decolonial current representative of Critical Theory in the Frankfurt mode (at least, being one who was born
in Europe and who studied at Frankfurt, which are major caveats) may actually be Stefan Gandler, because he has made
Mexico his residence and has taken up Bolivar Echeverria and Adolfo Sanchez Velasquez as exemplars of non-dogmatic
Marxism and as being uniquely positioned to provide resources for critical thought, representing a large shift, at least
in one individual, in touchstones for criticism. In his interpretation of these two thinkers he specifically positions him-
self against the more Eurocentric formulations of Habermas, and finds a model of criticism and interpretation that is
not only an equal to that of Europe's, but also superior to it.9
While such an affirmation is dialectically suspect, it nonetheless gives us an idea for a method by which Europeans
and Americans themselves may decolonize their practice. This would involve the unlearning of Eurocentric tendencies
of thought, as Amy Allen suggests. In a work that discusses this and predates Allen's suggestion of this for Critical The-
ory, Madina D. Tlostanova and Walter Mignolo (2012) have a co-written a book that seeks to apply decolonial concepts
in Central Asia as well as in Latin America. A common cause is found in decolonial thought, one that makes colonization
apparent in the different contexts of the two regions, explaining that [w]e are not

comparing Central Asia and the Caucasus, on the one hand, with South America and the Caribbean, on the other,
but rather analyzing the underlying colonial matrix of power maintaining the illusion that these “areas” are far
apart from one another (and they are as far as local histories are concerned), while in fact they are linked to
Western hegemony by the logic of coloniality. (p. 2)

This allows one to recognize the commonality between the two regions that both are enmeshed in the same world
structure described by Quijano and derived from world systems theory. Commonalities are recognized but only in the
sense of a logic that must be resisted, one that is quite similar to that identified by Horkheimer and Adorno, but that is
recognized as having a location, one that has its own history and cannot be understood as reason tout court.
In all this there is still something missing; something correctly identified in Allen's approach as being of prime
importance for Critical Theory and something that motivated the turn away from Adorno—the normative dimension.
This is also perhaps the most underdeveloped aspect of decolonial thought and something that, therefore, deserves
more attention. Again, Dussel has been at the forefront here, specifically attempting to blend the discourse ethics of
Habermas and Apel with the approach of Levinas and the responsibility to the Other. It is obvious that squaring this
particular circle, turning this transcendent other into the material other and integrating it would appear to lead to
intractable problems, even discounting the fact that this approach itself also needs an accounting of its amenability
to decolonization. Yet there is something at least tacit in his recognition of the exclusion of the indigenous peoples of
the Americas that has continued until the present and that itself is a motivating factor in actually doing the work of
decolonization.
Indeed, there is another approach, found in the work Maldonado-Torres, that follows this intuition. This approach,
however, itself is inspired by Dussel's own use of Levinasian themes and furthers it through an integration of the
thought of Fanon and the question of recognition. While this approach may seem more amenable to integration into
approaches such as those of Axel Honneth, the limits of recognition remain a problem, especially as it has become
increasingly apparent that “recognition” can take both progressive and regressive forms. This problem has become
especially apparent as an issue in Bolivia, where the link between activism and decolonial intellectuals is strongest.
As Javier Sanjinés has noted, an indigenous group known as the Movimiento Nacionalista Revolucionario was quite
capable of integrating itself into government upon gaining more influence and “transforming itself into a conservative
neoliberal force” (Sanjinés, 2002, p. 139). What is needed is something stronger that can overcome the resistance to
the decolonization of one's own approach. In this sense, perhaps it might be said that decolonization is hard to justify
in a normative way because it aims not at integration of other perspectives into European thought but because it is
BARTHOLOMEW 637

a matter of radically changing the way we live in such a way that cannot be explained within the present; of a sort of
utopian possibility that decolonization represents and that itself could therefore make it an attractive possibility. Much
remains to be developed in this direction, but it suggests that the decolonial does have its own possible draw for critical
theorists and, indeed, in terms different from the mere recognition or integration of decolonial insights.
Indeed, to be able to appreciate these insights requires the process of decolonization, specifically of unlearning
Eurocentric ways of thinking, something mentioned both in Allen and in Mignolo and Tlostanova and Mignolo. In the
case of the second, there is a description of the model of Amawtay Wasi, The Intercultural University of the People
and Nations of Ecuador, that is oriented toward an education informed by the traditional principles of the indigenous
population of Ecuador (pp. 13–14). In this context it is not a matter of merely unlearning but “[l]earning to unlearn in
order to relearn” (Gandler, 2013). Resisting the form of the traditional university, Amawtay Wasi represents a model of
learning that opposes a variety of tendencies found in the European model (p. 12). These differences are too involved
and particular to the institution to go into here. What the example illustrates is the possibility of different and local
models that would represent the decolonization of the university, the decolonization of knowledge, and the decolonial
possibilities in Latin America that can be understood as illustrating the possibility of translating this program to other
contexts. More than anything, however, it represents a choice, a possibility, a proper recognition of being able to be see
things otherwise.
In his discussion of the Zapatistas Mignolo recounts the story told by Subcomandante Marcos (Rafael Guillén) about
his own shift in perspective:

In the first encounter between Antonio and Guillén, Emiliano Zapata came in as a topic of conversation.
Guillén told the story of Mexico from a Marxist perspective and situated Zapata in that history. Then the Old Man
Antonio told the story of the Indigenous communities from a Mayan perspective and situated Zapata, indeed,
Votan/Zapata, in that history. After this exchange of stories, in which Zapata became the connector of two sto-
ries embedded in different cosmologies, Old Man Antonio extended a photograph of Votan/Zapata to Guillén. In
the picture, Votan/Zapata is standing up, with his right hand grabbing the handle of the sword that is hanging
from his right side. While Guillén was looking at the picture, Old Man Antonio asked him whether Zapata was
pulling the sword out or pushing it in. Once it is understood that both histories have their reasons, it is only an
unconscious structure of power that can decide which one is history and which is myth. And this is not necessarily
cultural relativism. (Mignolo, 2011, p. 220)

If this is not cultural relativism, then what is it? Mignolo suggests that this is a matter of “political choices and options
prompted by the awareness of the colonial difference” (Mignolo, 2011, p. 220). Following the logic pursued in the anec-
dote above, this interpretation appears very persuasive and, indeed, one that illustrates quite sharply the normative
terms involved in such a situation and how the choice one makes itself illustrates the essence of the decolonial. Most
important here is the use of the word “cosmology” here—Mignolo is implicitly making the two positions coeval not
by suggesting that the indigenous interpretation is itself rational in the same way that the Marxist interpretation is
but, rather, by understanding the Marxist position itself as expressing a cosmology.10 This move is reminiscent to that
taken by Fausto Reinaga in El Pensamiento Amautico where, rather than insisting on the equality of the indigenous peo-
ples to the Europeans or even the mestizos, he instead says it is the mestizos who must overcome racial thinking and
join the indigenous peoples, must move beyond categories of race and ethnicity, that themselves were imposed on the
Americas (Reinaga, 1978, pp. 45–46, 105–106).
It is just this sort of practice that needs to be involved in the decolonial project. This is why this article initially
presented itself as a question: decolonize Critical Theory? Can we? Or, rather, should we? It seems that to attempt
to do so is to miss the point, and recent attempts to engage the decolonial with Critical Theory illustrate this. Critical
theory was received in Latin America long ago. It has already been applied to local conditions in different ways,
some more, some less Eurocentric. It has, however, been confronted with these problems by those thinking from
Latin America, who still face the coloniality of power. Perhaps it is rather the critical theorists who must decolonize
themselves by changing the center of their thinking, not supplement their implicitly Eurocentric perspective with
a decolonial addendum, that in many ways is what recent attempts to integrate such thought have effectively done
638 BARTHOLOMEW

without meaning to or necessarily realizing that they have done so. They must, counterintuitively, look inward to voices
that have been silenced in the process of nation building to the exclusion of others, supplementing their histories
of modernity with others. E. P. Thompson influenced subaltern studies and postcolonialism, which itself influenced
decolonial thought. If Critical Theory is to decolonize itself, it must import back a perspective that will integrate
subaltern and peasant voices that are just as much marked by economic and ethnic difference as colonized countries
were marked by the natural extensions of the economic and the racial.

NOTES
1
Decolonization, as referred to in the title of this article, is different from recent accounts like those of Baum, insofar as it
wishes to make a distinction between decolonization as a process related to the decolonization of Africa, and decoloniza-
tion as related to the project of decoloniality, which is what this article is concerned. Bruce Baum's article (2015), as with
many others, is focused on another area than that of the increasingly visible area of research that is understood as being
the subject matter of the modernity/coloniality/decoloniality project, which is associated with a number of intellectuals such
as Walter Mignolo, Catherine Walsh, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, and Maria Lugones. It is to this tradition that is referred
to here.
2
Beyond this, his criticism is limited by its taking the approach of adding sources that recognize racism to the formula of
Habermasian Critical Theory—it is a sort of expression that might negatively be referred to as that of the “hand wringing”
of universalist liberals who are now ready to recognize the racism of Kant and Hegel but wish at all costs to find something
which might redeem them. As an attempt to understand Critical Theory in the American context, there is certainly some-
thing in his work that is of value. But the substituting of the position of the USA for that of Europe could also be taken as
substituting the perspective of one hegemon for another.
3
This point is made strongly here because the difference between the postcolonial and the decolonial is strongly maintained
by the decolonial thinkers as part of their own self-understanding, one which is often ignored by those who are not as familiar
with its development. That said, both the postcolonial and the decolonial do have many similarities, with similar conclusions
reached for similar reasons but with a different orientation. For example, Ngũgı̃ wa Thiong'o, in his Decolonising the Mind:
The Politics of Language in African Literature, takes into consideration the very same considerations that Mignolo and other
decolonial thinkers do in considering their own locus of enunciation, the geopolitics of knowledge, and so on, and describes
the situation in Kenya and his own shift away from English to his own language, Gikuyu. Beyond the difference of historical
context that is worked through in that of decolonial theorists from Latin America, there is also a difference in influence and
tradition, mentioned above. There is no doubt about the affinity between such a work and the decolonial as understood in
this article. It is just that the differences between the postcolonial and decolonial approaches must be attended to if one is
to be reflecting the self-understanding of those within each tradition. (I thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing Thiong'o
to my attention).
4
This claim itself leads to a set of issues, hitherto still not fully examined, regarding the relative position of decolonial thinkers.
If Mignolo wishes to shift the locus of enunciation to the Global South, why does he teach in the USA and write in English?
Further, what is to be said about postcolonial thinkers like Achille Mbembe whose major referents are French philosophers
from the Global North? There are no easy answers to such questions and I think that it remains to be examined in further
depth than is possible here. What will be said is that I believe the beginning of an answer is given later on in this article
where the question of normativity and its relation to the decolonial project returns again. What can be said is that it is surely
something that must be the object of further examination in greater depth.
5
It thus relates to questions of the identity of intellectual traditions as well. In this regard, it is of a part with the debates
regarding the identity of Latin American philosophy, its existence and uniqueness, which one see's challenged in the work of
Salazar Bondy and which has been treated with great depth in English in Vallega (2014).
6
Vallega (2014) details this problem in the work of Leopoldo Zea, Salazar Bondy, and Samuel Ramos. The problem remains,
especially at the national level of Mexicanness, at least for Guillermo Hurtado, whose El Buho y La Serpiente (2007) is useful
in terms of a retrospective analysis of the debates.
7
It is this that is behind the tendency to recognize an affinity between them, Adorno especially, and the so-called postmod-
ernists and poststructuralists, which might in many ways explain the adoption of such theorists in critical works from the
global periphery.
8
Similarly, Walter Mignolo makes it clear that the decolonial project requires an interrogation of what he refers to as the
loci of enunciation, that is, the specific historical-social context of the emergence of thought, which is inevitably taken into
consideration in intellectual work from the global periphery, but rarely acknowledged when it comes from the global center.
On this, see Mignolo (2000) pp. 100–124. He, further, says that “A Critical Theory beyond the history of Europe proper and
within the colonial history of America…becomes decolonial theory.” (Walter Mignolo, 2005, p. xx).
BARTHOLOMEW 639

9
Thus, in his 2013 article “Juarez y el Liberalismo Politico Mexicano. Aportaciones Emancipadoras Desde las Americas,” he distin-
guishes between moderate and radical liberalism, finding that it was in Mexico, with Benito Juarez, that radical liberalism
found expression in his treatment of Maximillian, specifically in applying the law to him in ordering his execution against the
wishes of many in Europe, thereby insisting on the actual equality of all under law in actuality. Of course, this does not mean
that Gandler's (2013) critique is of a kind with decolonial thought but rather that even in just making the choice to orient
himself relative to Latin American thought, he is already further along than most Frankfurt aligned critical theorists in the
decolonization of his thought.
10
This point can be brought back to European traditions via Cornelius Castoriadis, both with his specific criticism of Marxism
as claiming its own objectivity when it actually just sneaks in a metaphysics (Castoriadis, 1978, pp. 670–688) as well as his
postulation of the social-historical imaginary as expressed in Castoriadis (1987), esp. pp. 340–373).

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AUTHOR'S BIOGRAPHY

Jake M. Bartholomew is an instructor at Missouri State University. His current research focuses on Critical Theory and
Latin American philosophy, as well as the intersections and possible dialogues between the two.

How to cite this article: Bartholomew JM. Decoloniality and decolonizing Critical Theory. Constellations.
2018;25:629–640. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-8675.12389