Critique of Hegel’s universalism by Fanon, Dussel, and Freire

Abstract

The purpose of this essay is to present the critique of Hegelian universalism carried out by Franz Fanon’s concept of the zone of non-being, by Enrique Dussel’s zone of the exteriority and by Paulo Freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed. The (re) reading of the Hegelian dialectic operated by the three thinkers helps to understand the substratum of thought that guided the European conception of freedom inscribed in the field of political practice, locating it in time and space. In addition, his proposals for “decolonization of dialectics” renew the imagination and philosophical-political praxis of countries subordinated by the context of power relations in the modern/colonial world, in search of other symbolic-epistemic references necessary for the social transformation of the reality of inequalities of the Latin American continent. The gesture of the three thinkers opens the philosophical text or, more specifically, Hegelian thought, to an infinite, non-totalizable dialogue, to a critique of the metaphysical and/or ontological closure of knowledge, its universalization.