Violenza epistemica e pensiero decoloniale: la Transmodernidad di Enrique Dussel

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 is, a West that has imposed its episteme considering it superior to others and it has often done so in a violent way. A violence "denounced" by the 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 would be fully entitled to recognition in the debate on Modernity and Post-modernity, but this right is still denied. The aim of this paper is thus to give visibility to such episteme, "hidden" by Eurocentric arrogance, through Dussel's philosophical proposal.