 Yeah. So welcome everyone to our very first lecture for 2022. It's exciting to be back. And the seventh lecture in our series, the Swar's World Philosophies Lecture Series. This year, when we began, we focused on the concept of world philosophies, the prospects and challenges of talking about philosophy from global. If you're just joining us from a global human perspective, rather than from a strictly Western perspective, and we've had quite some very interesting talks from Professor Peter King, Ami Dabash, Boa Vettura, the Swar Santos, Veli Mitova, Uko Sivasi, Peter Park. We had very interesting, very interesting discourses last year. This year, we are doing something a bit, well, not so different, but more specific on talking on specific themes in specific philosophical traditions. And so it's very exciting that we are beginning this year with Mexican philosophy. Before we introduce our guest speaker, Professor Carlos Sanchez, who would like to introduce, I would like to introduce a few of my colleagues. I have Dr. Sean Hawthorne, who is the convener for the World Philosophies Programme here at Swar's. Sean, can you say hello? Yeah, and... Hello, everyone, and you're welcome. It's lovely to see you here. And I hope that you will join our mailing list, because we do these seminars every month. And our great plan is to make sure that philosophy becomes to be colonized. It begins to recognize that the rest of the world has intellectual traditions that are worth investigating and thinking with. And we really hope that you will join us in this enterprise. So thanks for coming today. Yeah, thank you, Sean. And yeah, that really summarizes the whole point of the lecture series. It fits very well into how we see philosophy here at Swar's. We are really striving to ensure that it is as decolonized and as inclusive as possible. Another colleague here is Dr. Bjorn Freta, who is part of the World Philosophies Team here at Swar's. Would you like to say hello, Bjorn? Yes, hello, everyone. I'm very happy to be here, to be the co-host for the first time. The last time I was still a visitor. So I'm very happy to be here today again. Thank you very much. Thank you, Bjorn. So we have with us Professor Carlos Sanchez. So say a few words just to introduce him. Carlos Sanchez is a Professor of Philosophy and Director of the Graduate Program of Analysis and Investment. Could you mute yourself, please? I think you just joined us. Okay. Thank you. He's also Chair of the American Philosophical Association Committee on Hispanics and Latin. He's also Chair of the Inter-American Relations for the Society for the Advancement of American Philosophy, SAP, and Executive Editor of the Journal of Mexican Philosophy. He's also Assisted Editor of the Journal of World Philosophies and Founding Member of the Society for Mexican American Philosophy. Professor Sanchez works primarily on the history of Mexican philosophy, the philosophy of violence, and the philosophy of immigration. He has published a number of articles and books on these issues and some of his publications include the book by the State of University of New York Press, Contigency and Commitment, Mexican Extensualism, and The Place of Philosophy. Another one is A Sense of Brutality, Philosophy After Nacocortia. He is also author of The Suspension of Seriousness on the Phenomenology of George Putelia and has a manuscript with Bloomsbury Press that is forthcoming, which focuses on core themes in Mexican philosophy. He is also the editor of the Oxford University Press book, Mexican Philosophy in the 20th Century, Ancestral Readings. So we definitely have one of the finest Mexican philosophers in our time with us and we are eagerly looking forward to his talk titled On Magsistentialism, Existentialism with the M, so on Magsistentialism. So, Professor Sanchez Callos, you have full attention. All right. Thank you everybody for coming. I'm going to share my screen here and see if I can entertain you with a PowerPoint presentation. All right, so that's my screen. I hope you can see it. Yeah, we can see that. Okay, so that's the title of my talk is On Magsistentialism and I'm going to do a little bit of reading and a little bit of just talking as I go. Please feel free to stop me if there's any questions or anything that needs clarification on the spot and I can get back to it. So I'll begin with this quote from the Mexican philosopher Jorge Portilla, who says that we Mexicans are existentialists by birth. I try to make sense of that in this talk. So, existentialism is short for Mexican existentialism or existentialism a la Mexicana. Like traditional existentialism, it takes seriously the concreteness or facticity of human existence, the situatedness, its finiteness, and its various limitations. Unlike traditional or European existentialism, mexistentialism locates the human struggle in a determinate space-time, one which affects our being human in a definite way. Always depending on where and when one happens to find oneself. For mexistentialism, the determinate space-time is Mexico and in particular, particularly post-colonial and post-revolutionary Mexico. This Mexico is a historical accident in Europe that for half a millennium has struggled to find itself or to find its identity. The Mexican subject, el mexicano, reflects this accidentality and this struggle contending with Nepantla and Sosovara as a way of life, lo mexicano. Mexistentialism does take seriously its mexicaness as fundamental to human struggle, the struggle which it recognizes only in its Mexican and not in its abstract or universal expressions. In other words, human existence is Mexican existence, but not because of some arrogant relativism that says that all there is is Mexican existence, but because existence becomes significant or meaningful only to the one who lives it, which for Mexicans is their own Mexican existence or that which is near to their concerns. Elsewhere I have referred to this Mexican version of existentialism as mexistentialism with parentheses on the end, so as to highlight its otherness to European existential traditions. That parentheses however indicates the marginalization, suppression or silencing of the Mexican contribution to existentialism understood globally. At this time I remove the parentheses and signal the end of the end of Mexican existentialism's parenthetical existence. Now a little bit of background or history, existentialism comes to Mexico in the mid to late 1940s, I mean I'm sorry in the late 1930s and via the the work of the Spanish exiles, refugees from the Spanish Civil War, also known as Transterrados. Among these is the Spanish philosopher José Gaus. Gaus was a student of Ortega y Gasset and also a student of Martin Heidegger. So he brings these traditions with him to Mexico City where he begins in the late 1930s to offer courses on existentialism and specifically on Martin Heidegger. In 1940 he begins the translation of being in time, which he is the first to translate fully by 1951 into a language other than German. And during that time during the 1940s he offers a series of courses on what he's working on and being in time, influencing an entire generation of philosophers in the process. Of course his reading of Heidegger and his reading of Sartre and Morelfonte is going to be very influenced by his own background as a Ortega scholar. Now Ortega is known to be to advocate for something that I refer to as circumstantialism, the idea that what matters is the circumstance and that the world is seen through the circumstance, the sort of perspectivism. And so by the mid 1940s, existentialism is firmly rooted in Mexico and young intellectuals are starting to grasp onto this and to try to look at Mexican reality through that lens, finding new ways to talk about their own experience in this way. There's a shift that happens in the mid 1940s where Gauss's influence begins to become a bit too oppressive. This idea that Heidegger is the end all beyond existentialism is challenged by these young Mexican upstarts who see in the technical rigor of Heidegger's philosophy a sort of, I call it a colonial prejudice to do philosophy in a certain way. And from this they decide that they're going to look at Sartre and Morelfonte and the French existentialists a little bit closer to see if they can get a better picture of things. And so that's what they do towards the late 1940s is that they started looking at French existentialism and move away from technical philosophy of Martin Heidegger. In the process they gained this sense of this ethical stance that was missing in Heidegger and notoriously missing in the end of time. And the ethical stance is offered by Sartre and Morelfonte's work. And so that's the history. I have a few pages of that that I'm not going to read, but that's basically the background of how existentialism is planted in Mexico City during this time. And we can talk about that more afterwards. So these are some of the faces of a bunch of men, mostly white men. Now, my secret aim is to insert existentialism into the standard history of existentialism, disorienting that history and unsettling our efforts to tell it as we have been telling it. Thus far I've only given, I have not given much of a reason to suspect that existentialism is disorienting in this way or that it contributes anything significantly new or unique to the standard existentialist narrative. As we will now see while existentialism appropriates and traffics the standard notions of European existentialism as it should, it enriches the existing conceptual archive with notions that because they are derived from the Mexican experience should unsettle our efforts to tell that standard story as we have been telling We are familiar, of course, with the conceptual horizon of European existentialism, one in which we find the notions of freedom thrown as anxiety, responsibility, death, subjectivity, faith, absurdity, and boredom. To these, existentialism adds accidentality, insufficiency, sosovra, nipantla, humanism response, I'm sorry, nipantla. Yeah, those are the ones that adds. While remaining, while reimagining concepts such as freedom, responsibility, and death, and humanity. So let's, I'm going to briefly try to go over these. And the first is accidentality. So accidentality refers to the being of s when s is understood as contingent in the terminate, reliant, conditional, not necessary, insufficient, unsubstantial, or dependent on p. History reveals Mexico as accidental to Europe, to the Spanish colonial project, its people as contingent byproducts of colonization, its culture as reliant and European culture, and the mestizo ways of life, Mexican being, as always already insufficient in relation to European and indigenous ways of life. In everyday life, Mexicans, either by corazonada or explicitly, know this and live with the knowledge of their accidental introduction into world history. However, a central decolonizing claim of Uranga's philosophy is Emilio Uranga's philosophy is that being accidental is not a deficient mode, but rather that deficiency is the authentic or actual situation of human, that being human. Uranga concludes in fact that to be human is to be always insufficient, always dependent, always unnecessary, always accident. Uranga says that to be human is to be a minus of being. Moreover, and I have that quote here, the accident is fragility, he says, oscillation between being and nothingness. This means that it's fit in being, its adhesion to being expressed in the modality of being in, is not protected by an ineligible right, but rather whatever may be the form of its inheritance. It is always revocable. The accident is constantly threatened by displacement. Attached to being, it can always be torn off from its there, exterminated. Whatever it holds on to, whatever handle it grabs on to can be removed. It was born to be in, and at the same time to not be in. The insecurity of being is manifested in the view that reality seems to be constantly slipping away. And the knowledge that everything is revocable and unhinged, and that the world itself is threatening and overwhelming. But more specifically, this lack of permanence points for fragility and vulnerability that describes us all. This book by Emilio Oranga was written in 1952, and it summarizes this existentialist position of Mexican philosophy. The next concept is insufficiency, and I couldn't find an image for this other than these cartoons, so I just left a bunch of text there. To be accidental is also to be insufficient. Insufficiency is a relational term pointing to how one exists in relation to both the idea of perfection or substance and to others who represent these. However, insufficiency is not inferiority. Well inferiority has been attributed to Mexicans, specifically by the Mexican philosopher Samuel Ramos in 1934 in his Profile of Man and Culture in Mexico. It pretends to explain the psychology of those who feel less than others. That's inferiority. Oranga proposes against this view of inferiority that Ramos puts forth, that we talk instead of insufficiency, which refers less to an individual or cultural neurosis and more to an actual ontological relations before an idea, one represented by the image of the European colonizer for Mexicans, as well as to the ontological fact of being accidental. Oranga writes, insufficiency, ontologically speaking, characterizes what is accident in relation to substance. Every modality of being grounded on accident is partially grounded on an absence. These modes of being are situated in inconsistent and fractured base, unquote. What this means is that as accident, the Mexican is insufficient to substance. To be insufficient to substance is to be always in a state of lack of wanting. It is to exist as if one's very identity is grounded, metaphysically, psychologically and ontologically on an incompletion, an unfulfillment and absence of substance. This is an original state revealed to the Mexican by historical fact, the trauma of conquest, the violence of colonialism and the uncertainty and insecurity of independence have made insufficiency palpable. In this way, the being that constitutes Mexican being is a reduced being and negative being or a minus of being. Insufficient or negative or a quote negatively conceived, the accident is a privation, an absence, a penury, a lack of defect of substance and insufficient being, unquote. And now the fact that my inferiority shows up when I compare myself to others and find myself coming up short or unable to measure up points to this more profound insufficiency or lack of being. Inferiority is an expression of my insufficiency. However, the profundity of insufficiency points to it being a more general condition of existence, one affecting both myself and the other with whom I compare myself equally. We are both insufficient and lack being in relation to the idea of perfection or substance. Ultimately, the recognition of insufficiency is empowering. Mexicans arrive at the truth of being human and in the recognized insufficiency are closer than the European others to the truth, to that truth, because Mexicans know their existence to be fragile, always revocable and always threatened by displacement. That is, they know their existence to be accidental. The truth, if we may speak of truths here, is that accidentality and insufficiency is all there is. In short, insufficiency describes the mode of being of a human as an always already incomplete project, a project becoming or a becoming project. Now, Nipantla, I'm not going to elaborate too much on this concept here, because I've done it elsewhere. This expert here is part of a larger project where I spent an entire chapter talking about this. What I'll say is that within the project of existentialism, Nipantla describes the in-betweenness of being, a being in between being. Not a being in between being and non-being, as is suggested by Nipantla himself. This would mean simply existence as being towards that, if you have a being in between being and non-being. That's what it suggests to me. Rather, what we're talking about is an in-betweenness that is that uncomfortable middle-hood that is that is neither ground or foundation, but a space of convergence and divergence of suspension and pendularity to which being returns as it swings to and fro different possible modes available to itself, given its determinate particular circumstance. In every sense, then, Mexican identity is thought to be dynamic rather than static, a constant migration from coasts to valleys, from edges to centers, and peripheries to peripheries, without the possibility of settling in any one of these. Nipantla designates a middle-hood that describes people whose identity as fluid, migratory, and undefined. Given its complexity and its role in defining Mexican being or the being of Mexican being, Muranga calls Nipantla the cardinal category of our ontology. So this is an important concept. Sosobra, which I try to disentangle from Nipantla, and I've been trying to do this for a while and I don't know if I'm succeeding, but I'm trying to tear these two terms apart and make them two different things. So you have Nipantla, which is this in-betweenness of being, and the idea is that as products of colonization, products of conquest, the Mexican mestizo, the hybrid identity of the Mexican, is always in between these two world conceptions of the European and the indigenous. And nothing's going to settle this issue. They're always going to be in between. Now, Sosobra is a different concept to me. Well, Nipantla is a fundamental ontological category describing the nature of a Mexican existence in general as an in-betweenness. Sosobra, I call it an antique or existential category describing the way in which the Mexican actually experiences that being in between. So Sosobra is the effective manifestation or the feeling of being in Nipantla. So Sosobra names the anxiety of not knowing where one stands at any one time, the feeling of sinking and drowning that overtakes one in moments of desperation or in times of catastrophe, or the feeling of being pulled on all sides by conflicting demands. And so Sosobra wants struggles to hold on to the meaning or to find one's way given the available possibilities of existence. Buranga imagines this as a mode of being that incessantly oscillates between two possibilities, between two affects, without knowing on which one of these to depend, on which of these to cling to for justification. That was his quote. I imagine it as a feeling of being quartered by uncertainties, as if by horses. And that's why I have this image up here. That's why I imagine Sosobra to be. It's being pulled on all sides by conflicting demands. This is Sosobra and Buranga thinks it manifests in the Nipantla nature of Mexican identity, as I understand it. As such, Sosobra never gives us a quote fixed in solid ground, but represents the world under foot as quicksand on which nothing firm can stand its uncertainty. Luis Villoro, another Mexican existentialist philosopher, had that Sosovada characterizes our being as accident, reflecting in our constant pursuit of security, permanence or substance. He writes, quote, the privilege sense of Sosovada reveals the accidentality of being itself and of the world. This one appears as insubstantial and fragile with us try to flee from our own insubstantiality by seeking substance. So it's a constant trying to fulfill something. Now as to the concepts that we are familiar with, the first is freedom. Mexican existentialism does not promote the notion of absolute freedom famously proposed in Sartre's being a nothing. As it does not seem to cohere with a picture of the world belonging to a post-western, post-colonial national community like Mexico. Certainly a history of colonial subjugation and imperial intervention instilled in Mexican consciousness an unambiguous desire for freedom. However, the desire of freedom is not absolute but qualified and takes the form of the positive freedom to commit or not commit oneself or to be responsible for one circumstance. Hence in his confrontation with Sartre, Lopoldo Zéa, another one of these famous important Mexican existentialists, attends not to the absolute freedom of Sartre's early existentialism but to Sartre's mature burden and the critique of dialectical reason, for instance. And he calls it, he calls freedom situated and committed. Freedom is situated and committed. It will be irresponsible according to Zéa to, quote, maintain the idea of freedom in a full and absolute sense when the whole of humanity is in crisis. What is needed, he says, echoing the later Sartre is, quote, a responsible freedom, one aware of its limit, one of limits, one always aware. Zéa does endorse a view of freedom where the restriction imposed takes the form of commitment or responsibility. In this way, freedom and responsibility are two sides of the same coin. For as Zéa puts it, quote, where there is no responsibility, there is no freedom. Luis Villoro, his notion of freedom is articulated in more traditional phenomenological terms. He proposes that angst and vertigo or being before the abyss into which I could fall at any moment reveals me in my freedom because at any moment I can throw myself into that abyss willingly. And Villoro's reading, absolute freedom is actually impossible because in my being free, I find myself always already in a context of significance, one that, quote, reveals a tightly woven fabric of phenomena that prisons me, unquote. The notion that there is a prison of phenomenon which I find myself refers to the fact that those things that stand around me what Hortegaega said called a circumstance, mesmerize me. They hold me in my attention and thus limit or restrict my physical and psychical movements. This is an unavoidable imprisonment since one is always in the world and thus cannot not be involved in and with things. This might be seen as a loss of freedom, but for Villoro it is the only kind of freedom we have. True freedom is only possible in the encounter with the other. In appearing before me, the other reveals her freedom in her ability to escape my conceptualization and revealing her freedom. I find that her freedom is made possible through me or because of me or in spite of me. More importantly, I become aware at that moment that I am willing to lose my freedom in the dialectic with the other as her quote, her fate becomes mine, unquote. As with Zah, freedom for Villoro is subordinated to responsibility. Responsibility for another who escapes my grasp, yet whose fate is tied to mine, which brings me to responsibility. Zah summarizes a mixed sensualist view of freedom like this, he says, our freedom is expressed in the form in which we assume the inevitable commitment to our circumstance, unquote. This inevitable commitment is assumed because the faith of the other, the other person, the circumstance, or even the absolute, is tied with mine. What happens to my circumstance happens to me, or vice versa. Ortega famously puts this in 1914 in his meditation, San Quixote. He says, if I do not save my circumstance, I do not save myself. I am thus responsibly committed to caring for that which is proximal to me and to my concerns. Zah elaborates on this, quote. For what situation must we be responsible? What commitments must our philosophy responsibly make? After all, if we are to be faithful to our philosophizing, we have to affirm that our situation is not that of Jean-Baptiste Hartre. Our situation is not that of the European bourgeoisie. Before making ourselves responsible for the world's commitments, we must be responsible for our own concrete situations. We must be conscious of our situation to make ourselves responsible for it, unquote. In this passage, we find the clue to the Mexi-Statialist difference. The M in Mexi-Statialism refers to the notion that our situation is not that of Jean-Baptiste Hartre. Our situation is Mexican. In fact, my situation, mine, Carlos Sanchez, my situation is not that of either Jean-Baptiste Hartre or Zah. My situation is holding mine and I must be conscious of it and take responsibility for it before I make my commitments to abstract entities like world or humanity. Of course, this does not mean that Mexi-Statialism advocates a type of narcissism that would prohibit caring for the world or for humanity. But that world and that humanity must be concrete and not abstract. And I make care for it after I care for those who I love, for my community, for my nation, et cetera. I teach a lot of business ethics courses and ethics of care comes to mind here. As accidental and insufficient, I can only care so much. The task for Mexi-Statialism is ultimately to shepherd us to a recognition of our own responsibilities and commitments, which will be unique to us. As our circumstance, habitat of world is unique to us. But this means facing accidentalities of sovra and epantla and the burden of our particular histories. This follows from Zah, who claims that quote, existentialism does not wish to elude reality, does not evade it, confronts it, assuminates it with all of its consequences. Now, I include this notion of humanism in here because I think it really kind of separates or highlights what I'm trying to say here about Mexi-Statialism with an M. Accidentality, insufficiency in epantla and sovra appear as defining characteristics of persons who live in Mexican existence. For Mexican, it's understood as a horizon of possible experience. But it's also defining a defining characteristic of human being as such, that is, of what it means to be human. Due mainly to the testimony of history, one that carries with it a familiarity with its existential and ontological reality, Mexicans are quick to identify them as their defining characteristics, even a pre-theoretically and ordinary non-philosophical language. However, this does not mean that these definitions define only Mexicans. For this reason, Uranga makes a rather suggestive proposal that genuine humanity is genuine only when it resembles that which is in a sense an experience Mexican. He says, quote, It appears to us that considering the Mexican person in his being, or in his ontological aspect, serves or functions as a source for a sense that the human applicable to anything that pretends to represent itself as human. It is not about articulating lo-mejicano, that which particularizes us as human, but the opposite. It is about articulating the human in terms of lo-mejicano. Lo-mejicano is a point of reference for the human. Whatever resembles lo-mejicano calibrates itself as human, unquote. The call here is for an understanding of a human that reflects those things about the Mexican which philosophically defined it, namely accident, its efficiency, so sovra, nipantla, etc. But we must understand this in its proper light. As this call is not, for instance, that French or Canadians should suddenly seek to mimic Mexican being so as to be properly human. Such imitation would be inauthentic and in an act of bad faith. This call is for Mexicans themselves to recognize their own being as authentic and own up to it as Mexicans, to look nowhere else but to their own reality, or that which is truly human, to accept it, and to live in accordance with that picture. Elsewhere in notes on an anthology of Mexican being from 1951, Uranga writes, quote, A call for the being of the Mexican does not serve any other purpose than to remind the Mexican person that in her style of life she has the norm of the human, that if she puts on a mask she runs the risk of dehumanizing herself. In this general sense, Mexicanism demands that the standard of humanity we set for ourselves should not be abstract or foreign to ourselves but reflective of our own concrete and familiar experiences and we can talk more about that. Now death. In Mexicanism, the relationship to death is one of coexistence and not a possibility. In the labyrinth of solitude, a very famous book by Octavio Paz, he writes, There are two attitudes towards death, one pointing forward that conceives of it as creation, the other pointing backward that expresses itself as a fascination with nothingness or as a nostalgia for limbo. Paz goes on to say that the attitude that points forward is found amongst the peoples of Europe and North America. The backward pointing attitude is found in the peoples of Mexico. We may call the forward pointing attitude the instrumental attitude and the backward pointing attitude may be referred to something like a historical attitude. Now to say that one's attitude towards death is instrumental is to say that death, my death and death in general is something that is yet to come. It is an event in the future. How it's under horizon and how it's a possibility. The historical attitude on the other hand is one which holds that death is a presence or a perpetual recovery or a past, I would have a past annihilation. It's something like a coexistence. The instrumental attitude is neatly described by Sigmund Freud when he says, the goal of all life is death. This means that life is a steady progress towards death. As a goal or destination, death motivates life forward. Even Heidegger would say that we are beings towards death, always towards that inevitable future. Life's movement onward toward death is echoed by the cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker in his famous book, The Denial of Death. He says, the idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else. It is a mainstream of human activity. Activity designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man. This instrumental view of death is a Western or North American attitude. The second historical attitude is summarized by Uranga when he writes, quote, death is the only thing that the Mexican does not leave for tomorrow. In other words, our being is not a being towards death, but a being with death, an experience in the now and not in the future. Mexicans coexist with death. This means that to coexist with death is much different than simply being aware of its inevitable inability. For Paz, as with Heidegger, death as a presence makes possible the very intelligibility of life, says, death defines life. Our death illuminates our life. If our deaths lack meaning, our lives are also blacked. Uranga, on the other hand, does not think death to be meaning bestowing. He says this, death is not fear for the ends it brings, nor because it impedes some mission, which doesn't exist, nor is it fear for ripping away a self that also does not exist. This is opposed to the extreme case, the German, which is Heidegger's, in which death is imagined as comparing upon life, both individuality and totality. For the Spaniard and for the North American, death takes away something. Well, for the German, it gives, but for the Mexican, it neither gives nor takes because there's nothing to take and there's nothing to give. The omnipresence of death is ordinariness and ubiquitousness, means that it has no special significance. It is not romanticized in existentialism as it is in European existentialism. Death is just there in the circumstance as an unglamorous coexistence. And so I put this picture here by the famous Mexican artist José Guadalupe Posada, which represents this kind of coexistence with that. Okay. Now, can I be a existentialist? I'm sorry, I misspelled that. Can I be a existentialism? No, you cannot be an existentialist. It's supposed to say, can I be a existentialist? Mexican philosophers approach existentialism not as a philosophical fad, a charge that some have leveled against post-war French existentialism, or even as a rigorous philosophical method, but as a possibility for a critical philosophical articulation of their own situater reality, implying also the possibility for a more responsible engagement with the history, culture, and the future of that reality. Mixed existentialism understood in this context allows the articulation of the mode of existence belonging to historically marginal peoples, those who are accidental, as a matter of ontological fact. Moreover, existentialism makes possible the confrontation with ontological aspects of the human being as these are given in Sosobra and Epantla, modes of being that reveal indeterminateness and ungroundedness as structuring categories of human life. Here I have tried to offer a profile of what I call existentialism. Not only does existentialism mark the emergence of a philosophical program preoccupied by cultural and historical identity and authenticity, but insofar as it insists on the relevance of cultural or national identity and philosophy, it presents a challenge to Western philosophical hedgemony. While European existentialism paints a picture of radical individuality as thrown absolutely free, mired in anxiety and projected towards and not known to come, existentialism conceives of a human person as always already engaged in circumstantial reality. For existentialists such as Villoro, Zea, and Uranga, to exist is to commune, to care, and to engage. Accidentality and insufficiency in Epantla and Sosobra will characteristic of our mode of being do not exempt us from the responsibility to others. On the contrary, insufficiency and accidentality, by pointing to the fragility and finitude of human existence, call on us to live fuller or carrying more generous lives. That is consciousness of our insufficiency and accidentality, calling us to take responsibility for the other by articulating on her behalf the urgency to pursue a genuine and authentic existence and the necessity to forgo the impossible assimilation to purity and perfection. This is a moral orientation we find in feminist existentialism, which is an entire section that I left out of today's talk, but we can discuss that if you want to, as well as in existentialism more generally. In other words, the move that follows a deep dive into our own being is a move upward. Villoro explains that one must quote, get out of insular consciousness so as to arrive at community consciousness because community is a form of life which is superior. And it consists only in a personal life practice, which is interpersonal and ethically motivated. But Mexican essentialism is also more than Mexican or for Mexico. For example, it goes beyond itself beyond the space time limitations and lends itself to today, as European existentialism did for the Mexican philosophers in the mid 20th century. We can talk then about how it affects us, the Latino population in the United States, for example. Like the Mexican experience, ours, like for instance against that Latinx experience, is one involving marginalization, accidentalities, which makes a search for a critical philosophical articulation of our contemporary reality and urgent matter. We feel a kinship with existentialism for many reasons, specifically us Latinos, one of which is historical, another geographical, and still another political. The significance of recognizing this kinship is existential itself. As it justifies itself, it justifies our philosophy, our voice, our confidence in joining and contributing to a conversation that surely concerns us as human beings. It is in this sense an alternative revision of the human condition, one that is not Eurocentric. But most importantly, it also lends us concepts that apply directly to us, and we do not seem alien but familiar and known via historical familiar relations, for example. With these concepts, we can begin an analysis of our own situated condition. We can reframe our identities as accidental, for instance, and from this refuse a hegemony of the Western intellectual tradition as we endeavor to forge our own. My hope is that we may come to talk about Mexican existentialism alongside French and German existentialism, or even something that I've heard called American existentialism. Existentialism, like as French or German varieties, is rooted in the notion that human existence is a never-ending project, a precarious and uncertain becoming and overcoming. The existentialist urge and Mexico emerges from the suspicion that the Western philosophical inheritance is biased and even arrogant, that it is the suspicion that philosophical universality and generality are historical constructs serving the interests of European colonial power. That's what Anga says in 52. We are not certain of the existence of man in general, or of what passes itself off as man in general, namely generalized European humanity. So the movement away from this doubtful man in general requires a return to origins, that is to the lived world of the non-European, where the generalizations of Western Eurocentric philosophy may not always fit. After all is said and done, the real practical question becomes, can I or you be mech existentialists? If my picture of the world involves the notion that my existence is accidental and that no existence is substantial or absolutely self-sufficient, that my being as a being in a bandela or always in between and always in transition, that while Sosobra defines my everyday life, I can build projects on that basis, that my freedom is qualified and that my freest action would be to commit myself to the needs of my immediate circumstance, but also that I am determined by culture only to the extent that I allow it. And finally, if my picture of the world includes the view that death is not something to look forward to or fear, but an accomplished fact, an event with which I coexist, then yes, I and you can be mech existentialists. As a mech existentialist then, I do not behave carelessly or disenforce myself or my world, for instance, as the protagonist of Camus' Stranger. On the contrary, my behavior is caring and involved, a manifestation of understanding life's instability and finitude. Ultimately, mech existentialism is but one way to talk about what makes our world our own individual life, both unique, genuine, and worth its philosophical articulation. Thus, we can even talk of Latin existentialists and so on. I saw a couple of the folks here in the audience will chuckle at that. The mech existentialist position here is not merely a position or a stance, but a description of a form of life, which has always already been lived. It does a ferns for us all, Mexican, Latinos, and other peoples historically relegated to the peripheries and margins of philosophy, though we are, and as a matter of fact, or genuinely or authentically, always already grappling with human existence. But perhaps mech existentialism's most valuable lesson is that in the revelatory articulations of existence as accidental, so sobrante, and committed, one is able to communicate a human presence that in its difference affirms the belonging to a global community. I thus invoke mech existentialism here as a concept that captures the reading of existence through a situated post-western perspective. Finally, it shows the existential historical priority of community over subjectivity, implying an ethics of responsibility and commitment to one's particular community and to each other. So thank you very much. Excellent. Thank you Carlos. That was really excellent. It's a very, very interesting, very, very interesting talk. I mean, it's loaded with quite a number of authentic mech existentialist concepts, if I would say. Accidentalism, insufficiency, nepotia, so sobra, and relational freedom, historical death. And it's interesting that these concepts are concepts that can easily be appropriated to non-western philosophical spaces, just as you were saying before you concluded, African philosophy, eastern philosophy, Chinese philosophy, Indian philosophy, perhaps due to quite similar concretely lived experiences in these spaces. I'm sure Sean and beyond Smidway said the periphery of margins of philosophy because they do teach a module titled margins of philosophy. Yeah, so as the world's philosophies program. So there's a lot of concepts loaded in your paper that we can really relate with. I'm sure quite a number of us will have some questions for you. Dr. Bjorn Freta, I will now take us through the discussion on comment session here. Yes, thank you very much. Yeah, I would like to ask anyone who would like to ask a question, just raise your hand or alternatively if you prefer that feel free to write it into the chat and I will try to keep up of the order. Wonderful, here we go. Just let me make a note quickly. Yes, Peter, please feel free to ask your question. Okay, thank you very much. Can you hear me? Yes. Okay, thank you very much. I'm not a big big appreciation to the team that saw us, Ravis, Bjorn, and Hartorn and others. This series has been very, very educated for people like me. Yeah, quickly to my question. Let me say, Oku, a big thank you to Professor Sanchez. So while you were being presented in Mexican Shalism, I was quite very, very interested in your thought. But it just struck me that much of the analysis, I mean the historical analysis you did, seemed to take off from the colonial experience of the Mexican people. Now, I was just wondering what you would say in terms of Mexican Shalism, pre the arrival of the Spanish, I mean does Mexican Shalism also look at the existentialist realities, realities around the lived world of the Mexicans before the arrival of the Spanish, I mean the whole colonial experience. So that's my first question. And if it does that, what then would be the outcome of the interaction of these two lived experience, the pre-colonial experience, pre the Spanish arrival, and then the experience during and after the colonial. So that's my hope. Thank you very much, Peter. Yes, so would you like to collect questions or would you like to answer them immediately? I'll answer immediately. I'll forget. So I'll just answer them now. I mean the simple answer to the question is that no, it does not account for a pre-colonial experiences. Now, why would that be? Well, because the reason why Mexican Shalism finds a crisis in existence is because of that disconnect, right? There is a disconnect between the pre-colonial world and the colonial world that they're trying to, that it causes quite a bit of sosovra, right? It's this idea that there has, something has been lost, right? A world has been lost, which was a world that was meaning bestowing in many ways. So it's, there's a sense in which something big has been, has been lost by an act of violence and conquest or something like that. So one of the reasons why Nepantla, why I say that Nepantla defines Mexican existence is because Mexicans find themselves in between these two worlds that they really don't have any access to. One world is the indigenous world that is rich and complex and historical. And the other world is the world of the Europeans who have basically abandoned them in a way, right? Historically, colonized through colonization and conquest and all of that, they have also been subject to their violence. So they find themselves in between these two pillars, these two monoliths of history, and that's where they sit, that's where they are in this Nepantla state and this middle hood, right? And so, so the quick answer to that is no, it does not account for that, for that history. Thank you very much. Manuel, please. Hey, Carlos, thanks so much for the talk. So a, you know, a handful of questions and feel free to ignore as you like or, you know, it's a choose your own adventure kind of question set. So one question about Udanga and the recommendation. So in this talk, it sounds like you were reading Udanga as offering a kind of or Mexican, Mexican existentialism more generally is offering a kind of normative picture, a recommendation of care, both for the self and about relations to other people. And I'm curious about where you think the story ends in the picture. So, and again, this is an old quote, in some sense, an old and familiar question. But one way of putting it is that it looks like the picture of Udanga's accidentality is being in contrast to an indigenous and European substantiality entails that Indigenous peoples who are fully embedded in their, their world's historical views and haven't been assimilated by the project of the kind of post-revolutionary Mexican national state look like they're not Mexican on this account. And it looks like it, you know, and this is, of course, you know, there's this ugly history of the, on the need to Mexicanize the indigenous peoples to pull them into the project of the nation state. And so one way of reading the Udanga on this is, you know, how isn't this just a doubling down on the known, in fact, these folks aren't, these folks aren't Mexican, and that we should make them Mexican, we should want them to be Mexican in as much as the Mexican gets valorized as distinctively human. It looks like in some sense it reproduces some of the dialectic of colonization, where there's a kind of, there's the humans and then there are the indigenous and the indigenous in some ways are kind of masked or degenerate versions of humanity. Last is, if you want to say something about it, I would love to hear more about the feminist strand of existentialism. All right. Well, that's three, three shoes your own adventure paths. Let's see which one I take. First about the, this normative picture of business that I'm trying to pry out of Udanga. Well, basically, my reading of this is that towards the end of analysis of Mexican being, which is Udanga's famous book published in 52, and which I just recently translated and published this this year. So there's a plug. He, towards the end of it, he's, when he's talking about Sosobra, he seems to be very concerned about the, the idea that he seems to be concerned for community, basically. He's concerned that, that, that there's, there's condition of being Mexican in which everybody is falling into this condition of Sosobra, this uncertainty and anxiety of being torn to shreds. And this common feeling of, of Sosobra motivates this call out, this, this idea that, okay, now that we're all suffering this, let's all get together and talk about it and communicate with each other based on this, on this condition of Sosobra. And, and to me that concern with calling out other, calling out from Sosobra to others is the point at which Udanga commits himself to this care for the community. Because in Mexicans, if Mexican being is defined by Sosobra, then that means that it's just not him, right? It's an entire community struggling with the same thing. And he wants us to speak from that struggle to each other and with each other. And that's where I get this idea that, okay, now let's read it back to the Accidentality bit. What is he saying about the state of Mexican community? Well, he's saying that if, if we, if we feel that our lives, that our life is contingent and accidental at the point of fracture at all times, that yeah, we will fall into some sort of existential vertical, like, like the characters in Camus and the stranger or waiting for Godot or whatever, right? Like this idea that, okay, we're kind of stuck here, paralyzed by this idea that we are accidental. And I think that's something that that Udanga notices at the end of his book, right? Or that's something that he is aware of. And he wants to say, okay, well, no, we don't have to be stuck in this, in the, or paralyzed by our fear of being accidental, like we can actually call to each other from that, from that Accidentality. We can reach out from the Accidentality to others. It offers us a common point of commonality, something that we can share, communicate with one another. So I don't know that's going to be satisfactory to you. But, but that's, that's where I'm coming from with this. Now, the second point that you make about the exclusion of the indigenous voice or the indigenous people is an interesting one, right? I mean, I'm not, I don't have an answer to it. All I'll say is that I'm very concerned by it, by it, to the extent that in this, in this manuscript that I'm working on, I have an entire chapter dedicated to, to contemporary indigenous philosophy. Because I, in reading contemporary indigenous philosophies, you see a lot of echoes of what was going on in the 1940s in Mexico. This idea that contemporary indigenous identity in Mexico, for example, is, is also likewise conceives itself as accidental as as, as so-so-bra and all these other ways. So I don't, I don't have an answer to your question. I think that that's a very good one. That, that we, that work in this field should be very aware of going forward. And, and, and so then finally about the, the, the existentialists, the feminist existentialists a bit that I didn't talk about. What one of the things, of course, that, that we have been, and Robert is, is down here in the, in the audience too, that we've been concerned about is the inclusion of the feminist voice in our accounts of Mexican philosophical history in the 20th century, for example. And it's, it's been, it's been quite a journey simply because the female voice was kind of marginalized quite a bit in, in during this time in Mexico as well, as everywhere else. But as, as, as you've also pointed out, Rosario Castellanos is a good point of departure for us, right. She presents in her work a picture of that, that resembles that of Luis Viodo and Muranga and this, and what, and, and it, and that it pushes back against this idea that there's this abstract universality that we should be kind of bound to. So in the, in the stuff that I didn't talk about today, I talk about the Rosario Castellanos and her work in several places where she's talking about how the struggle for Mexican women is to be, the struggle for Mexican women arises when they recognize that they're both Mexican and Mexican women. There's like a triple marginalization that's going on there. And she makes sense, she makes certain calls to, to other women in Mexico of things that they should be doing, right. And one of the things that she wants women to do is to write. In writing, you express, you, you, you manifest this transcendence that goes beyond your particular condition, and you can liberate yourself in a certain way, right. And so I try to, in that, in that section, I try to connect her concerns and her prescriptions with the other things that I'm doing in the rest of the, of the paper with Uranga and Viodo. And this might be a bit of revisionist history that I'm doing, but I think it's, it's necessary to move the conversation forward, right, to, to say, okay, well, it's not just, it's not, it wasn't, it wasn't just Mexican men that were kind of worried about these existential issues. But there was also worries about Mexican women that were equally, if not even more complicated, because of their more complex, but they're more complex marginalization and peripheralization. So, so I don't know. Your question's always something, Manuel. So happy birthday and thanks for, thanks for asking. Thank you very much. All right, Monica, please. Thanks, Colas. Very fascinating. I'd like to hear more about that substance, because I don't think I'm clear about the work it does in what you discussed. On one hand, I thought the emancipatory potential of Mexican sensualism was that it's coming up from substance metaphysics. So then I didn't understand that bit, that lack of, because it seems that the point is, if death is a part of being, and you don't romanticize it at all, then I would think that, you know, a pure kind of substance metaphysics, you move away from it at all. So it is, there is no need to set up a relation to that anymore. So then all of a sudden I didn't understand why one needs to go back to it. Well, the whole bit about substance, I think is, it's, and I tried to kind of reduce it a little bit in the paper to make it sound as though it's a relational term, right? When Uranga is talking about its efficiency, I'm saying that it's it's, he's talking about this relationship that we and what that one has. Now, the reason why I'm doing that is because I'm trying to avoid, you know, the problems that you're talking about here, avoid that conversation, right? But in reality, what Uranga is referring to when he's talking about substance, I think is this idea that when, when Mexicans from their colonized or post-colonial perspective look out into the world, they are confronted by these notions of what humanity is. Now, the picture of humanity that was handed to them in the colonial experience was the picture of the Spaniards as representing, you know, a complete or fulfilled substantial picture of what a human being is supposed to be. On the other hand, the romanticization of the pre-colonial Indigenous past gives them also this idea that there's, even within their history, there is a picture of the human, which is complete and substantial. And the Mexican, as a hybrid of these two cultures, of these two pictures of substantial humanity, can't measure up to either. And so in Uranga's narrative, I think what substance means is just this idea of perfection, this idea of completion, this idea that that there's these two different, different conceptions of the human, which are not lacking in anything, right? They have their history, they have their, their ways, they have their culture, and they have everything. Well, the Mexican is trying desperately to fit this middle ground. And so they're looking outward to these two opposing worldviews and see them, and they see the mass of substantial, as completed pictures. At least that's how I understand it. And so I think that the reason why I say that it's a relational, that insufficiency as a relational term is for that, for that reason, that I think that it's just the reason why Uranga just, the top brings up substance is not to get involved in this, in this whole metaphysical story, but only to say this is, this is how our relationship is to these two worlds, right? It's one of where we feel in this relationship, we feel insufficient. I don't know if that answers your question. I don't know if I'm answering any questions today, but yeah, just feel free to let me know if you, if you feel that you need to follow up on the question ask. Thank you very much for that answer. Now, Sean, please. Thank you, Professor Sanchez for an absolutely fascinating and rich talk and so much to think about, think with, and it certainly supports us in the kinds of things we're trying to do here at SAAS. The one thing that struck me as you were talking, and I, you know, I understand that what you're dealing with with Uranga is a particular historical moment where existentialism is the kind of regnance philosophical discourse. But so many of the kind of concepts that existentialism seems to come up with, you know, insufficiency, nopantla, etc. strike me as so much more and also use kind of lack of substance, it's kind of intermediary identity, this, this kind of way of being in the world that is torn seems to me to be so much more in conversation with or at least perhaps could fruitfully be in conversation with the more kind of post-structural take which is so deeply critical of the existentialism of Sartre, etc. in France, as well as the kind of phenomenological stuff that comes out of Heidegger and then also Maria Ponti. Why, why isn't that, I mean, is that conversation happening? Is there a dialogue to be had with that or is there kind of investment in the existentialist project that is particular to the Mexican case? Yeah, that's a good question. No, I don't think that there's any investment in keeping the narrative assets as I presented it here. I see, like I've noticed also like this, that we can export the Uranga critique or the Uranga description and really kind of have put it in conversation with post-structuralists and other traditions very, very easily actually and it would be fruitful to do that. The reason why I invest myself in this idea is because I'm, I can't seem to get myself to pull it out, to pull out the conversation out of this historical milieu of where it was and what it was doing at that time. When I first started this work back in 2007 or so, I went to Mexico City because I wanted to know more about this tradition. I wanted to get more text. There wasn't anything here. I was in the National Archives and the University Archives, I'm sorry, digging up stuff. I found not articles, at that time I didn't find a lot of articles or books, but I stumbled upon this newspaper controversy that was happening in Mexico City from like 1948 to about 1951 where almost every Sunday there was a debate between existentialists like Uranga and Zea and all these other guys about what existentialism was, about what it meant, about how to understand it, about what it didn't mean, about how much of, how this other, this very famous important Mexican philosopher, José Vas Concelos who called it garbage, existentialism is garbage and Sartre is a clown. He was very upset with existentialism, so during this time in Mexico City newspapers and on the Sundays and a lot of dailies, you had this concern with existentialism, either it's garbage and we should absolutely forget it or it's amazing and we should use it to talk about a reality or let's think of something else that's talking to talk about Marxism or whatever, but there's this conversation and then there's worry, there's concern and so I find myself, I find it difficult to extricate myself from that thought that it was an important moment and I need to keep faithful to it, to that conversation. Now Manuel José Manuel Vargas recently published a paper on accidentality that begins in the spirit of Mexican philosophy and Emilio Uranga's depiction of it specifically, but he moves it into a conversation with contemporary philosophy which is insanely fruitful, it's very, very fruitful and I think that that's the direction that we are going, I think that the direction that Mexican philosophy is heading is towards a less historical, more conceptual conversation and that's in a way, this paper here today and the manuscript that I'm writing is meant to make that move as well, like I want to talk about these concepts that we could use in contemporary philosophy in conversation with deconstructionist and post-structuralist and Marxist and so on and so forth, analytic philosophy. Now as I was getting towards the end of my manuscript I realized that we can talk about that existentialism, if you look at a syllabus on existentialism in the United States for example, you will not find anybody else but Camus and the French and the German. So then that got me worried and I decided to write this paper and so it's my attempt to say okay well now you don't have an excuse, right? If you want to teach existentialism globally you have to include these people because I'm calling it something catchy, right? But in reality I really, I think that your point is a very good point, I think that that is a future of Mexican philosophy to put it in conversation with contemporary issues and concerns and philosophy as Manuel has done and for me the only reason why I'm kind of stuck in talking about it in the way that I do is because I feel like it's important at least to record it for now. May I just come back on that? I mean I think you're completely right, I think philosophers are just very generally not very good at doing the historical work, right? Of kind of plotting why ideas emerge in the time and the space that they do and I think in any kind of decolonized philosophy that history is absolutely vital. We have to do that work of showing where, why, who is doing this work, why they're engaging with particular ideas, why they're discarding others, what they're innovating and you know I kind of think that what you've laid out today in this kind of genealogy for one of a better word of kind of how these ideas emerge and and what they're intended to map is very important and sort of saying we have something to say about all of this, we don't have to be in a band to you know deconstruction or post-structuralism or anything like that. You know we're thinking it's I'm trying to remember Paula Moyer's work who says you know we speak from where we are, right? And I think that that's really valuable about what you're doing in mapping that history. So I don't want to kind of question that project at all, I think that's completely vital and it is a way of actually reinforcing that Mexican-ness to what you're doing. There's very specific conceptual, that conceptual apparatus that has been you know brought out of this work. So you know just really thank you very much, I appreciate it a lot. Thank you. Thank you. All right Elvis. Yeah, thank you so much Carlos. I just wanted to ask if I do understand these concepts quite well, of course it's something I'm really interested in exploring a bit more. Would I be right in saying that Zosobra, sorry if I'm not pronouncing it right, that's Zosobra. It's quite similar of course, I'm not saying it's exactly the same but quite similar to the Africana or Black philosophical concept of double consciousness of the boys. Where we find ourselves in this fullness where we are torn apart between two identities, two realities. And while Nepatla is the optimism of Zosobra, so it's the in-between that gives us that potentiality, that possibility to go beyond this being torn apart and to realize that we can actually become anything. So would I be right to summarize Zosobra as the fullness and Nepatla as the possibility in terms of this in-betweenness. The second thing I would like to have a bit more clarification about is death as historical. Is this death as historical which I find a very interesting concept. Can it be experienced collectively? So could it be collective death as historical and I'm thinking about it this way, particularly because the concrete experiences for example in Mexico, in Mexican philosophy was collective as well, not just individualistic. So yeah I may just be babbling but I hope you understand the questions I'm trying to ask. No yeah yeah thank you, thank you. Yeah I think that the way that you describe Zosobra and Nepatla is fair. It's when Uranga for example brings up those two concepts in his book, you'll find as you're reading it, you'll find that it's very hard to pry them apart. It's very hard to say that Zosobra is one thing and Nepatla is another. I've been just obsessed about the fact that they must be pryable, they are two different things and so I've just been making this, I've just been kind of going over and over and over about it by saying that yes, Zosobra is like the, Zosobra is the expression of Nepatla in the sense that as you're right, Nepatla is this, is this in-betweenness that represents the possibilities of movement of doing. When I think of a being in-between in here in the United States, the Chicana feminists appropriated this concept a few decades ago to talk about their in-betweenness as this point of revolutionary practice, this idea that from this not being tied down to any particular identity, they will be able to emerge and fight off oppressions of sorts. So yeah, so Nepatla belongs in that space of possibility. Zosobra is this, in existentialism, the clearest comparison to Zosobra is anxiety or angst in European existentialism. However, I find that Zosobra is much more complex than simply anxiety or angst. It is, as you say, if we problematize double consciousness and make it even more, what's the word I'm looking for, if we make it even a more urgent kind of thing, then yeah, I think that Zosobra and double consciousness are similar in that way, in the sense that in Zosobra you find yourself always being pulled in different directions by different demands, either existential demands or just material demands or whatever. You're all, you never feel like you can be settled in into your in-betweenness. There's a sense in which the in-betweenness is this liberating kind of spot that you can settle into, but Zosobra pulls you. It's pulling you in different directions and there's no peace. There's no peace to that. It's a constant being pulled in all different directions. That's why the image of being quartered kind of came to me. I wanted to come up with an idea of it and I thought, yeah, well, in medieval times when people got split and forced by horses, that's the idea, I think, that this concept is trying to convey. My colleague Francisco Gallegos, who has his hand raised and I, we published a paper, not a paper, but an opinion piece right up to the elections in the US a couple of years ago, where we talked about Zosobra as being this defining, as that moment kind of exemplifying Zosobra for everyone. I think it really hit a nerve because we eventually started, the paper was, I mean, the article was circulated all over the planet pretty much and a lot of people related to this idea, finding themselves torn apart by different demands and different things. I think you're right in thinking about it that way. Yeah. Oh, and then about death, the notion of death that Uranga kind of proposes here, the way that I understand it is this idea that death is, the coexistence with death has been one where Mexicans have existed with death since the conquest. There's an excellent book by, I forgot his name, but it's, the book is called a mestizo mind. And in this book, the author takes excerpts out of witness testimonies from the days of the conquest of Mexico City, and talks about how in those days after the conquest of Mexico City in 1521, bodies littered the streets and the canals of the city and remained there rotting for months. Right. And to walk from one place to another was to smell death, to be with death always. And that's memory, I think, stayed with generationally with Mexicans to the point that death is something that just, it's just there. Right. And I believe that it helps explain a lot of things, right. It helps explain a lot of attitudes that I may get in trouble for, for promoting here. But I recently published the book, I always mentioned it as called a sense of brutality philosophy after narco culture, where I talk about the violence and brutality of contemporary Mexican narco culture, the fact that Mexico suffers, really suffers. And today in the United States, we're suffering because the cartels are putting a squeeze on our avocado consumption and our lime consumption. And they're killing people for avocados and limes in Mexico right now. And so the cartel, the narco state in Mexico is very serious. And the violence that they carry out is brutal. Right. And one of the claims that I make in the book is that it seems as though Mexicans live with death in a very ordinary way. Right. Based on even current testimony, there's, you know, there's that guy, okay, well, let's go to the store now, right, kind of thing. So there's a problem with thinking of death in this way, though. Right. And the problem is that you begin to, at least from a Western perspective, think of these people as barbarian in some sense, like, oh, my God, you know, look at the way they're living with the dead, look at the way they think of death or the way they value life, right, they don't value life very much. So there's things that we must talk about and talk about death in this way. But I think that Uranga wanted to back back in when he was writing, he wanted to talk about that relationship that Mexicans have always had with this idea of death as being an accepted fact. And that's something that you look forward to, but something that you kind of live with. Right. And I'll say one final thing. I mean, and this is just trivial, but growing up when I grew up in Michoacán in Mexico, and talk of spirits, talk of ghosts is very, very common, very familiar. Yeah, you are frightened by the possibility that if you walk out of your room, you're going to encounter this whole, you know, this crew of ghosts and spirits hanging out in the front yard. But when people talk about it, you don't question their sanity. You know, if somebody says, oh, yeah, I saw a ghost last night, you know, you don't immediately think, oh, well, you need medicine. You're like, oh, who was it? Right. It's like, you just assume that they're, that they're writing in their experience. And I think that that speaks to that, to that idea. So, so, yeah, so I'll stop talking about that. But all right. All right. Thank you very much. We got one final question from Francesco. Thank you so much. Really lovely talk. And I'm so taken by this project of trying to carve out existentialism and distinguish it from French existentialism. And so I've been thinking about trying to track the contrast that you've, you didn't frame it this way as like explicitly, I want to just compare and contrast, but I've been doing it sort of as you've been talking and I've been trying to like track it. And so tell me, tell me if, if I got anything wrong, I'm going to, I'm going to post something here in the chat, just so I can, there's a lot of ideas, so it keeps things easier. So the French, German existentialist tradition, they talk about angst and anxiety, but in the Mexican, Mexican, existentialist tradition, we talk about sous-sovres. I mean, that's an interesting question, like, what is the difference there? One thing you talked about is stuckness versus the sous-sovres about as a movement, as a kind of, you never can find your balance, as a teeter-tottering. Then you have death as a telos versus Mexican death as an everyday companion. I thought that was really nicely, nicely put. One thing you didn't really talk about, but I thought maybe you touched on is like this idea from the French and existential, and German existentialist tradition is about individuating yourself from das man, about conformism and just being an authentic individual versus something about how in the existentialist tradition, it's not so much about individualism, but about being authentic as Mexicans. It's about asserting Mexican self-determination and celebration of Mexican style as authentic and something we're doing collectively. The existentialist seems to be doing a collective project, and that seems to be an important sort of collectivism ethos there. Then in terms of the idea that like the Europeans are substantial, but we Mexicans are accidental, that gets into trouble in the ways that Manuel pointed out, but it does seem like there's something to the idea that as ideals, as ideals of responsibility, that there are some people who think that what it is to be responsible, to take responsibility for your life, is to kind of get your shit together, to like decide what really matters, what's your priority, and don't be so dispersed, don't be kind of like just kind of putting out fires, but kind of get yourself together as like a committed individual who kind of knows what matters and what doesn't, versus a kind of responsibility that's about sort of responding to the contingencies of life, knowing that that might mean that you can't offer a substantial explanation for who you are and why you are the way you are, that it's okay that you're dispersed and conflicted and you don't make sense entirely. There's not a smooth narrative that you can reflectively endorse or rationally endorse, that is responsibility, it's responding to contingent circumstances. That's what I think that would be interesting kind of way of teasing that out. And then one thing you didn't mention at all, which is a big theme in French and German existentialism is absurdity, the idea that life is absurd from Camus, and I was, you know, you kind of, I mean, there's like obvious overlaps and similarities, but like one thing about this idea that life has no rational justification, anything can happen at any time, you know, that comes out of Camus, is that kind of obscures some basic geopolitical analysis of like why some people's lives are so absurd as opposed to other people's. In other words, it obscures basic analysis of oppression, of oppressed communities, like some people's lives are more absurd than others because they don't have power, because they're not calling the shots, because they're constantly having to figure out a way of making their marginalized existence livable. And it seems like the Mexican existentialists are really trying to put a political analysis of geopolitical oppression and power relations at the center of all of these discussions in a way that the French and German existentialists just didn't at all. So I'm curious, what do you think about that and any sort of thoughts or responses that come to you from those provocations? Well, thank you, Francisco, like always. Well, the stuff about individualist authenticity versus collective authenticity, I think that it's it's an interesting one, right? And it's an interesting move there that I'm currently trying to tease out. There is a sense in, in with Portilla, for example, with La Polo Zéa, with Emilio Ranca and Luis Villoro, that the ultimate goal, the ultimate price here is to arrive at a, at an existentialism that values collective authenticity over and over subject over individualistic authenticity, that that true value comes from community, true value comes from commitment to that community. Now, it's a very, it's a struggle for them to make this claim. And, and, and you see, you see the contrast or you see really like that, what the struggle is when, when you contrast this collective authenticity with indigenous conceptions of community. The indigenous conception of community, and I talk about this in the manuscript, is one where the individual does not fit at all, right? There's no fit whatsoever for individual authenticity. In any sense, the, the, the, the indigenous conception of community is one where the community is all there is. And if you're not part of the community, you're nothing. There's nothing for you. Now, as I contrast the, the, the conceptions of community by say Portia and, and those indigenous conceptions, both of them are trying to arrive at this conception of collective authenticity that, that, that's different in a way because within the, within the existentialist project, it's important that you have some sort of autonomy. It's important that you make the decision to put your community first, for example. And in doing that and making that decision, that free decision, you are somehow becoming authentic in a way. And so, but it, so it retains, it retains that individualism in a certain sense. And so that's, that's the struggle there that I'm, that I'm trying to tease out still. And it was, it came to the forefront because I was thinking about indigenous notions of community. So, so that's, that's one thing. I'm still kind of working on that, but it, but it's an interesting and very good question that that could take up an entire class period. So, you know, just to, to plug the whole purpose of this project is, yeah, we want to talk about this in the classroom. So, you know, you can spend an entire class period talking about that. And then the last thing I'll mention is this notion of absurdity that you talk about. Now, Carlos Pereda, who, you might know Francisco, but Carlos Pereda is this Uruguayan Mexican philosopher in Mexico City, who has been a proponent of Mexican philosophy for many years. He's still around and he's been a proponent by pushing back against us, right? He's like, well, what makes him Mexican? Why is there a Mexican in front of philosophy? What's the point? But he's been a very motivating factor for us because he pushes us to kind of move forward. But anyways, he, he's something of an analytic philosopher and he has this concept he calls arrogant reason. And the concept of arrogant reason is this idea that it's, is basically the idea that the West has imposed upon the colonies this idea of, of reason as being the end all be all of all things, right? And what Western concepts are supposed to give us a truth of things in a very straightforward way. He says, that's arrogant. That just, that that's an arrogance. That's a colonial prejudice, a colonial vice. Now when, what one of the things that I'm doing is that I'm keeping in mind that idea of arrogant reason as I move along my readings of these philosophers, because I want to make sure that, that I, that I'm reading them correctly. I think Carlos Pereda is right. I think that, that, that one of the things that Mexican existentialists, and existentialists have done is combat the pretensions of arrogant reason by saying, well, we have our Mexican sort of reasoning going on here that explains death and community and freedom and being in between and being anxious. And you have yours. And ours is not arrogant because it is grounded firmly in our experience. Yours is arrogant because it's trying to explain our experience. And so I like this idea that you're mentioning about absurdity, right? It's, I don't, I don't think that Mexicans, and it's a, and I really haven't thought about this Francisco. I never thought about the lack of the discussion of absurdity and Mexican existentialism. I really hadn't thought about that until right now, but noticed it even that, okay, wait a minute, why are you talking about absurdity? Well, because they don't have to. At a certain point, the idea is that colonial reason is absurd reason. And so we're not going to even talk about it. We're just going to say like what Anga says, any conception of the human that sees it as substantial is arrogant. And so, and so I really like that. I think that, that I'm going to keep that in mind as I go, as I move forward. But you know, that's, that's pretty much all I, all I have for you, but you know, as always, we'll keep talking about things. Alright, thank you very much for that extensive explanations on all these questions raised in the very last question. Yeah, thank you very much. I think I'm going to hand it over for Elvis to finalize our session today. Thank you very much. Thank you, and thank you so much, Carlos. I think we've had a very interesting lecture, as well as a discussion session today. Very interesting thoughts and concepts to keep in mind going forward. And we really look forward to your forthcoming book. Hopefully, sometimes soon we'll have it to, to our, to our literature as we get familiarized with all the philosophical traditions. So we'll be meeting again in April, the last Friday of April, April 29. And I know that we'll be looking at Chinese philosophy, but I'm not sure which aspect of it, because that's another very broad and comprehensive tradition. But till then, thank you all for being with us today. We hope you have a fantastic weekend ahead after the week's work as usual. And we look forward to being in touch, Carlos, in the future. Let me just add, you know, please do join us in our monthly seminars. I think, you know, we need to build a critical mass to make sure that, you know, philosophy is no longer the purview of dead white middle class men. And it would be just great if you could all join. But for now, I would just like to say, Viva, existentialism. Thank you so much. I want to thank everybody too for coming and for listening to Ramelon. That was great. Really, really great. Thank you so much. This will all be put up on YouTube as, as are all of our seminars. So if you join the mailing list, we can make sure you have links to all of the previous talks as well as this one. But thanks so much for coming. It was lovely to see you all here. And Elvis, thank you so much for organizing this fantastic talk and Bjorn for helping curate the discussion. So have a lovely weekend, everyone. Bye. Bye.