he argues, is never seen as exhibiting attributes
that are properly part of humanity or, when it is,
these attributes are generally seen as of lesser
value. Mbembe suggests that in western social
theory African politics and economics only
appear as the sign of a lack, while the discourses
of political science and development economics
have become characterized by the search for the
origins of that posited lack. In this frame, war is
seen as all-pervasive, and the African continent
is seen as powerless, engaged in rampant self-
destruction. These negative images and one-
dimensional representations, present in the
post-colonial period of separation from western
coloniality, are traced back to the violence of
colonialism which Mbembe treats as having
three forms: (1) the founding violence of colonial
sovereignty which created the space over which
conquest was exercised and also the space within
which colonial power could introduce its own
laws, where its supreme right was also the
supreme denial of the right of the colonized;
(2) a violence of legitimation where the language
and models of colonial rule were introduced as
part of a universalizing mission to cement into
place a new institutionalizing authority; and (3) a
banal and everyday violence of cultural rule,
expressed in a ‘gradual accumulation of numer-
ous acts and rituals’ so that there was a cultural
imaginary that the state shared with society as a
way of reproducing colonizing power through
the intricate web of social relations (2001: 25).
I have referred to these passages from
Mbembe because they point to a rather impor-
tant component of the discussion of Euro-
Americanism: the place of violence and conquest
in the history of relations, representations
and positionalities when thinking about west/
non-west encounters. This point can be illustrated
in the context of the conquest of the Americas and
its close relation to western thought.
For example, the Argentinian philosopher
Enrique Dussel (1998) strongly argues that the
Spanish conquisto(or vinco), i.e. I conquer, must
be given historical and ontological priority over
the Cartesian cogito, ergo sum(I am thinking,
therefore I exist) as the first determination of the
subject of modernity. In this sense conquisto
means to take possession of the land and the
people of the conquered territory so that any sub-
sequent formulation of thought and truth must
already presume, implicitly or explicitly, a terri-
torialization based on a self/other split which
can only be properly understood in the frame of
conquest. For example, whilst Hernán Cortés
(1521), preceded the Discours de la méthode
(1636) by more than a century, it is important to
recall that Descartes studied at La Flêche, aJesuit college with a religious order that, at that
time, had deep roots in America, Africa and
Asia, and in its teaching the ‘barbarian’ was the
obligatory context for all reflection on subjectiv-
ity, reason and the cogito. For Dussel, modernity
was born when Europe constituted itself as the
centre of world history in 1492. Only with the
invasion of the ‘New World’ did Europe enjoy a
true springboard that allowed it to supersede
other regional social systems. The idea that ‘I
conquer’ constitutes the practical foundation of
‘I think’ has been taken up by both Moreiras
(2000) and Spanos (2000) in their discussion of
the crucial relation between geopolitical power
and the territorialization of thought, and this link-
age, as I shall show, is highly relevant for subse-
quent sections of my argument. In sum then
Dussel makes three interesting points.
First, the Hispanic Conquest of 1492 provides
an essential context for understanding the subse-
quent evolution of thinking on subjectivity,
reason and culture. Second, a great part of the
achievements of modernity were not exclusively
European but grew out of the continuous dialec-
tic of impact and counter-impact between
modern Europe and its periphery, including the
constitution of modern subjectivity. And third,
for Dussel, Eurocentrism consisted precisely in
confusing or identifying aspects of human
abstract universality in general with moments of
European particularity, which was in fact the first
‘global particularity’ (1998: 132).
This last suggestion, Dussel’s definition of
Eurocentrism, leads me to the final element of
this section of the chapter. What difference does
‘America’ make to our perspective on western
universalism, or how might ‘Euro-Americanism’
be different from ‘Eurocentrism’?
These questions can potentially lead us into a
long discussion of the historical, socio-economic
and political differences between the United
States and Europe. Along this pathway, one can
mention Lipset (1991: 40) who, in attempting to
define ‘American exceptionalism’, notes that the
United States is the least statist western nation in
terms of public effort, benefits and employment,
and, inter alia, more religious, more patriotic,
more populist and less law-abiding than other
developed countries. Daniel Bell (1991), for his
part, draws our attention to the lack of a feudal
history, the relative absence of socialism, and the
abiding sense of a moral purpose, expressed
perhaps most emblematically in the notion of
‘manifest destiny’. Bell writes, for instance, that
‘from the start there had been the self-conscious-
ness of a destiny that marked this country as
being different from others ... that the greatness
was laid out like a magnetic field which would422 BEYOND THE WEST3029-ch22.qxd 03-10-02 11:01 AM Page 422