MIT Building 14N-112

Presented by Deborah Jenson Professor Emeritus of Romance Studies, Duke University Abstract: Sylvia Wynter defines a founding “Word of Man” representing man as a “selected being and natural organism” from 1512 onward. Around “Man,” Western Europe founded a tradition of secularized discourse heralding global expansion and plantation colonialism. “Man” for Wynter is an epoch as well as a figure, in whose name connections are forged between empirical scientific methodologies, liberal economies, and racialized identities of “Man-as-liber.” In this paper I present Wynter’s concept of the “autonomy of human cognition,” and of autopoiesis as biological cognition, in the context of a broader Caribbean and Latin American genealogy of freedom within the “Cognitive Charter” of modernity. From the responses of the Haitian thinker Anténor Firmin to the early brain science as presented at the Paris Anthropological Society where he was a member in 1883-84, to the development of cultural or ethno psychiatry in Haiti by Louis Mars, to Wynter’s integration of Chilean theoretical biology into her philosophy, I will present a Caribbean counter-model of cognition, not the Cartesian ego-model of rational consciousness, or what Vidal has called “brainhood,” but an environmental model of human being as praxis, in which, as Varela would later […]