Peripheral Lives and Knowledge as Transgressing Powers

Abstract

This article presents a conception of periphery seen from peripheral lives and knowledge as transgressing powers. Whether the sense of production of knowledge or the production of other spatiality, we affirm the existence and importance of peripheral lives and knowledge from a renewed conception of the periphery. Reflecting on periphery means to think of the center, and the center-periphery relationship, both spatialized in the symbolic and political sense, linked to the social dynamics. Therefore, the article brings as an analytical foundation the I-other relationship in which the philosophical themes of identity, difference, and otherness appear as the references of the gaze. More than that, we try to think about its unfolding in the possible ways of realizing that relationship as limit and transgression. The center-periphery relationship appears as the I-other relationship. So, the other is worked from decolonial approaches, considering the effort to restore the dignity of others who were historically and geographically denied, invisible and exterminated, in addition to often diagnosing the invention of the other as a mechanism of knowledge and power. We assume that the recognition of other spatial-existential practices expresses an ethical mode of relation with the other, different from that which constructs the sense of the periphery in the scope of the European modern-colonial tradition.