ABSTRACT
In the last few decades – especially in a time in which there has been growing global sensitization to the traumatizing othering and effacement of others by colonialism and the persistence thereof in neo-colonial and “post”-colonial guises – growing numbers of philosophers have underlined the glaring incommensurability between Kant’s universal moral theory, with its inspiring Enlightenment ideals of human autonomy, equality and dignity, on the one hand, and his racism, on the other. For Kant, a critical interrogation of one’s own present is not an attempt to find how it diverges from the past following some dramatic event, nor is it an interrogation of the present to unearth signs of a forthcoming event, or of a point of transition toward the dawning of a new world. Mbembe maintains that at best, “slavery is experienced as a wound whose meaning belongs to the domain of the psychic unconscious”.
