At the core of the philosophical discourse, a strange desire can be emphasized: a desire of abstraction – that is a spiritual desire of death: to erase the faces, the skins, and the topoi that are the material conditions of the production of the philosophical discourse. This desire of spiritual death bears a name: this is the movement of the universal.
As this lecture will try to draw, the idea of « epistemic decolonization » has nothing to do with a new expression of theoretical melancholia but with a certain understanding of remaining alive. Thus, it breaks with the classic idea that the subjects of philosophy have to be dead to their own bodies.