Profile

Alejandro Vallega (Assistant Professor)

Office: 328 PLC
Office Hours: by appointment
Phone: 541-346-5979
Email: avallega@uoregon.edu
View CV

Alejandro A. Vallega was born in Santiago, Chile, and went into exile with his family in 1974. Since then he has lived in Argentina, the United States, Austria, and Italy. He was first formally trained as a visual artist in Boston, and then went on to study philosophy at the St. John’s College Great Books Program in Annapolis. He received an M.A. in Ancient philosophy from Boston University, and a PhD on 20^th century European philosophy from the University of Vienna, Austria. His work focuses on the articulation of thought and its histories unfolding in exteriority or alterity, from a Latin American perspective, i.e., the development of philosophical thought beyond and from the oppressed and ignored periphery of North American and Western European philosophy. Central to this work are the critical analysis of the relationships and limits between Western philosophy and Latin American thought and the articulation of the modalities and orderings that sustain traditional interpretations of philosophical thought. In terms of Latin America this work involves a double critical move: on the one hand, the decolonization of the Latin American mind, on the other, the articulate expression of Latin American concrete experiences that may contribute to the development of world philosophies. Some of the primary influences in his work are fundamental ontology, deconstruction, hermeneutics, Marxist critical theory, the work of Frantz Fanon, esthetic theory, Latin American thought and popular culture, and his experience as a visual artist (he continues his activities as a painter to date).

He is the author of Heidegger and the Issue of Space: Thinking On Exilic Grounds (Penn State Press, American and Continental Philosophy Series, 2003) and of Sense and Finitude: Encounters at the Limits of Art, Language, and the Political (Contemporary Continental Philosophy Series, SUNY Press, 2009). Among other edited works, Alejandro is the editor of the English translation of Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation (Duke University Press, forthcoming) and of Anti-Cartesian Meditations (Indiana University Press). He is head editor for Latin America of the World Philosophies Series published by Indiana University Press. He is the author of many articles (for a current example see ¨Displacements - Beyond the Coloniality of Images” in Research in Phenomenology 41, 2011, 206-227.) Alejandro was co-director of the Collegium Phaenomenologicum in Umbria, Italy in 2004, and has been active part of the faculty since 1998. He has also taught at the Ph. D. Program in Esthetics of the School of Fine Arts of the Universidad de Chile, Santiago, and at the School for Decolonial Thought in Tarragona, Spain.

Alejandro’s current research focuses on the contemporary resurgence and reformulation of the Latin American philosophy of liberation as a path towards world philosophies beyond Western hegemonic neoliberal thought and colonialism. His work has made a strong impact with respect to the necessity of an “aesthetics of liberation” which must accompany any project of social, political, ethical and epistemic decoloniality beyond Westernizing configurations of existence and humanity. During the coming year he will be completing his new book Displacements, in which he fully develops this thesis. He will also be working on Light Traces, a book coauthored as a painter with John Sallis. In addition he will be completing a piece for the catalogue of the Paul Klee exhibit to be held at the Boston College McMullen Museum of Arts in 2012. Alejandro will be the plenary speaker at the XVI Congreso Internacional de Filosofía, Asociación Filosófica de México, Asociación de Filosofía y Liberación (Toluca, México, 24-28 of October, 2011). Also in October, he will be speaking on the work of Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben as part of an invited panel on the Italian philosophy, at the 50th anniversary meeting of SPEP.

His courses this year will include: in Fall 2011, Philosophy of Human Nature (Phil. 110) and Philosophy and Literature: history, temporality, thought, in Walter Benjamin and Latin American Literature (Phil 331); In Winter 2012: Introduction to Latin American Philosophy (Phil. 342) and an advanced author’s course on the implications of Gabriel García Márquez´s work for understanding philosophical thought today (Phil 463-563).