Reviewed by Felipe Martínez-PinzónAgainst War: Views from the Underside of Modernity. Durham: Duke University Press, 2008. 360 pages. $84.95 cloth, $23.95 paper.
One of the most enduring images in Against War is from another book, Enrique Dussel’s The Invention of the Americas. It is of an event that happens in privacy, behind the scenes of History: Hernán Cortés learns from Moctezuma’s envoys that the indigenous inhabitants take him to be God. Alone, and then surrounded by his men, Cortés acknowledges the power bestowed on him by those very words that constitute him. This scene of solitude is also one in which unmistakable and egotistical grandeur works as self-fashioning. Even more so than for Dussel himself, it serves Maldonado-Torres as an occasion to reflect on the birth of modern subjectivity as a consciousness born out of the radical unevenness between the European and the native. Far from Spain, freed from the all-seeing gaze of the King, Cortés can truly believe himself to be God.
