The so-called ‘Age of Discovery’ coincides with the gestation of western modernity and the onset of the modern/colonial order. The notion of discovery has certainly functioned as a euphemism for the mass conquest of peoples and territories. Yet, Vázquez Melken interrogates the ‘Age of Discovery’ as an index of the impetus of expansion of western thought. Decoloniality brings modern thought face to face with its own finitude, disorientation and forgetfulness. To the loss of Earth and the loss of worlds, earthlessness and worldlessness, corresponds a loss of thought, argues Vázquez Melken.

In his inaugural lecture, he will address the question of the coloniality of modern thought and the task of decolonial thinking. What is the task of thinking, beyond the metaphysics of modernity? What is the task of thinking in the awareness of the precedence and finitude of Earth? What is the task of thinking in relation to what has been unthought, to what is under erasure?

Prof. dr. R.D. Vázquez Melken, Professor of Post/Decolonial Theories and Literatures, with a focus on the Global South: On the Coloniality of Thought.