The Terror of the Foundation in Santiago Castro-Gómez’s Political Philosophy: A Critique of Political Ontology

This article problematizes Santiago Castro-Gómez’s rupture with genealogy in favor of normative political philosophy. This rupture is characterized by a turn toward a political ontology that transforms political concepts into ontological categories that allow Castro-Gómez to posit a category of “the marginalized” as the ultimate foundation of political normativity. Through a dialogue with Frank Wilderson and Frantz Fanon, this article argues that such an ontologization of political categories, Castro-Gómez’s political ontology, leads to the reinscription of a colonial foundationalist logic of the terror of exclusion and leads Castro-Gómez to erase the specificity of incommensurable struggles and to constrain political imagination.