摘要：This work is consciously and explicitly polemical. It is polemical toward the disparaging belief in the existence of a " South of Europe" (and thereby Latin America), a belief which has been epistemically constructed by the Enlightenment from the center and north of Europe since the middle of the 18th Century. The Enlightenment constructed (in an unconsciously deployed makin g 2 ) three categories that concealed European "exteriority": Orientalism (described by Edward Said), Eurocentric Occidentalism (fabricated by Hegel among others), and the existence of a "South of Europe." This "South" was (in the past) the center of history around the Mediterranean (Greece, Rome, the Spanish and Portuguese Empires, not to mention the Arab world of the Maghreb, already discredited two centuries prior), but was already at that moment a cultural leftover, a cultural periphery, because for the 1 8th - Century Europe of the Industrial Revolution, the entire Mediterranean was the "old world." In de Pauw's phrase: "Africa begins at the Pyrenees," and the Iberian Americas, evidently, were situated as colonies of the already semi - peripheral Spain and Por tugal. With that, Latin America simply "disappeared from the map and from history" until today, the beginning of the 21st Century. The goal of this work — which will certainly be criticized as "pretentious" — is to attempt to begin reinstating these Americas w ithin global geopolitics and the history of philosophy.
