1. Centering the margins

In a co-authored essay with Elizabeth Spelman, María Lugones makes the following claim: “the deck is stacked when one group takes it upon themselves to develop the theory and then have others criticize it … turf matters. So does the fact of who if anyone has already set up the terms of the conversation” (Reference Lugones and Spelman1983, 579). Challenging the terms of the conversation over and above adding a few new voices to an established discussion is a characteristic move in decolonial theorizing.Footnote ⁵ Simple as this formula may sound, the challenges of doing so are considerable. When it comes to philosophy, at stake is dislodging the asymmetrical epistemic authority of the European tradition—an authority that insinuates itself even in work that criticizes Eurocentrism.

To borrow one revealing example from Seloua Luste Boulbina, when it comes to comparative philosophical approaches that set Fanon and Sartre into dialogue, there is a marked preference “[To] make Fanon into a reader of Sartre rather than Sartre into a reader of Fanon” (Reference Boulbina2019, 269). As a result, Boulbina argues, “Fanon’s reading of Sartre … appears essential, while Sartre’s reading of Fanon appears inessential. Thus, the same division is reproduced, the same hierarchy, and, in the end, the same coloniality” (Boulbina Reference Boulbina2019, 269). As Boulbina goes on to explain, despite the best intentions of those researchers who move toward decolonial philosophy by considering Fanonian thought, reading Fanon through Sartre ultimately risks reenacting the very coloniality that these authors presumably take as their initial problematic. For the implicit suggestion is often made that Fanon is simply a reader of Sartre, and so the non-European world is cast as a recipient rather than a producer of philosophical knowledge.Footnote ⁶ At issue, then, is what David Kim has helpfully described as a “surreptitious or second-order Eurocentrism” in decolonial and post-colonial theorizing: the reification of European philosophy as the cardinal point of reference in thinking that, from a first-order perspective, subverts Europe’s epistemic privilege (Reference Kim2015, 162).

It is in the interest of challenging this second-order Eurocentrism that this paper offers a reading of Heidegger through Lugones rather than vice versa.Footnote ⁷ In what follows, I take the “margin” as my interpretive starting point: I begin with the themes that have characterized Lugones’s thinking on selfhood and go on to read the early Heidegger’s account of Dasein and the project of authenticity through this lens. In first explicating Lugones’s work absent a Heideggerian interpretive framework, my aim is to join thinkers such as Marisa Belausteguigoitia in “interrupt[ing] the idea of the double as the one that is not allowed to reply/translate back and is instructed mainly to reproduce the original signification” (Reference Belausteguigoitia, Alvarez and Costa2014, 119). That is, I seek to conduct a conversation between Lugones and Heidegger in a manner that is careful not to present Lugones as though her work is mimetic vis-à-vis the original “canon.” Instead, I allow Lugones to set the terms of the conversation—I unstack the deck—and see what comes out of the work of juxtaposition when methodological habits are challenged.

I call this methodology centering the margins, but this designation should be taken with a grain of salt: because I am intentionally treating as pivotal “marginalized” work, the intention is to put pressure on what is considered “marginal” and “canonical” in the first place. The driving insight here is that inclusion in a tradition—for example, Latina feminism within phenomenology accomplished by the generation of scholars mentioned in the introduction—is a beginning and not an end goal (Gaudry and Lorenz Reference Gaudry and Lorenz2018, 221). In addition to diversifying the field of philosophy by appending new voices, a decolonial approach urges a concerted challenge to the “Eurocentri[c] foundations of the field,” including less visible forms of Eurocentrism reiterated by ostensibly inclusionary efforts like comparative work with a more global reach (Maldonado-Torres et al. Reference Maldonado-Torres, Vizcaíno, Wallace, Eun Annabel We, Gurminder, Gebrial and Nisancioglu2018, 65).

I understand centering the margins to be in the spirit of Lugones’s work and her persistent challenge to the canon/margin binary that inflects so much philosophical theorizing.Footnote ⁸ Lugones’s and Spelman’s questions regarding theoretical work lie in the background of this inquiry: why this activity, why according to this methodology, and what are the stakes of doing this work from my own position as a white Belgian woman trained mostly within the European philosophical tradition? If the possibility of reinstituting European hegemony looms large for any comparative work that brings together “canonical” (European) thought with marginalized (non-European) thought, this is all the more so when this work is done by someone working out of that European inheritance. Indeed, as I will discuss in the pages to follow, Lugones remarks that “traveling” to other worlds of sense from a position of privilege—for example, the effort on my part to understand Lugones’s writing without the lens of the European tradition—requires significant epistemic effort if it is not to slide into imposition and, ultimately, assimilation.

One motivation for deploying the methodology of centering the margins is a sensitivity to this sort of risk: it is an attempt to displace my own tradition and take up the challenge of, as Lugones writes, “striving to understand while … not hav[ing] the authority of knowledge [and] coming to the task without ready-made theories” (Reference Lugones and Spelman1983, 581). It is an attempt to follow the thread of Lugones’s writing without a ready-made philosophical filter—which is not the same thing as taking on a view from nowhere. In this way, I see the methodology as being especially germane for those who occupy a social position relevantly similar to my own and who must therefore exercise greater vigilance in their attempts to “travel” to other worlds. This being said, to speak of all of this as an attempt is important, because I do not presume in advance that this will be successful, nor do I recommend centering the margins as a fix-all approach. As Lugones reminds us, once we appreciate the need for a decolonial turn, “the questions proliferate and the answers are difficult” (Reference Lugones2010, 755). Although I hope the following will bear out the fruitfulness of disrupting practices of placing historically devalued perspectives behind a more “legitimate” thinker and thus challenging implicit forms of coloniality, the methodology is ultimately offered as one example among others.Footnote ⁹ The contribution, then, consists in an invitation to continue pursuing conversations about the eminently challenging but crucial work of decolonizing academic philosophy.

2. Lugones’s world-traveler self and the vantage point of marginality

Across her groundbreaking body of work, María Lugones delineates an account of selfhood that begins from the “everydayness” of those who find themselves “outside the mainstream” (Lugones Reference Lugones2003, 9; Reference Lugones1987, 10). In a manner that has by now become familiar within critical-theoretical and decolonial traditions, Lugones’s writing takes off from the messy realities of particular lives, eschewing the traditional philosophical taste for the “birds-eye view” (Reference Lugones2003, 5). Summing up her methodological approach in her essay “Enticements and dangers”, she writes: “I start within the midst of subjects, many of them subjected, but understood in our complexity and possibility … my starting point eludes abstraction, that theoretical temptress” (Reference Lugones2003, 197). As a number of commentators have pointed out, Lugones’s refusal to shy away from a writing that is for the marginalized and proceeds directly from their lived experience has done much to make visible previously neglected perspectives, and to “help us redefine the conception of subjectivity and selfhood so as to include considerations of gender, race and class, as well as multi-cultural concerns” (Ortega Reference Ortega2001, 4).

Lugones’s unique understanding of selfhood emerges through her attention to the often disorienting experience of being caught between what she calls multiple, heterogeneous, but always intersecting “worlds of sense”: as she puts it, the experience of being a “world-traveler”.Footnote ¹⁰ The fact that a “world” for Lugones is a “world of sense” immediately cues us in to the hermeneutic dimension of Lugones’s thinking: a world is, on Lugones’s simplest definition, a “community of meaning” (Reference Lugones2003, 87, 144). To say that a world is a community of meaning is not to discount the fact that each world is a “tense confluence of local and trans-local histories of meaning” (Reference Lugones2003, 220). As Lugones elaborates:

Now, for Lugones, to be produced as a self under conditions of oppression is to be keyed in—often painfully so—to the fact that there exist many such “worlds,” and that far from being continuous fields of meaning that exist in a pristine harmony with one another, these worlds often offer up conflicting hermeneutic resources for understanding oneself. In other words, Lugones’s point is not just that there are different worlds of sense, but that one is instantiated—or, more precisely, constructed—as a different person in different worlds. As she writes, it is an experience of being “more than one: having desires, character and personality traits that are different in one reality than another” (Reference Lugones1990, 503).

Lugones does not think that being constructed as this or that type of person by the semantic context one inhabits is unique to those who inhabit the margins. Nonetheless, the experience of what she calls “world-travelling,” that is, of being aware of a multiplicity of worlds and of feeling oneself to be significantly different in different worlds, is something that she takes to be broadly shared among the bicultural and the oppressed.Footnote ¹¹ The “epistemic shift” involved in navigating different worlds and hence different selves is, she writes, “part and parcel of our experience and our situation” (Reference Lugones2003, 12, 18). While world-traveling is not, then, in principle inaccessible to those who occupy positions of privilege, Lugones’s point is that, for the oppressed, world-traveling is “a matter of necessity and of survival” (Reference Lugones1987, 11). By contrast, those who feel at ease in the mainstream neither need to, nor can they without significant epistemic effort, go over to other worlds: “to travel to the worlds of those who are oppressed but who are categorially isolated from us … requires acute fluency in the mechanisms of oppression and insight in resisting those mechanisms” (Reference Lugones2003, 19).

Lugones famously relates her discovery of world-traveling through a recounting of her own experience of “profound confusion” as she “experienced [herself] as both having and not having a particular attribute,” namely, playfulness (Reference Lugones1987, 9). Recognizing this dissonance between her own and others’ perceptions of who she is, Lugones considers the various worlds she inhabits and questions how it is that she can be constituted as playful in some worlds but not in others. This experience of world-traveling, in turn, leads her to articulate a distinctive vision of the self as thoroughly socially constituted:

Instead of merely acting or pretending, one really is “someone of a different personality or character or someone who uses space or language differently” than oneself; the “self” is, paradoxically, different from itself. Thus, what emerges here is a notion of the subject that embraces the ambiguities of a self caught between the different norms, interpretive horizons, and available self-constructions of different “worlds”. This notion helps makes sense, for Lugones, of how it is that she can at one and the same time be a playful person, and not be a playful person:

Explicitly rejecting the dream of “unity underlying multiplicity”—an issue this paper will return to below—Lugones goes on to conclude: “There is no underlying ‘I’ that is the ‘true’ self ” (Reference Lugones2003, 128).Footnote ¹² This radical conclusion is one that Lugones returns to throughout her work. Again, she does not believe it is the case that she is truly playful but comes to take on other characteristics as accidental in her role as a marginalized person in another world; for Lugones, these personae are her, and their contradictory relationship reveals the lack of identity at the heart of selfhood.

There are two elements of this account that are especially interesting from the point of view of this paper. First, Lugones’s claim that the world-traveler self may be constructed differently in different worlds leads her to reject any notion that there is an underlying “substratum” of experience, some essential kernel of identity that remains the same from one world to the next. Lugones’s notion of the world-traveler is thus a radical version of social-constitutive accounts of identity, whereby the ontological independence of a “subject” standing outside a “world” to which it then freely relates is upended by attention to the everyday experience of those whose identities are marginalized. One’s situatedness in the world or indeed in various worlds is irreducible: there is no “I” independently of the constructions proffered by these communities of meaning; there is no “I” apart from its worlds.

Second, part of the power of Lugones’s account lies in its grappling with the challenges that accompany being a self that is constantly pulled, to borrow Elena Ruíz’s illuminating phrase, in “different hermeneutic directions” (Reference Lugones2020, 217). As noted, Lugones speaks from her own “profound confusion” in the hope that those who occupy the margins might resonate with this disorienting experience of navigating multiple versions of selfhood—some of which involve stereotypical constructions of one’s identity—and of feeling oneself to be an entirely different person as one travels between worlds of sense. In spite of these challenges, Lugones nowhere suggests that disunification or multiplicity is a problem to be overcome. Indeed, as Linda Martín Alcoff (Reference Alcoff2020, 208) comments, “what is most arresting here is not so much the multiplicity itself but the positive … valence given to multiplicity.” As Alcoff goes on: “The contrast is stark with mainstream western philosophy, where a coherent unified self is taken to be the normative goal” (Reference Lugones2020, 208). The second element of Lugones’s account that I want to highlight, then, is that Lugones’s writing goes against the current of mainstream philosophical accounts not merely because she begins from the everyday experiences of the oppressed, but because in doing so, she arrives at a radically different evaluation of a contextualized version of selfhood.

In “Purity, impurity and separation,” Lugones foregrounds this contrast between her vision of multiplicitous selfhood and traditional Western understandings of the self that privilege unity, integration, self-identity, coherence, and purity (Reference Lugones2003, 121–48). One of the important accomplishments of this essay is Lugones’s turning the evaluative equation of unity with moral goodness and multiplicity with defectiveness on its head. The desire for unity is shown to be bound up with a domineering purity logic rather than regarded as a moral achievement, while the multiplicitous subject is revealed to be uniquely equipped to engage in moral seeing. Lugones thus insists that embracing multiplicitous selfhood and the flexible vision that accompanies it has deeply positive consequences for one’s moral and political outlook. The experience of world-traveling involves a “humbling and honing of perception,” a willingness to bear witness to the realities of others, at the same time as it undermines self-importance and an overly rigid commitment to “dangerous orthodoxies” (Reference Lugones2003, ix, 159).

For Lugones, moreover, the idea of a unified self is not merely one conception of subjectivity among others, albeit one with deleterious moral effects. Rather, the vision of the self as unified is, Lugones writes, a “fiction” that is “conceptually tied to domination” (Reference Lugones2003, 128; Reference Lugones1987, 1). As Martinez unpacks this claim, the idea here is that the maintenance of the self as unified is made possible by inhabiting a position of privilege in such a way that one does not need to world travel, thereby making one’s “own sense of the world into a total world” (Reference Lugones2014, 229). The manner in which one is perceived differently—and indeed constituted as different—by others is not therefore taken to impinge in any significant sense on one’s core identity. As Lugones writes, the “remainder becomes of no consequence” (130). Again, while the socially constituted nature of selfhood generalizes, insight into our disunified condition is typically obscured by privilege.

Lugones does not here deploy the language of “reality,” but given that she speaks of unity as a “fiction” and of the standpoint of the unified, integrated subject as one that involves “radical self-deception,” it would not be a stretch to attribute to her the view that embracing an ambiguous vision of selfhood hits the ontological nail on the head (Reference Lugones2003, 128–30). To be a self at all is to be variously constructed across different worlds in a manner that renders one plural, ambiguous, and many-sided, whether one acknowledges it or not. As Christine Cuomo has recently remarked of Lugones, then, “the ideal of a unitary, undifferentiated true internal self is an illusory and oppressing fiction that serves domination by preventing us from understanding and utilizing our own plurality” (Reference Cuomo, Pedro, DiPietro and Roshanravan2021, 272). Lugones’s point is thus not merely that the mainstream Western philosophical notion of an integrated, unitary self is fundamentally misaligned with the experiences of the oppressed. Ultimately, we are led to see that the experience of marginalization—the consistent starting point for all of Lugones’s writings—is revelatory of the nature of reality in a manner that otherwise risks occlusion, inasmuch as it grants insight into the fundamental nature of selfhood as always already plural. In other words, and in an important point to which I will return in the conclusion of this paper, “the unsettling quality of being a stranger in society” affords a distinct epistemic advantage (Reference Lugones2003, 143).

3. Lugonesean world-travelers, Heideggerian Dasein

In her essay “Purity, impurity and separation,” Lugones warns that her own work should not be understood according to a postmodern philosophical framework, even as she grants that there may be resemblances (Reference Lugones2003, 121). As already noted, commentators have developed these similarities between Lugones’s work and, among others, Heidegger’s, noting that Lugones’s notion of multiplicitous selfhood is consistent in significant respects with a generally Heideggerian way of conceiving the human. However, the tendency in comparative projects that bring together phenomenology and Latina feminism has by and large been to begin with the former, and to read the latter as specifying or ameliorating phenomenological insights. My aim in the remainder of this paper is to map the resemblances between Lugones’s work and Heidegger’s while resisting the assimilative pull of comparative theorizing.

The preceding section concluded with the suggestion that Lugones’s notion of selfhood implies a criticism of Western philosophical understandings of the human subject. As Lugones notes, it is by “beginning in the midst of subjects, many of them subjected,” that is, from the lived, everyday experience of those on the margins, that she arrives at a “sense of the subject [which is] not an individual, not ‘unitary and centered’ and created out of the binaries of Self-Other, Subject-Object’” (Reference Lugones2003, 197).Footnote ¹³ Heidegger is explicitly concerned with undoing the traditional Western notion of subjectivity: the project of Being and time is indeed nothing other than a Destruktion of the Western tradition of metaphysics in which the being of the human has, according to Heidegger, been deeply misunderstood (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1962, 44). Much like Lugones, he builds his alternative understanding of the human self out of the phenomenological horizon of everydayness. Heidegger’s investigation into the self—or, as he puts it, “that entity which each of us is himself,” denoted by the term Dasein—begins with interrogating how Dasein comports itself in its day-to-day existence (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1962, 44).

As Heidegger writes in a letter to Karl Löwith from 1921, “I work by proceeding concretely and factically out of my ‘I am’— from out of my spiritual and altogether factical background/milieu/life context; I work from that which is accessible to me from these as the lived experience in which I live” (Heidegger and Löwith Reference Heidegger, Löwith, Goesser Assaiante and Montgomery Ewegen2021, 37). This focus on everydayness generates an understanding of the human being as inseparable from its social, cultural, and historical world. The idea of Dasein ultimately mounts a radical critique of traditional notions of selfhood (associated especially with Descartes) which depict the self as fundamentally independent from its surrounding context. There are thus clear affinities between Lugones’s work and Heidegger’s: their theorizing begins with an attunement to lived experience, and the accounts of selfhood engendered out of this attunement put the accent on the constituted and contextualized nature of the self. As we saw above, in the context of Lugones’s work this is closely tied up with her determination to devote serious philosophical attention to the experiences of the oppressed. As she writes, “in giving up on the unified self, I am guided by the experiences of bicultural people who are also victims of ethnocentric racism in a society that has one culture as subordinate and the other culture as dominant” (Reference Lugones1990, 503). Approaching Being and time with this in mind raises the following question: what kind of social subject is Heidegger paying attention to when he goes to the dimension of everydayness?

Throughout Being and time, Heidegger remarks that Dasein’s everyday existence is permeated, or, as he puts it “infiltrated” by the Western ontological tradition. The world of Dasein— that in terms of which Dasein interprets itself—is deeply shaped by the theoretical biases of Western metaphysics, now “hardened” into common sense (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1962, 44). There is a certain sense, then, that although Heidegger sometimes presents the analytic of Dasein as “general”—that is, not tied to any particular social identity—he nonetheless identifies Dasein’s world closely with the cultural and philosophical milieu of twentieth-century Europe. The (singular) world of Dasein is thus not just any world, but the specific world shaped by the ideas of Aristotle, Descartes, and Kant.

By the time of Introduction to metaphysics, Heidegger dispels any would-be residual doubts about the specific character of Dasein’s world—and hence the specificity of the “self” of Dasein—by linking the question of Being, and the investigation into Dasein which is preparatory to it, explicitly to Europe, and, within Europe, to the German people (Heidegger Reference Heidegger2000).Footnote ¹⁴ In sharp contrast to Lugones, then, Heidegger’s unraveling of the dominant Western notion of selfhood does not proceed from attending to liminal communities of meaning. Quite the opposite: Heidegger is writing explicitly from the center—his thinking on Germany during this period hearkens back to a vision of Germany as geographically and metaphysically at the heart of Europe. This is brought out most emphatically in Introduction to metaphysics, where Heidegger writes: “We lie in the pincers. Our people, as standing in the center, suffers the most intense pressure—our people, the people richest in neighbors and hence the most endangered people, and for all that, the metaphysical people” (Reference Heidegger2000, 41). As this quote suggests, this geographical positioning brings with it a peculiar sort of responsibility vis-à-vis a metaphysical questioning understood to be the special prerogative no longer of Europe, but increasingly of Germany given its special (but never fully explained) affinity with the Greeks.Footnote ¹⁵

Lugones’s and Heidegger’s shared methodological starting point—lived experience or everydayness—thus plays out very differently in each of their thinking, and this is a fact that has not received sufficient attention in standard comparative accounts—a point to which I return below. Nevertheless, as already intimated, from out of this variegated horizon Lugones and Heidegger do develop strikingly similar accounts of the self. According to Heidegger, when we look into how Dasein is in its everydayness, we find that Dasein’s being is inseparable from the world that it inhabits: Dasein operates essentially in the state of “being-in-the-world.” It is only when we put on our theoretical hat and take the “birds-eye view,” to deploy Lugones’s term, that the self appears as fundamentally distinct from the world. In day-to-day experience, by contrast, Dasein is quite literally immersed in its dealings with the world and the beings which populate it, be they things or other selves (Reference Heidegger1962, 80–82, 107, 150, 163, 220).

Throughout Being and time and other writings, Heidegger helpfully uses the language of “dispersal [Zerstreuung]” to characterize the manner in which Dasein’s “selfhood” is not necessarily its own, wrapped up in some bundle “inside” the self, but is rather, in an essential manner, dispersed throughout the world by being caught up with entities and the other Dasein “outside” of it (Reference Heidegger1962, 83, 167, 441; Reference Heidegger1992, 138). Tellingly from the perspective of a Lugonesean account of the multiplicity of the self, Heidegger goes on to take stock of the manner in which Dasein’s dispersion into the world takes the form of “multiplicity” and even “disunity”: to be a Dasein is to be dispersed into a “manifold of relations” (Reference Heidegger1992, 333). Rather than conceiving of Dasein along the lines of a unitary, closed-off and integrated subject that would need to “venture a leap,” as it were, into an external world in order to encounter objects or other minds, Heidegger’s understanding of Dasein dissolves the subject–object and subject–other distinction characteristic of Western metaphysics.

For Heidegger, the discovery that the being of Dasein in its “everydayness” is Being-in-the-world is not a naïve experiential datum of which philosophical contemplation might later disabuse us. To the contrary: Heidegger insists that Being-in-the-world and the multiplicitous dispersion characteristic of it “belongs” to Dasein’s very essence (Reference Heidegger1962, 84). This is not to say that the horizon of everydayness will always grant access to the fundamental nature of Dasein; in fact, there are many ways in which Heidegger thinks that the perspective of everydayness may be quite misleading. Nonetheless, by looking at Dasein in its everyday mode, Heidegger does think that we have landed upon something that mainstream Western philosophical notions consistently miss in their “fanciful idealizations” of a “pure ‘I’” (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1962, 272).

4. Reading Heidegger through Lugones: problematizing universality and everydayness

The preceding section undertook an initial reading of the early Heidegger through Lugones rather than vice versa. One result of this is simply to highlight that there are indeed similarities between their thinking: in addition to a shared methodological commitment to lived experience or everydayness, Heidegger joins Lugones in rejecting the notion that selfhood is some substantial core or substratum, standing apart from the rest of the world. As noted, these similarities have been pointed out, with philosophers taking stock of the “convergence between world-travelling and traditional phenomenological areas of study” (Pitts Reference Pitts, Gail Weiss and Salamon2020, 347). What, then, is substantively different on the methodological approach recommended here? This section throws into relief how centering the margins results in different phenomenological insights than those that have so far been offered by engaging a direct dialogue with Mariana Ortega’s rightly influential comparative account of Lugones and Heidegger, which follows a standard comparative methodology.

That both Lugones and Heidegger begin from lived experience has been pointed out in the literature; indeed, this common methodological commitment has constituted the inspiration for work that has brought into dialogue not merely Lugones and Heidegger, but Latina feminism and phenomenology more broadly. When comparing these dimensions of their work, however, it quickly becomes apparent that Heidegger’s account of everydayness, unlike that of Lugones, does not pay any special attention to the experience of marginality. Following a standard comparative approach, commentators have parsed this distinction between Heidegger and Lugones in terms of the “generality” or even universality of the Heideggerian account, which Lugones and other Latina feminists then supplement with important specifications. Ortega thus writes:

The picture that emerges here is one which juxtaposes the general applicability of European phenomenology with the more specified and particularistic versions of phenomenology we might find in non-European philosophy. There is no doubt that this interpretation gets something right: Heidegger is not interested in thinking through a differentiated account of Dasein which factors in the significance of marginalized identities. However, when we approach Being and time equipped with Lugones’s interest in the significance of social positionality, we are primed to be more attentive to what kind of social subject Heidegger is in fact describing—in a manner that casts doubt on the idea that Dasein is in fact generic. As we saw in the preceding section, bringing these concerns to Being and time shows up that the apparent generality of the Heideggerian self is only a pseudo-generality: Heidegger is discussing the European—and, ultimately, the German—self.

Reading Heidegger through Lugones rather than vice versa thus resists the suggestion that Heidegger—our “canonical” philosopher—simply offers a universal account of the self. Ortega’s account seems to encourage this sort of move, leading to the conclusion that the Heideggerian account of selfhood offers a “general ontological characterization of human beings” while Latina feminism turns our attention to “specific material conditions” (Ortega Reference Ortega2016, 53). One upshot of bringing Latina Feminism into conversation with phenomenology, on this view, is that Latina feminists contribute a more sociopolitically conscious and differentiated account. As Ortega writes in a 2021 retrospective on In-between, this sort of supplementation of Heidegger by Lugones enables us to “move Heidegger’s discussion forward so that it can be better attuned to the lived experience of marginalization and liminality” (Reference Ortega2021, 449). The comparative approach thus does the ameliorative work of making visible the distinctive experiences of “selfhood” of those marginalized subjects who are otherwise slotted into the generic vision that phenomenologists proffer.

And yet, the very association of the West with universality and the “rest” with particularity is itself a colonial logic—one that we can see gets perpetuated in comparative accounts that begin with Western philosophy and move outwards to non-Western accounts as specifications of the universal insights contained in the Western canon.Footnote ¹⁶ The inverted order of reading encourages attention instead to what “canonical” thought is implicitly or explicitly excluding, illuminating the extent to which Heidegger’s version of selfhood is equally if not more specific than that found in Lugones. Centering the margins thus puts a distinctive decolonial spin on Luce Irigaray’s (Reference Irigaray1999) influential argument that a feminist perspective gives the lie to the supposed universality of Heidegger’s ontology.Footnote ¹⁷

A second upshot at this point in the analysis is an opportunity to engage a more nuanced thinking regarding the methodological value of everydayness. This shared starting point is, again, one of the bridges that connects Lugones’s writing with Heidegger’s. As Ortega writes, “Even though the Heideggerian account and those provided by Latina feminists originate in widely different social, political and economic situations … both types of accounts are important for the development of a self which attempts to do justice to our experience, which takes into consideration the various contexts that contribute to making us who we are” (Reference Ortega2001, 3). Ortega is thus clearly attuned to the fact that Heidegger’s context—Germany in the era of National Socialism—renders him a suspect resource for any theory with emancipatory ends. As she writes:

I am sympathetic to the disidentificatory resonances of Ortega’s interest in holding on to what remains worthwhile in a work such as Heidegger’s. Nonetheless, I worry that this could lend support to a not uncommon idea among critical phenomenologists that everydayness is simply a valuable phenomenological tool. While the emphasis on lived experience has been galvanizing to critical phenomenology—indeed to disciplinary philosophy as a whole—what is sometimes missing from these accounts is a critical discussion of the fact that the type of context one begins from is significant. As a result, classical phenomenologists like Heidegger are regularly celebrated for their contributions regarding the philosophical significance of everydayness without a sufficiently critical eye toward the fact that when Heidegger’s factical situation informs his work this is spectacularly problematic. The situation in Heidegger studies is ultimately not much different: while there has been a recent bout of discussion about whether Heidegger’s political commitments inflect his philosophical output, the connection between this eventuality and Heidegger’s methodological emphasis on facticity and lived experience has been left underexplored.Footnote ¹⁸

Reading Heidegger through Lugones points us in a different direction. Lugones is clear that what makes her lived experience such an epistemically fruitful starting point is the experience of marginality. As she writes in a passage quoted in the section above, it is “the unsettling quality of being a stranger in society” that enables the sharpness of vision which accompanies her ontological investigations into the nature of selfhood and reality (Reference Lugones2003, 143). The idea that the condition of exile is productive of insight not readily available to those who are simply at home in their world has been put forward by Seloua Luste Boulbina. As she writes, “what is difficult at the affective level is intellectually stimulating … Migrations are occasions or opportunities for thought … ‘the condition of exile… has facilitated the boldest realizations, in destabilizing subjects’ adherence to a unique community’” (Reference Boulbina2019, 272). As Boulbina makes clear, it is key not to entertain a thoughtless fetishization of marginalization—the condition of marginality is difficult and not to be reproduced—an important point to which I return below. This is underscored in Lugones’s insistence that inhabiting the intersection of multiple worlds is not a matter of abstract choice—a construal which would smuggle in, as she writes, “an implicit reference to a liberal conception of the subject” (Reference Lugones2003, 185). Still, there is an extremely important insight about the manner in which the experience of marginality—of inhabiting many worlds at once, of moving between “tense, disjunctive overlapping oppressive and liberatory contexts” and being aware of it—is conducive to ontological realizations less readily graspable by those comfortably in the center (Reference Lugones2003, 190).

Beginning with Lugones brings into focus her commitment to theorizing from everydayness as part and parcel of a philosophical project concerned with equipping socially marginalized subjects with the theoretical tools to better understand their experience. Looking at Heidegger with this Lugonesean concern in mind, we are primed first of all to the absence of such a concern in his work. More than this, however, we gain a more refined picture of the value of everydayness as a methodological starting point. Specifically, we see that it is not everydayness simpliciter, but the day-to-day experience of marginality, that is the launching pad for Lugones’s enduringly compelling reflections. As Lugones herself warns, those writing comfortably from the “home places” may by contrast become captive to “orthodoxies and ossification” (Reference Lugones2003, 161). The following section examines how this charge may be leveled at Heidegger, interrogating Heidegger’s recapitulation to a unified account of selfhood by Lugonesean lights.

5. Ossification in the home-places

Much like that of Lugones, Heidegger’s alternative conception of selfhood carries an important hermeneutic dimension. According to Heidegger, the fact that Being-in-the-world belongs to Dasein’s very essence has consequences for how Dasein interprets itself, for it means that Dasein draws its self-understanding from the world around it (Heidegger Reference Heidegger1962, 70). As Heidegger writes, it is on account of Dasein’s “dissemination into a multiplicity” that it interprets its own being in terms of the world around it, and inevitably “identifies” with the entities with which it interacts on a day-to-day basis (Reference Heidegger1992, 138). More interesting for our purposes are the hermeneutic consequences of a further dimension of Being-in-the-world that has been mentioned in passing: not so much Dasein’s interactions with entities, but rather its absorption into others. For Heidegger, Being-in-the-world is always at the same time a “being-with”: “the world is always the one that I share with others,” and this means that Dasein only interprets its own being in terms of entities, but also in terms of the others alongside whom it exists (Reference Heidegger1962, 154–55).

In light of Heidegger’s insight that to be a self at all means to be dispersed in the world, the notion of “others” takes on a unique significance. As Heidegger elaborates, “by ‘Others’ we do not mean everyone else but me,” in such a way “that one must then seek some way of getting over to the Others from this isolated subject” (Reference Heidegger1962, 154). And he goes on: “They are rather those from whom, for the most part, one does not distinguish oneself” (Reference Heidegger1962, 154). In other words, Dasein’s everydayness is marked by a thoroughgoing sociality, to such an extent that “others” play a pivotal role in making the “selfhood” of Dasein what it is. Just as Heidegger rejects the notion of a bare subject standing apart from the world, so too does he deny that one can make sense of an isolated ‘I’ without others.

The fact that Dasein does not differentiate itself from the others it “is-with” has implications for how Dasein interprets its own being. Dasein tends to understand itself according to the dominant theories and conceptions of what Heidegger calls the “They” (das Man), the undifferentiated mass of others with whom Dasein shares the world. As Heidegger elaborates: “Th[e] everyday way in which things have been interpreted is one into which Dasein has grown in the first instance, with never a possibility of extrication … In no case is a Dasein untouched and unseduced by this way in which things have been interpreted” (Reference Heidegger1962, 213). That is to say, Dasein tends to understand both itself and the nature of Being as such according to the “vague average understanding” circulated by the others with whom it shares a world (Reference Heidegger1962, 25). As the language of seduction suggests, this is not understood by Heidegger to be a positive phenomenon. Dasein’s Being-with others—in itself a neutral and irreducible fact of Dasein’s essential Being-in-the-world—means that its possibilities for self-interpretation have been “taken over” (Reference Heidegger1962, 167). Heidegger indeed speaks of the “dominion” of the “They” and of the manner in which Dasein’s interpretation of the world and of itself is “prescribed” and “dictated” (Reference Heidegger1962, 164–67).

From the point of view of the interpretation of Lugones offered in the first section of this paper, the unmistakably negative characterization of the hermeneutic consequences of Dasein’s dispersed Being-in-the-world is striking. In sharp contrast with Lugones, Heidegger’s recognition in division one of Being and time that selfhood is constitutively dispersed does not prevent him from suggesting that this condition is to be overcome. This is made clear in division two, where Heidegger looks into how Dasein might attain some kind of “unity” and form a “whole”, thereby achieving “authenticity [Eigentlichkeit]” or its own proper selfhood (Reference Heidegger1962, 279–84).

Division two insists on the possibility of a radical self-appropriation or individualization on the part of Dasein, a seizure of what is proper (eigentlich) to Dasein and consequently a turn away from its worldly embeddedness. Seen through a Lugonesean lens, the resonances of the German term eigentlichkeit strike at the heart of the issue: to pursue a project of eigentlichkeit would mean to focus on that which is one’s own (eigen). The relevant contrast here is not so much “Unechtheit” but “Fremdheit”—to become eigentlich is to turn away from the strange, to reject the foreign which informs and is taken to distort one’s self-perception. This is markedly distinct from Lugones’s world-traveler self, for whom it is precisely the experience of travel and contact with the strange that animates her self-construction. We here arrive at a deep gulf that separates Lugones’s thinking from that of Heidegger as it is presented in Being and time. The predominant affect undergirding Lugones’s writing is playfulness in travel, a willingness to be substantially transformed by one’s movement between various worlds of sense. Heidegger’s Being and time, by contrast, is finally characterized by a strong sense of homesickness and an aversion to the foreign.Footnote ¹⁹

This is brought to the fore in Heidegger’s discussions of authenticity. For Heidegger, in order to be “authentic,” Dasein “must first gather itself together [zusammenholen] from the dispersion and disconnectedness” that constitute its mode of Being-in-the-world (Reference Heidegger1962, 441–42).Footnote ²⁰ Heidegger links this overcoming of multiplicity with the anticipation of death, writing that:

In death, Heidegger writes, Dasein is “individualize[d] down to itself”: its relations with other people and with the world are severed in the process of Dasein’s becoming its own self (Reference Heidegger1962, 308). Heidegger further suggests that, inasmuch as Dasein takes on an authentic relation to its own mortality, something about the very nature of Dasein becomes apparent. As one commentator summarizes Heidegger’s view, “dying offers an experience of the human condition … the isolation of death reveals Dasein as it truly is” (Dreyfus Reference Dreyfus1991, 312). That Dasein has eigentlichkeit as an essential possibility thus suggests that its dispersal is an interim condition to be overcome. When seen from the perspective of Lugones’s positive valorization of her multiplicity and her resistance to the idea that it should be overcome in a project of self-unification, Heidegger’s turn to a project of self-unification in division two of Being and time is conspicuous.

Heidegger’s turn to authenticity has generated a great deal of discussion, for it raises a difficult interpretive question as to how the understanding of Dasein propounded in division one, namely, the insight that Dasein is essentially dispersed, should be rendered consistent with authenticity conceived as the overcoming of disunification. In particular, the suggestion that the “ownmost” and “uttermost” possibility of Dasein is non-relational has struck many commentators as puzzling, for it amounts to saying that Dasein, as finite, is fundamentally oriented away from dispersion. As Charles E. Scott has put it, the impression made by division two is that “Dasein in its most proper possibility is not finally defined by its linkage to people or things” (Reference Scott and Sallis1993, 70). This, however, appears to be a not entirely coherent retreat from the social-constitutive account of selfhood whereby multiplicity is essential to the being of Dasein—an account which, I have argued, Heidegger shares with Lugones.Footnote ²¹

From a Lugonesean perspective, what is interesting here is not so much how these two dimensions of Being and time may be rendered coherent as the fact of the interpretive puzzle itself, namely, that division two makes apparent a Heideggerian commitment to an ideal of selfhood that division one had apparently left behind. The fact is that Heidegger, in spite of the radical break with modern visions of selfhood precipitated by his claim that Dasein is essentially absorbed by its relations with entities and other Dasein, does ultimately give in to a self-reappropriative movement toward “ownness.”

When all is said and done, then, Being and time seems to join the ranks of Western philosophical accounts of selfhood whereby “the goal [is] an integrated self ” (Ruíz Reference Ruíz, Weiss, Murphy and Salamon2020, 218). Lugones’s trenchant criticism of the misguided Western philosophical celebration of unity outlined above thus applies, perhaps surprisingly, to Heidegger. We have thus arrived at a third distinctive interpretive result of centering the margins: what comes to light is a Lugonesean critique of Heidegger’s capitulation to what she identifies as a “purity logic”—a desire for, and belief in, unity being the underlying ground of multiplicity (Lugones Reference Lugones2003, 121–47). In the context of Being and time, the ultimate meaning of Dasein lies with its possibility for becoming whole, of quieting the influence of dominant societal interpretations in an act of self-integration which overcomes dispersal. Heidegger thus “shrinks back”—to borrow the terms of his criticism of Kant—from the social ontological insights offered in division one.

Seen through the lens of Lugones’s steadfastness vis-à-vis not merely the ontological aptness but the positive ethico-political dimensions of multiplicity, Heidegger’s interest in self-integration—whether or not it may be rendered consistent with the first part of Being and time—can thus be viewed as a recapitulation to mainstream, Western philosophical accounts of selfhood. For all his caution vis-à-vis the Western ontology that has sought to determine the “subject” as a substantial thing, as the unifying ground of a multiformity of experiences, Heidegger ultimately remains enthralled with the vision of “integral selfhood” that pervades Western metaphysical thinking.

It will be instructive to once again place this methodological result into direct dialogue with what we get from Ortega’s account. According to Ortega, one of the advantages of placing the Lugonesean and Heideggerian conceptions of the self into conversation is the possibility of supplementing the “world-traveler” self with Heideggerian insights. Specifically, the claim is that Lugones’s account raises a difficult question regarding the identity of the “self” who travels between worlds: if the Lugonesean self is entirely constituted by the worlds through which she travels—such that she really is a different person in different worlds—it is unclear how there is a singular self doing the traveling. The turn to Heidegger then addresses this problem, for “Heideggerian elements can help us explain how a world-traveler can still be thought of as a self, even though there is no appeal to a transcendental subject or an ego-pole” (Ortega Reference Ortega2001, 17). On this view, Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, and especially his appeal to mineness, “makes it possible for me to be aware of my own Being” (Reference Ortega2001, 17) and thus fills in the conceptual lacuna opened up by Lugones’s suggestion that there is no persistence of identity between worlds. This fusion of Lugonesean and Heideggerian insights underlies Ortega’s own vision of selfhood, which maintains a certain identity in multiplicity by insisting on existential rather than ontological pluralism (2016, 89). The result is an account of selfhood that, in line with Ortega’s strategic reading, supplements Lugones’s insights into the multiplicitous nature of selfhood by drawing sustenance from the Heideggerian framework where such sustenance is to be found.

My intention here is not to quarrel with this vision—I accept much of it—but, again, to throw into relief the distinctive insights that emerge from the pairing Lugones/Heidegger on the methodology of centering the margins. As this section has argued, in addition to allowing us to problematize Heidegger’s presumed universality and his appeal to lived experience, beginning with Lugones provides a revitalized critical view on Heidegger’s retreat to a unified version of the self. We gain an understanding of Heidegger’s “shrinking back” from his social ontological insights as connected to his situatedness within the hearth offered by the center. We thus see that we might in addition supplement Heidegger’s ultimately conservative thinking on the self with Lugones’s exilic resistance to a version of the self as eigentlich and unified. I believe this more critical perspective to be one piece of a broader disidentificatory reading; the foregoing upshot is thus intended as compatible with Ortega’s project, particularly in her later writing, to hold together a vision of the self that is one with the need to resist unification. My claim has been that when we read Heidegger through Lugones, the accent falls on the latter leg of this attempt rather than the former. To the extent that Heidegger might still be utilized to supply an understanding of selfhood that responds to puzzles regarding the continuity of identity, this must be accompanied by a greater critical weariness vis-à-vis the way that Heidegger falls back into step with the Western metaphysical tradition.Footnote ²² Ultimately, in reading Heidegger through Lugones we come to see that, beyond ameliorating canonical philosophy by offering important specifications to insufficiently differentiated philosophical accounts, one upshot of placing the “margin” into conversation with the “canon” is that we recognize places where our canonical thinker resorts to a privileging of traditional motifs.

6. Disorientation

This paper offered a reading of some key features of the early Heidegger’s account of Dasein from the vantage point of Lugones’s work on multiplicitous selfhood. While the proximities between Lugones’s thinking and that of Heidegger have not escaped the notice of commentators, comparisons between the two have tended to follow a reading strategy whereby the “marginal” thinker is approached by way of the “canon.” Heeding Elena Ruíz’s warning that “we should constantly guard against Eurocentric methodological biases that legitimate the ideas of women of color by placing them neatly within a preexisting framework designed and licensed by male philosophical privilege” (2016, 430), this paper has inverted this traditional order of reading. The driving hypothesis of this paper has been that, besides contributing to a decolonial strategy of centering “marginalized” perspectives, this methodology might enable certain interpretive insights. I have shown that approaching Heidegger’s account of Dasein with Lugones’s concerns in mind does indeed open up (i) a decolonial feminist take on the Eurocentrism built into Heidegger’s supposedly undifferentiated account of Dasein, (ii) a refined picture of the methodological value of everydayness, and (iii) a revitalized critical perspective on Heidegger’s recapitulation—with his account of authenticity—to a vision of unified selfhood. I thus argued that centering the margins encourages us to supplement Heidegger’s notion of Dasein, especially its integrative tendencies, with the adamantly social ontology found in Lugones’s work.

To conclude, I want to make explicit that the interpretive results of centering the margins provides a distinctive conceptualization of the methodological value of bringing the “margin” into conversation with the “canon.” Rather than merely highlighting the distinctive experiences of oppression in a manner that traditional philosophical accounts would do well to take into account, the reading of Heidegger via Lugones suggests that the perspective of the margin has a decisive critical advantage. That Lugones remains dedicated to her insight that multiplicitous selfhood is a positive phenomenon makes salient Heidegger’s retreat from his radical reconceptualization of the “self,” and the extent to which Heidegger, in spite of so many precautions, remains captivated by the mainstream philosophical account of selfhood as aiming at integration—understood as a turn away from the strange. It thus seems to be the fascination with a singular home and a proper place in the world that leads Heidegger to repeat the metaphysical gestures of which he is otherwise so critical.Footnote ²³ Lugones, on the contrary, remains committed to a watchfulness vis-à-vis traditional orthodoxies. She writes: “one may see that the no-home, exile position may have provided some perceptual advantages: the one without home may have learned to see orthodoxies and ossification in the homeplaces” (Reference Lugones2003, 161). As this quote from Lugones suggests, there is a distinct epistemic advantage incurred by inhabiting a marginalized social position.

While such an insight follows naturally enough from the reading strategy employed in this paper, it also puts pressure on the idea of centering the margins. In beginning with Lugones’s thinking and thus treating as “central” a philosopher who has been marginalized, doesn’t this very strategy inhibit the resistant potential of the margins? Put otherwise, if the ultimate arc of such a project is to center the margins, wouldn’t this imply a multiplication of the “homeplaces” and all the attendant orthodoxies? The other “leg” of the dilemma is no less thorny, however, for the suggestion in all of this has, again, not been to fetishize and ultimately generalize the condition of marginalization—itself a product of colonization. How then can we square an emphasis on the epistemic generativity of marginalization while insisting that marginalization is not to be replicated?Footnote ²⁴

To think through if not exactly resolve this dilemma, I will call once again upon Lugones. In “Toward a decolonial feminism”, Lugones locates a certain tension in Mignolo’s work between his interest in dialogue between subaltern and hegemonic perspectives, on the one hand, and his claim that the transcendence of the colonial difference can only be effected by the subaltern (Reference Lugones2010, 752). In speaking to this tension, Lugones comments: “if dialogue is to be had with the modern man, his occupation of the colonial difference involves his redemption but also his self-destruction” (Reference Lugones2010, 752). And later: “so indeed, the transcending can only be done from the perspective of subalternity, but toward a newness of be-ing” (Reference Lugones2010, 753).Footnote ²⁵ As Lugones suggests here, what decolonization announces is not on the order of a re-entrenchment of the center/margin or hegemon/subaltern dichotomy, albeit with a reversal of the roles. Decolonization rather propels us beyond these dichotomies toward a new epistemological terrain.

Similarly, centering the margins neither aims to position thought that has been denigrated atop a philosophical hierarchy, as the putative center, nor does it seek to cast European philosophy into the position of the marginalized “other.” Taking inspiration instead from Fanon’s remark that “there is a point at which methods devour themselves” (Reference Fanon2008, xvi), centering the margins is self-destructive in that it ultimately aims to unravel this very distinction. The transformation that is sought is therefore less a cartographic or epistemological reversal and more a kind of disorientation—a loss of our familiar conceptual bearings with respect to what is philosophically pivotal and what is merely supplementary.Footnote ²⁶ Such a disorientation implies forgoing the comfort of the homeplace without advocating a reproduction of the conditions of oppression.