The name of the perfect language

Abstract

This article parts from the thesis that the modernising project is a self-centred one that has not known how to recognize a state of otherness. It not only places itself as a universal project but it disqualifies non-western cultures by placing them as obstacles to progress as we have conceived it. Paradoxically, in the name of freedom and tolerance it destroys otherness or reduces the other to the anti-illustrated category of “minor.” Modernity carries with it a structural contradiction between the moral principals in which it is sustained itself and the historical achievements to which it has given rise. The solution is not to reject the modernising project altogether but, on the contrary, to radicalize it; that is, to make it coherent and in order to do that, one must begin by making it more inclusive in terms of diversity. This means, in political code, to construct citizenships with differences instead homogenous citizenships, and in order to make that possible it will be necessary to take seriously the need to construct multicultural states that substitute today’s national states that we have inherited from modernity. Only in this way will it be possible to move from tolerance to the recognition of the diversity of public life, from ethnocentric monologues to intercultural dialogue as the guiding principal of coexisting cultures.