THE RIVER IS CALLING TO THE FRONTIER OF HISTORY: IN SEARCH OF ALTERITY

Abstract

We started this research by defending the hypothesis that the insurgence of new alterity practices has corresponded to a new socio-environmental issue for the human sciences. The objective is to advance this debate towards an intercultural conceptualization of sustainability with emphasis on a fundamental question: thinking about historical time from practices of alterity means considering what kind of theoretical and methodological approach to the present time? The specific objective aims to place, then, a reading on the variations of the concept of sustainability in a progressive epistemic territory in the face of the advances of the regimes of totalities of the modern world-system. Based on bibliographic procedures, two discussions guide this study: (i) the foundations of an epistemology of exteriority for a philosophy of alterity; (ii) the issue of social change, the present time and human rights. This article is a phenomenological essay on the processes of liberation that run from the Global South with an emphasis on the debates of sustainable communities, whose historical roots of human groups have so far been disregarded, producing a political modality of psychological suffering derived from environmental impacts and injustices and human rights violations. We conclude that contemporary practices of alterity refer to a resistance of solidarity that connects philosophical and ethical foundations about the experience of psychic suffering caused by processes of transformation of the world that run under the signs of extractivism and progress, with new gradations of conflicts between socio-environmental values and human rights. We also emphasize that environmental disasters and irreparable damage to the planet's biodiversity thresholds have triggered the tense relationships of ruptures and discontinuities between History and Nature given the new options of thinking about the historical direction of the World.