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Barreto, Luis Filipe was born in 1954.
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Luis Filipe Barreto
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Barreto’s main emphasis is on rewriting the history of Portuguese colonialism from a primarily post-structuralist point of view. There is a ‘commonsense’ element which asks us, first, to dispense with the mythologies which have grownup surrounding such exploits, and which are expounded in history texts, in favour of the Derridian concept of differance, holding that if we view history as differance, as temporalization, as spacing, we can then begin to reappraise it as the handing-down of a series of discourses conditioning both the individual as well as what he calls ‘Portugal’s destiny’, and can thus begin to see how such disciplines as philosophy and science helped to support what he labels ‘ideological construction’. This is made difficult due to an intellectual and social hermeneutics of inferiority. This ‘complex’ is analysed dually: firstly, by looking at the margins of transitivity of the medieval world for the Renaissance and, second, investigating linguistically Renaissance philosophical formulations. Jointly, such an analysis will highlight what he sees as history's ideological status as a way of discursively ‘colonizing’ the past for presentist purposes. This historical colonization breeds a false consciousness which often uses historiography as what Barreto calls its ‘sounding box’. It is so, he says, due to the fact that the past, that is, the projection of the other from within the self, forms part of a complex structural anthropology which is projected on the basis of an ‘entire sociocultural imaginarium’ which endlessly feeds back into itself. Barreto attempts with some success to harness poststructuralist. especially Derridian, concepts in order to critically re-appraise historical writing and history itself, viewing it as primarily a set of ideologically reinforcing discourses which are, therefore, susceptible to analysis under the Derridian notion of differance, strangely, though fruitfully, allied to Gadamerian hermeneutics— Barreto holds that linguisticity is a form of realization of comprehension, and this sits well with a deconstruction of the colonial(izing) subject—and it is this that makes Barreto's work influential, not only in Portugal, but in the Iberian peninsula in general, where the philosophical community has always been receptive to European philosophical research and which, crucially, has shared the historical colonializing tendency and which is now doing so much to reappraise that past.
