Octavio Paz: in the labyrinth of (post-) colonial experiencies

Abstract

This article is part of a larger research in which I am searching for possibilities to relate the Octavio Paz’s work to contemporary debates in the social sciences an in philosophy. Paz’s work and, in particular, his book The labyrinth of solitude, has is guide a genuine sociological interest. In this article I am arguing that Paz was also a post-colonial thinker, so there is a link between their sociological interest and his critique of this period. Though it is possible to find a sort of critical postcolonial modernity in the Paz´s work, we need to show how different this is compared to many others that define the present-day debate about the postcolonialism and the diverse critical approaches to this phenomenon. Critique of post-colonial modernity than Paz offered it takes care less about «deconstruct» Eurocentrism and power relations geopolitics, which conduct the ways that produces knowledge related to our global modernity, and much more by try to develop a sophisticated reconstruction of Mexico´s history colonial and post-colonial, to show the intertwining local and the global but without omitting the differences. Paz remembers that the modernity not only is a common frame in which a human being is constrained to be, but it constitutes an opportunity to discover what is what all the human beings share in spite of their differences.