The world of ideas has lost a monumental figure. Eduardo was one of those rare and extraordinary people who left the world a much better place. His academic work bridged fields and methods which often find themselves at odds with each other: Latin American philosophy, German critical theory, French poststructuralist thought, liberation theology, pragmatism, philosophy of language, geography, animal studies, and critical philosophy of race, just to name a few. A philosopher by training, his work was in constant critical dialogue with religion and politics. This is why we at the Political Theology Network are honoring his life and work.
Readers interested in the questions of political theology who are unfamiliar with Eduardo’s work will find it most generative to start by engaging his contributions to the postsecular turn in critical social theory. Eduardo is also credited with popularizing the decolonial turn in philosophy by translating the work of the Argentine-Mexican philosopher and theologian Enrique Dussel, as well as by publishing numerous anthologies on the topic. As someone whose work is situated at the intersections of Latin American philosophy, German critical theory, and the postsecular and decolonial turns, I am intellectually indebted to Eduardo in a way that finds no equivalence. His legacy and spirit will undoubtedly continue to inspire generations of critical thinkers for the foreseeable future.
Below, you will find a few reflections from colleagues and close collaborators of Eduardo on his life and work. I hope that these reflections encourage readers to further engage with Eduardo’s groundbreaking scholarship.
With much gratitude and appreciation.
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That the fields of Latin American and Latinx philosophy have exponentially grown in the United States in the last three decades is in no small part due to the extraordinary work of Eduardo Mendieta. I first found his work in a graduate seminar in the mid-1990s. It was an introduction to and a translation of various essays originally written in Spanish by Enrique Dussel that appeared in a book entitled The Underside of Modernity: Apel, Ricoeur, Rorty, Taylor, and the Philosophy of Liberation. The publication of the book could not have been more timely, since it disrupted the notion that the horizons of the viable forms of political philosophy and philosophical ethics at the end of the twentieth century and towards the beginning of the twenty-first century were already well covered by existing philosophical debates in the Global North.
The Underside of Modernity played an important role in my decision to reach out to Enrique Dussel to study and work with him in Mexico during the 1998-1999 academic year. Once there, I heard Dussel talking enthusiastically about a young Latino philosopher who was breaking new ground in the U.S., making sure that the philosophy of liberation was well known in that context. He also spoke highly of Linda Alcoff, and he could not be prouder of the work that Eduardo and Linda were doing individually and as a team. For me as a doctoral student, young philosophers like Mendieta and Alcoff were playing a major role in widening the possibilities of doing philosophy at U.S. universities and beyond.
In his work as a philosopher, translator, and active participant in the American Philosophical Association and the American Academy of Religion, Mendieta appeared as the leader of a new generation of philosophers interested in crossing the boundaries between philosophies in the Global North and philosophies in the Global South, particularly in the Americas, and between philosophy and religious thought. I fully shared those concerns as a graduate student who navigated the waters of Euro-continental philosophy, comparative religious thought, Latin American philosophy, and Africana philosophy. I was extremely fortunate that Eduardo was strongly dedicated to opening doors to many of us interested in similar themes and projects even while he was still an assistant professor. It was extremely inspiring that Eduardo was as bright and adventurous in his thinking as he was kind, generous, and humble.
I got to meet Eduardo in person shortly after I returned from Mexico to the US., and I almost became his colleague at the University of San Francisco. We worked together at the Committee on Hispanics of the American Philosophical Association, and at the American Academy of Religion, where I succeeded him as co-chair of the Section on Religion in Latin America and the Caribbean. I consider myself lucky that I had the privilege to team up with Eduardo in thinking about and engaging in activities that sought important transformations in our fields.
Eduardo also gave me important feedback on my work, and he played an important role in making it possible for me and others to publish early in our careers. Throughout the years, I heard others making similar comments. His enthusiasm and the time and energy that he put into making space for philosophies and philosophers that challenged the narrow confines of philosophy in the U.S. were simply extraordinary. I and so many others owe Eduardo much; the entire discipline of philosophy does as well. Eduardo clearly left the field of philosophy much different from when he started. May the Mendietan revolution of bridge building, humility, and kindness continue changing the fields of philosophy, theology, and religious studies for a long time to come!
Nelson Maldonado-Torres
Professor of Philosophy, University of Connecticut
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Eduardo Mendieta was an unusual philosopher for his time and place: a Germanist leaning toward French post-modernism, a Latin Americanist in an Anglophone profession, a broad political philosopher and decolonial thinker who, in his last book, wrote about animal philosophy. He helped to change the face of professional philosophy in North America by his translations, interpretations, original arguments and critical accounts of the hidden assumptions in both critical theory and global studies.
Eduardo was also someone who strove to bring people into conversation across divides of geography and philosophical orientation. From his very first job at the University of San Francisco, he found ways to get resources out of deans and provosts for innovative conferences with keynote speakers of whom they had never heard. This helped our budding Latinx community of philosophers in the United States build confidence that we could actually get jobs, and tenure, working on little known writers and relatively ignored topics. We began to share ideas, argue, debate, and improve our work.
Eduardo was from a modest background, and had had a difficult immigration from Colombia, separated from his mother for many years. He did manual, farm labor as a child, and talked wistfully about this work in his last years. Given where he came from, Eduardo’s record of scholarly production was miraculous. I believe his secret was maintaining a largely optimistic view of the future. I shall miss his optimism, his comradely friendship, and his dogged determination to keep moving forward.
Linda Martin Alcoff
Professor of Philosophy, Hunter College and CUNY Graduate Center
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My decade long collaboration with Eduardo Mendieta has been one of the highlights of my academic career and, like so many good things, it came about as much by luck as by design. In the fall of 2014, Eduardo and I were both finalists for the department head position in the philosophy department at Penn State. At that time, we had known each other for a while – we received our PhDs around the same time and had met over the years at conferences and other events – but not terribly well. We ran into each other at the SPEP conference that fall and somewhat awkwardly joked that if either of us got the Penn State job, our first official act should be hiring the other one. That way, we reasoned, we could both win—and, at the same time, help turn Penn State into a hub for critical theory. As it happened, I got the job and my first item of business after signing my contract was to ask the dean for permission to hire Eduardo. (Whether or not I ‘won’ is a matter of opinion; more than one colleague suggested to me later that Eduardo was the lucky one because he got a great senior position that didn’t require him to be department head!) And so, when we met again at the end of December 2014, over dinner at the Eastern American Philosophical Association conference in Philadelphia, it was to begin making plans for our work together.
What I remember most about that evening was Eduardo’s incredible energy, enthusiasm, and vision. As anyone who knew him well knows, he was a voracious and wide-ranging reader and an exceptionally broad-minded thinker, with an active and fertile mind. He must have pitched half a dozen ideas for our collaboration that night – so many that I confess I started to feel overwhelmed. In the end, we settled on two projects: the Cambridge University Press Habermas Lexicon and a series of critical theory symposia that we would host at Penn State with resulting edited volumes published by Penn State Press. As I look back on it now, those two projects capture Eduardo’s distinctive intellectual style so well. The former was conceived as an homage—and 90th birthday present—to Jürgen Habermas, the leading figure in mainstream Frankfurt School critical theory and an important mentor for Eduardo. The latter, by contrast, was designed to push the boundaries of that tradition beyond Europe by spotlighting the work of major Black feminist and decolonial critical theorists such as Angela Davis, Patricia Hill Collins, and Enrique Dussel. Where others might have seen a contradiction—between fidelity to a Habermasian project and a global, decolonial conception of critical theory—Eduardo instead found a productive and creative tension.
He also had a knack for expanding the philosophical horizons of others. More than once, Eduardo pushed me out of my comfort zone as a philosopher by the sheer force of his will, always to beneficial effect. He convinced me to participate in a panel on Davis’s prison abolitionism at SPEP in 2005 and to contribute to a conference on Habermas’s work on religion in 2009, and he basically insisted that I write a paper for our 2018 symposium on Dussel. Looking back, those were all pivotal moments for the development of my thinking. It was as if he knew which directions would be productive for my work before I did, and I was left playing catch up. In the end, his illness took a tremendous toll—on him, and on our relationship. But when I look back on our time and our work together, what remains is his restless curiosity, his passion for books and ideas, and the expansiveness of his vision. May his memory be a blessing.
Amy Allen
Associate Dean for Faculty Affairs and Advancement and Distinguished Professor of Philosophy and Women’s, Gender, and Sexuality Studies, The Pennsylvania State University
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Can a bridge be as meaningful as the independent sides it connects? It can be, and it is when the bridge is Eduardo Mendieta. Eduardo’s work shows that the different traditions of critical thought require a relational methodology that cannot be reduced to a single unit, yet that emerge from interconnected systemic pressures. As the structure pushes us for competition, the conversation he bridges becomes a compelling anti-systemic project in the struggle for a just world. And this is precisely one of the longstanding legacies that I want to remember in his honor.
I realized that Eduardo was a forerunner of the work that needed to be done during my years as a doctoral student. His monumental work on “atheistic Jewish Messianism” made him the only Latinx scholar to find his way into a Frankfurt School syllabus of a Catholic psychologist’s course attended by this Latin American Jewish sociologist. I confirmed this a few years later when Eduardo and Hortense Spillers received distinguished awards from the Caribbean Philosophical Association. During the always-memorable ceremonies established and led by Afro-Jewish philosopher Lewis Gordon, Eduardo made an unrehearsed and spontaneous gesture toward the iconic Black literary feminist critic that received the instant acclamation of the whole audience, marking the tone of the ceremony and leaving an unforgettable lesson of common complicity for everyone present. And I confirmed it again just a few years ago at a Political Theology Network workshop in Chicago when, despite the physical limitations that were already pressing upon him, Eduardo generously and generatively offered lasting insights across each of the discussions, from Chinese transnational artistic productions to Africana theological abolitionism to global political socialisms, leaving everyone with an effervescent spirit of the work that still needed to come.
I regret the fact I was never personally close to Eduardo. And yet in each of my encounters in writing and in person with him he left not only a strong memory but the impetus for a path forward. He showed many of us, through his learned writing, his personal generosity, and his professional engagement, that the different traditions of critical thought should be studied, engaged, and discussed and that the best way to honor their specificities was to put them in critical conversation with one another. He understood in a highly original and compelling way that the system generates not only the injustices these traditions were confronting but also a competition among them to prevent transnational and transcultural complicities, resistances, and re-existences. His work generated this encounter among Frankfurt, decolonial, transmodern, Latinx/-American, feminist, Africana, and other traditions that may be too numerous to name. Because of his permanent quest to be a bridge, he put forward one of (if not the) most compelling anti-systemic proposals of his generation.
For the generations who follow, we need to learn that the bridge shines because it makes the parts shine, generating plural engagement. Today, as Eduardo joins our ancestors, he becomes a shining light for our encounters. The erudite, critical, generous, and compelling bridge becomes the path forward.
Santiago Slabodsky
Florence and Robert Kaufman Chair of Jewish Studies, Hofstra University
