"Migrations, Knowledge, Being During the Renaissance"
The theme builds upon two previous works, one in which I argued that migration is the engine of history. And therein pointed at the existential condition that perhaps migrating (verbal noun) is primordial to being-in-the-world insofar as Being, Dasein, moves, pro-jects, acquires (a sense of) self when with others. The migrant provides the ontological category for an idea of the human being who ab initio requires energy, space/freedom to change place, and (speech) capacity to modulate itself during encounters along the way. My earlier research was dedicated to the epochal epistemological shift that occurred starting with the great navigations towards the Americas. It dealt with Columbus, Cabot, Vespucci, Waldseemüller. I now turn to the next generation: Pigafetta, Cortés, Bernardino de Sahagún, Verrazzano, Bartolomé de las Casas, and other migrants (sailors, conquerors, explorers, merchants, delegations, sponsors of the succession of ships that started plying the Atlantic) drawn from various archives. My aim is to interpret how their descriptions of these “other worlds” foreground certain symbols about movement/relocation and how allusions point to the cracking of the inherited (though revitalized in the XIV-XV centuries) theo-metaphysical assumptions about human beings and their values and function in this no longer sole, or unitary, or stable World. And how perhaps people have always been “on the move” between worlds, between and within city-states and kingdoms. Even in the Americas. The “conquest” itself offers proof of an intersectional “encounter” among flows of humans. Is a “degrounded” humanism possible? Would Hermes be the new deity?
