The Question of Interculturality and the Archive of Humanistic Sciences

The starting point of this essay concerns the possibility of an intercultural philosophy - i.e. of a philosophical project to which it might be ascribed the capability of dealing with the question of cultural difference without presupposing the pre-eminence of the western model of rationality. The main assumption is that it is simply impossible to avoid this presupposition: any given access to other traditions results necessarily intermingled with a given set of representations of otherness, which at the same are strictly intermingled with the idea that the western subject has of its own position within the universal history. As a result, it becomes necessary to cope with the paradoxical situation resulting from such a mutual relation between construction of the self and construction of otherness. A possible solution consists in deconstructing the archives of the disciplines that had - and have - the purpose of describing both the cultural difference in itself, and the meaning it has for the construction of modern identity. The disciplines in question are what we normally refer to using the general term "humanities". Referring to the concept of archives as developed by Derrida and Foucault, and also to Luhmann's system theory, it becomes clear to which extent such a deconstruction of the humanities contributes to clarify both the political meaning of any discourse about alterity, and the related necessity we have to reinvent the boundary between "us" and the "other".