The dialectic, or dialectics: which is it? With its all too definite article, the dialectic would appear to signify the all too definite system of the Hegelian tradition, with Fichte's triad – thesis, antithesis, synthesis – gesturing toward a certain completeness and resolution, a positive progression. “So it is,” writes Fredric Jameson, “that to speak of the dialectic with the definite article cannot but reinforce the more universalistic claims of this philosophy, as well as its unity” (Valences of the Dialectic (2009), 4). In an energizing and radical attempt to rethink this much-theorized tradition, Decolonizing Dialectics takes aim at some of these universalistic claims – teleology, unity, progress – by demonstrating some of the profound affinities and productive points of departure in the work of three antidialectical thinkers (Georges Sorel, Frantz Fanon, Enrique Dussel), culminating in a reading of contemporary Venezuelan politics. Dialectics in this book, shorn of their world-historical “the,” are less an interpretive method of resolving contradiction than a form of emancipatory struggle that actively generates it.

Georges Sorel, the turn-of-the-century French syndicalist, was no great fan of the dialectic, calling it “the art of reconciling opposites by means of nonsense” (23). Dialectically enough, Sorel's strident critique of the singular dialectic, Ciccariello-Maher argues, produced a useful defence of dialectics in the plural, one which emphasized contingency and struggle, rejecting the long-lens waiting game of letting history do its work. In his demonstration of radicalized dialectics via Sorel, Ciccariello-Maher lays the groundwork for the more trenchantly decolonialist chapters that follow. The Sorel section yields some magnificent insights into the function of revolutionary myths and violence. If dialectics are to be grasped as the “dynamic movement of conflictive oppositions” (2), how might radicalized, combative dialectics confront the great conflictive opposition between the bourgeoisie and proletariat? For Sorel, the ever-increasing chasm prophesied by Marx and Engels had not come to pass: the dialectic had ground to a halt, blocked by a series of mediations between the classes. A rigid class binary simply did not exist, but – and here the dialectic casts its spell – it had to be restored in order to be overcome. “Sorel's framework,” in other words, “counterintuitively insists on the reestablishment of a traditional class opposition while simultaneously opening the door to its transcendence” (45). We might interpret this gesture as Ciccariello-Maher's guiding thesis: subjective self-assertion, in Sorel's case through revolutionary myths and proletarian violence, as a means of kicking the dialectic back into motion.

The next chapter offers an extended reading of Fanon's critique of Hegelian dialectic of the lord and bondsman, master and slave. Paying particular attention to Fanon's notion of the “zone of non-being” occupied by racialized subjects, Ciccariello-Maher takes us through Hegel's false steps, chiefly the presumption of a shared basis for reciprocity and recognition. This relationship, far from being symmetrical, constitutes an ontological struggle for Being. From here we make a final gear change and arrive at popular identity in the Latin American context through the work of exiled Argentinian philosopher of liberation Enrique Dussel. Having explored the combative dialectics of internal rupture in Sorel and Fanon, Ciccariello-Maher presents the Latin American people as a “radical and dynamic historical subject that only comes into being through self-activity and rupture by the (internally) oppressed alongside the (externally) excluded” (121). Dussel's distinction between dialogue and translation is one of the great practical and political questions explored in this chapter:

The final chapter offers a reading of Venezuela's Bolivarian revolution, testing out the book's theoretical claims – which are always more than theoretical – while providing a qualified defence of “the people” (el pueblo) against the narrow Eurocentrism of those who dismiss the category.

Readers looking for a nailed-on definition of dialectics will not find it in this book, which “is not and cannot be a book about Hegel or Marx … above all because we must set such questions aside if we are ever going to get where we are going” (10). They will find, however, a light-footed and richly textured work, which demonstrates how radically different historical moments can speak to one another; how dialectics animated by a certain mobility and openness might help to explain, and ultimately transcend, the legacies of colonialism and slavery.