Secretions of Subjectivity: Temporality and Agency in Colonial Debts

This review essay analyzes the problem of subjectivity in Rocío Zambrana’s Colonial Debts: The Case of Puerto Rico (2021) from a phenomenological perspective. The essay argues that despite the absence of an explicit formulation, Colonial Debts relies on a theory of subjectivity. This theory is articulated through a characterization of Zambrana’s concept of “unbinding” as a process of desubjectivation enacted by decolonial practices in the context of material conditions of oppression. The essay also argues for the critical usefulness of phenomenological descriptions to theorize both the logics of subjection that coloniality instantiates, and the “prefiguring” of a potential interruption in their operativity. Finally, it studies the experience of waiting as a particularly revealing determination of the temporality of colonial existence that is especially recurrent in Puerto Rican intellectual production.