ON CATACHRESIS AND THE DECONSTRUCTION OF HISTORY: IS THERE ANYTHING MESSIANIC ABOUT FILIPINIZATION?
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Abstract
The notion of history as a text to be deconstructed has been a staple of much advancement in the treatment of the discipline as a literary work. In the Philippines however, very few historians have taken note of the fact that the writing of history is subject to its own rhetorical devices and effects of metaphor. In this paper, I advance the argument that the most pervasive methodological flaw in the nationalist construction of Philippine historiography is the persistent catachresis that traces everything to the notion of a “Filipino” people that was subjugated by the advent of Spanish colonialism. This tendency to trace all events to a unitary and originary standpoint as a basis for interpreting everything about the pre-Philippine past results to the epistemic violence of a historiography that is complicit with the Orientalism of Western Eurocentrism itself. Filipinization, taken as the discourse of emancipation anchored on the insistent realization of a Filipino nation, would thus precisely instantiate this problem of discursive complicity that compels us to ask: “Is there anything messianic about nationalism?”
Submitted: 30 May 2025
Accepted: 24 December 2025
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