E D I T E D B Y A M Y A L L E N A N D E D U A R D O M E N D I E T A Decolonizing Ethics The Critical Theory of Enrique Dussel (original) (raw)

Review of Enrique Dussel: Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion

APA Newsletter on Hispanic/Latino Issues in Philosophy, 2014

Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion brings together the diversity of traditions and problems on which he has worked throughout his career. The presence of his engagement with Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger, which plays a more central role in his earlier work, for example, in Philosophy of Liberation (1977), is here informed by his extensive four book study of Karl Marx developed during the 1980s (1985–1990), and his subsequent engagement with the discourse ethics of Karl-Otto Apel and Jürgen Habermas (1994 and 1998). Here, Dussel engages in a broad dialogue with thinkers from other traditions. Dussel offers us an ethical Marx who is critical of the destruction of life and the alienation of the human under modern capitalism, coupled with a concern for the responsibility to the other, the excluded, the victim (foci taken from Levinas), and the necessary emphasis on the intersubjective character of ethics developed in Apel. Yet, Dussel’s thought is not reducible to the work of any one of these thinkers: he offers us a singularly new work, one which must be worked through in depth and studied with care if we are to answer the challenge of developing an ethics of liberation. The challenge of developing an ethics of liberation is a call to produce the flourishing of human life in an age where there is a greater degree of poverty and exclusion of large portions of humanity than at any other moment in human history. Dussel presents a challenge that is not just a theoretical call to revise and rethink our own ethical categories as we work beyond the impasses of neo-Aristoteleanism and neo-Kantianism, but a practical call: a philosophy which has as its aim not merely the interpretation of the world but its transformation. This call to transformation is the task of a practical and critical material philosophy in the same vein for which Marx famously advocated in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach.

Transmodernity and the Americas: Enrique Dussel's Philosophy of Struggle

Philosophizing the Americas, Edited by Jacoby A. Carter and Hernando A. Estévez, Fordham University Press, Forthcoming, 2019

Enrique Dussel rethinks the concept of reason in relation to his project of liberation as a global dialogue between different geopolitical positions in opposition to the isolated task of an uprooted Cartesian thinker freed from materiality. Transmodernity aims to open up reason beyond its Eurocentric stronghold, to the pluriversality of the globe. Dussel finds resources for his project in the discourse ethics of Jürgen Habermas and Karl-Otto Apel, while he is at the same time critical of the neutral playing field or perfect symmetry under which a global rational dialogue might take place. In this chapter, I argue that Dussel’s emphasis on saving the reason of modernity from its violent excesses risks conceding too much to the reason of the center with the notion of dialogue. I argue that Dussel also gives us resources, and I think we should emphasize these, to orient our attention to the creativity of the transmodern project in the tensions that it produces with respect to the hegemonic geography of knowledge, rather than being limited to its moments of possible dialogue with the center. In closing, I turn to the thought of Frantz Fanon with the aim of engaging Dussel and Fanon in a decolonial inter-American dialogue. Fanon provides critical resources to think transmodern creative reason by illustrating the creative passions unleashed in the struggle for liberation.

Narration and Alterity: Metaphilosophy & Weak Historicism in Dussel

Inter-American Journal of Philosophy, 2025

In this paper, I identify and explicate the overarching metaphilosophy of the Argentine-Mexican philosopher Enrique Dussel. I do so to draw attention to the core philosophical and narratological moves of Dussel's project with regard to the philosophy of history and the rejection of historicism. While Dussel's is a project often cited in the secondary literature with regard to questions related to liberation and decolonization (the contentious relationship between la filosofía de la liberación and el giro decolonial notwithstanding), the major implications of his work for the philosophy of history, narratology and rhetoric (in relation to his political philosophy), are rarely, explicitly, described. As such, this paper attempts to begin the process of remedying these gaps by looking to how Dussel constructs his project by way of two key metaphilosophical distinctions, which in turn allow him to make certain historical claims, and also, more fundamentally, to rhetorically 'figure' philosophy as a discourse that is able to speak to the nature of history itself. I treat both schemas quickly herein so as to spend most of my time exegeting these schemas out of the context of Dussel's project.