Enrique Dussel’s _Ethics of Liberation_ Now in English

Last week I was delighted to find in my mailbox my long-awaited and pre-ordered copy of Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion (Duke University Press, 2013).  I’ve read and cherished my Spanish language version, purchased in 1999 from the Libreria Gandhi Polanco in Mexico City. Re-reading it now in English brings still further insight from a great thinker, whose other works, The Philosophy of Liberation, The Invention of the Americas, and Twenty Theses on Politics, have informed my work. There’s the added attraction of this appearance of the book in English, in that Dussel himself has been involved in some of the key moves in this translation of Ethics of Liberation. (Above right, Dussel is shown with Subcomandante Marcos.)

Dussel is one of those key thinkers of the global South – of whom there are many often not recognized in “the West” –  who thinks and writes out of the transcontinental thought of Africa, Asia and Latin America, while also fully engaging the philosophers of Europe and the U.S.  Yet, rarely if ever – and this remains shameful – does he show up on the required reading lists of U.S. and European doctoral studies programs, especially in theology, ethics and philosophy. (Let me know the exceptions!).

Dussel’s astounding corpus includes a three-volume work on Marx’s Capital, extensive analyses of the works of Plato and Aristotle, Kant and Hegel, John Rawls, Karl-Otto Apel, Jürgen Habermas, Charles Peirce, Hilary Putnam, Niklas Luhmann, and many others. Through these engagements, Western modernity is situated in a field where African and Asiatic currents are shown to be the most powerful sources of the moral and ethical traditions of the West, encompassing and contextualizing, “provincializing,” those of ancient Greece, modern European and North American thought.

As notes the editor of the final translation, Alejandro A. Vallega, Ethics of Liberation “is the work in Dussel’s corpus that grounds all other works: it is the crucial cornerstone for the philosophy of liberation.” Dussel informs writers that he began to write this work in 1993, “twenty years after a bomb set by right-wing extremists partially destroyed my house and my study in Mendoza, Argentina, and drove me into exile in Mexico, where I have lived ever since.” Dussel wrote the book over a four year period and it has seen four editions in Spanish (1998, 2000, 2002, 2006). Over an eight-year period, we can send out a hearty thanks to four translators who have delivered this work to us: Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Pérez Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado-Torres.

I obviously look forward to discussing the book with others of you engaged in its reading. I am re-reading it in English for my reviewing it for Radical Philosophy, a UK-based journal in socialist and feminist philosophy. (Note: my review has just been completed, as of November 2013, and can be previewed, by Radical Philosophy permission, at a more recent post at this web site.) I end this particular blog entry with a short review I did for the Journal of Religion, of Dussel’s earlier work, Twenty Theses on Politics (Translated by George Ciccariello-Maher. Foreword by Eduardo Mendieta. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2008. xvii+162 pp. $19.95 (paper).

Below, beneath the photo of Dussel with Subcomandante Marcos of the Zapatistas, see my review of Dussel’s 2008 work , which is re-printed here with permission from The Journal of Religion.

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Enrique Dussel photo: El sup y Enrique Dussel Universidad de la Tierra Chiapas diciembre 2007 SupyDussel.jpg

From the pen of perhaps Latin America’s foremost philosopher of liberation comes this brilliant condensation by Enrique Dussel of his political philosophy. Behind Twenty Theses on Politics, ably introduced in Mendieta’s superb Foreword, stands an astounding number of publications: among them, a large three-volume set, still in Spanish, his Politics of Liberation, and three more weighty volumes on Marx.

Dussel, a philosopher at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana (Iztapalapa) in Mexico, is already widely known for two other impressive texts: Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion (also, to date, in Spanish) which fused his interpretations of Emmanuel Levinas and Marx, and also The Invention of the Americas, which challenged Eurocentric thought, reorienting phenomenology to a decolonial, counter-imperial and liberatory practice in the Americas. Dussel’s entire project has received one of the best critical analyses to date in part three of Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Against War: Views from the Underside of Modernity (Duke, 2008).

Twenty Theses provides readers with key principles of Dussel’s entire work, especially of the Politics of Liberation. His intellectual work also taps popular political movements spanning at least five decades of struggle throughout Latin America. Thus, the text offers rigorous philosophy, but also meditations, occasionally hortatory exclamations, bearing witness to the hyperpotentia, a “power of the people” in movements across Latin America.

Dussel’s notion of hyerpotentia springs from his most important conceptual distinction, an “originary ontological scission” (19), between power in-itself, a fundamental, “common will-to-live” in all communities (potentia), on the one hand, and this power as constituting itself as instituting power (potestas), on the other. Power as the institutionalized potestas is of two kinds. First, it can be “obediential” to peoples’ will-to-live, in which case a new “noble vocation of politics” arises, with representatives delegating power to nurture peoples’ needs for material, democratic, and feasible liberation. Alternatively, potestas can become “fetishized,” absolutizing representatives’ own will, with power becoming domination and coercive action (32).

“The people,” a veritable shibboleth of social struggle, is given disciplined treatment by Dussel. “The people” (el pueblo in Spanish, Altape in Aztec, Amaq in Maya) refers to victims’ exclusion and oppression congealing through outcry and action into differentiated social movements. They seek what Dussel, following Ernesto Laclau, terms a “universal hegemonic claim,” in which many needs (of say indigenous, women of color, men and women of all backgrounds in labor and industry) form a bloc from below, an “analogical hegemon” (73). This constitutes the power of creative movements (hyperpotentia), uniting people’s common will-to-live, with consensus among diverse negated peoples, with efforts for institutional transformation. (78-81).

Dussel engages not only the interests of liberation theologians, but also of religion scholars more broadly. “Mythical narratives,” Dussel notes, are crucial for forging coalitions among victims working to transform dominating institutions (xvi, 15). True, the tropes of religion often fetishize domination, but Dussel also acknowledges their potential for narrating victims’ drives for transformation. Religious groups also keep alive “political postulates,” those “logically thinkable (possible) statements that remain empirically impossible but nevertheless serve to orient action” (112). Dussel explicitly develops the liberating postulates of “perpetual life,” “perpetual peace” and “the dissolution of the state.” Twenty Theses offers many other notions and distinctions over which philosophers, religion scholars and thinking activists will want to labor.

Valuable as is Dussel’s gem of a theoretical manifesto, some caveats are appropriate. First, this reader found the numerous diagrams, with circles, arrows and dimensional representations to be more confusing than helpful. Dussel’s careful prose is more to be depended upon. Similarly, the titles and sub-titles – some featuring two colons in their construction – do not clearly mark the book’s logic.

Second, there is an ambiguity in Dussel’s view of the political. Is the political, one field among others within life’s matrix of intersubjectivity (5), or, as he also writes, is it ontologically constitutive of all intersubjectivity, of the will-to-live in all fields (17, 71)? It may be fine for Dussel to have it both ways – the political as both one field and also as ontologically constituting power – but if so, it would help to theorize further this relation between the two.

One also takes pause over Dussel’s presentation of the family as largely a private space “external to the political field” (8). Although notions of family and of the private do require distinctive theorization, Dussel portrays them as spaces where persons are “protected from the presence, from the gaze, and from being attacked by the other members of the multiple intersubjective systems . . .” (8). The “public” realm, by contrast, he names “the field with others.” The problem here is that the agonism of sexual, racial and gendered life in families is thus glossed, and patterns of “othering” and of the gaze within families seem removed from Dussel’s political.

Finally, one might question the positivity Dussel attributes to potentia, that grounding “will-to-live,” which lies before the scission of its expression in potestas, institutionalized power. Is it so that a space of positivity can exist before the negativity of struggle, the agonism of domination? I do not question the value of positive notions of power, but Dussel seems to suggest a potentia that is preliminary to agonism (18-9). But is not the agonistic more rooted ontologically than Dussel grants? One might pose a question from the Lacanian political of Slavoj Žižek, and wonder how Dussel’s posited “will-to-live” relates to the death drive, to what Žižek terms that “strange immortality at the core of our being.” If the death drive operates amid the will-to-live, the scission Dussel posits, between potentia and potestas, is more complicated than he allows. For then, the negative emerges not just with the move of potentia to institutionalized potestas, but before that, amid the very “will-to-live.”

Even with these caveats, Twenty Theses, remains a deft, disciplined intervention into English publication for philosophers and religious scholars. With bracing spirit and conceptual rigor Dussel engages the global North from the struggle of the South, subsuming the West’s proclamation of “Equality, Fraternity, Liberty!” into a fuller world cry for “Alterity, Solidarity, Liberation! (137)”

Mark Lewis Taylor, Princeton, NJ. 2008 The Journal of Religion

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