Abstract
Chapter 1, Introduction, summarizes the content of the chapters, which present Enrique Dussel’s ethics of liberation in terms of the analectic method, the ethical principles, and the subsumption of these principles in the political and economic fields. It also provides a short biography of Dussel, including a discussion of the first version as well as the second version of the ethics. The biography covers some of the landmarks of Dussel’s intellectual journey from the development of the ideas of totality and alterity through to his magnum opus, Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion.
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Notes
- 1.
For a discussion of Dussel’s European trip, see Maldonado-Torres (2008, 190–192).
- 2.
For a more in depth discussion and critique of Dussel’s early views of Latin American identity and history, see Maldonado-Torres (2008, 189–194).
- 3.
Dussel, while pursuing his doctorate degree in history at the Sorbonne, spent three summers studying at the Archives of the Indies in Seville, pouring through thousands of documents, to conduct research for his doctoral thesis on Latin American Bishops as Defenders and Evangelizers of the Indians, 1504–1620, originally written in French. Dussel addresses a similar theme in several works, including The Invention of the Americas (1992/1995), in which Bartolomé de Las Casas’s (1484–1566) defense of the Amerindians at the hands of the conquistadors is described as among the first counter-narratives, though only partial, of early modernity (69–72); see Hanke (1974), for a discussion of the debate between Juan Gines de Sepulveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas .
- 4.
- 5.
For Dussel’s detailed account of “An Argentine Political Decade (1966–76) and the Origin of Liberation Philosophy,” see Dussel (2007/2011c, 498–520). Dussel addresses several of the criticisms of Cerutti-Guldberg (1983/2006) about various tendencies within philosophy of liberation and their relation to the politics of the time in Argentina .
- 6.
I follow Barber (1998) and other Dussel scholars in taking this Levinasian turn as being a critical moment for the manner in which Dussel anchors the critique of the totalizing system in the exteriority of the Other . “Once Dussel underwent his conversion to Levinas’s thought,” writes Barber, “such ‘Catholocentric’ and ‘ethnocentric’ judgments cease to appear, and he focuses his efforts instead on an unmasking of false universalistic claims, such as these of his earliest period” (57–58). For a critique of Dussel’s interpretation of Levinas , see Maldonado-Torres (2008).
- 7.
A caution is in order here. There is no metaphysical dualism in Dussel. Although we are able to transcend the lifeworld from a critical perspective of alterity , we remain lived bodies within the lifeworld . Furthermore, this transcendence is itself an expression of life and never a mere abstraction.
- 8.
- 9.
In 2017, Dussel had Las metáforas teológicas de Marx republished with a new preface that emphasized the continued relevance of this work for both Marx and theological studies. Dussel argues that the theology of a form of Christianity in accord with the capital system “inverts” the messianism of the first Christians and that Marx “continuously” makes this case as a feature of his critique of political economy . “Marx endeavors to suggest a critique of theology that enables Christians … to situate themselves contradictorily in relation to capitalism. To this end he [Marx] continuously uses theological metaphors: he lays out the theoretical path for the believer to discover the contradiction of the original critical Christian religion (if it is authentic and inverts the inversion of Christianity ) with capitalism, [an endeavor] made possible by defetishizing economic science, but also simultaneously suggesting a critical reinterpretation of theology …” (2017, 10–11). The economic science Dussel refers to here maintains that capital is self-expanding and therefore such science covers over the source of value , namely, living labor .
- 10.
While Dussel’s dialogue with the thought of Jürgen Habermas is also important, I limit the discussion to Dussel’s encounter with Apel .
- 11.
Dussel discusses the relation between the thought of Marx and Apel and the importance of the material principle in an autobiographical video (García-Agundis 2015, 1h 22 min–1h 23 min).
- 12.
Dussel explains the term subsumption in 16 tesis de la economía política: Interpretación filosófica (Sixteen Theses on Political Economy : Philosophical Interpretation) (2014a). In a Kantian and Hegelian sense, something is subsumed when “its abstract universality is negated and it is redefined or affirmed in its new particularity. Metaphorically we can say that the bread, upon being eaten is negated as bread and is transformed or affirmed as a moment of the same corporeality that has digested it (subsumption of the bread in the living corporeality). The bread, metaphorically, would be the ethical principle, and the living corporeality the normative principle in the economic field” (202, note 40). It should also be noted that for Dussel, subsumption can also be used in the sense of alienation , such as the case of the subsumption of living labor (as labor power) by capital as an “internal determination” of capital (Dussel 2001, 148, note 9).
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Mills, F.B. (2018). Introduction: The Path to Liberation. In: Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94550-7_1
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