Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion by Enrique Dussel (review)

Enrique Dussel is an Argentinean-born philosopher who, following an assassination attempt on his life by right-wing extremists in 1973, sought exile in Mexico, where he has lived ever since. His work of the early 1970s was very much connected to the liberation theology of thinkers like Gustavo Gutiérrez and to the philosophy of Emmanuel Lévinas. The book Dussel was working on at the time his house was bombed was Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana (Towards an Ethics of Latin American Liberation). From the very beginning, then, Dussel has been concerned with the way in which the Other—be it the indigenous Latin American peoples, the poor, or women—has been oppressed or excluded from human consideration by hegemonic powers.

Written between 1993 and 1997, Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion is the culmination of his earlier work on the topic of economic exploitation and exclusion, including Philosophy of Liberation (1977) and numerous articles. Given Dussel’s international importance as a philosopher, the English translation of Ethics of Liberation was a needed but challenging task. As Alejandro A. Vallega reports in the editor’s preface, the translation took eight years and “involved four translators” who worked with a number of previous translations that were either incomplete or simply did not agree with one another (xiv). The final result, however, is a masterful translation of an important work. In 1550, Juan Ginés de Sepúlveda and Bartolomé de Las Casas met in Valladolid, Spain, in a heated debate on the question of whether the newly discovered—or, as Dussel would say, the newly “uncovered”—Indians were rational beings or beasts, and thus (in Aristotle’s term) “natural slaves” that could be colonized, controlled, and enslaved with impunity. Las Casas argued in favor of the rights of the Indians, while Sepúlveda argued for their enslavement and forced conversion to Christianity. Unfortunately, while philosophically Las Casas won the debate, in terms of political reality Sepúlveda’s side was triumphant, and Amerindians continued to suffer enslavement, torture, and all kinds of hardships in the Spanish colonies of the Americas. It is from here—starting with the repercussions of the historical event of October 1492—that Dussel has developed his ethics of the excluded Other. This ethics of the oppressed, which began with an interest in the Latin American Other, has shifted in the last twenty years to include the oppressed peoples of the world. As Dussel says in the author’s preface: “Now, I seek to situate myself in a global, planetary horizon, beyond the Latin American region, beyond the Helleno- and Eurocentrism of contemporary Europe and the United States, in a broader sweep ranging from the ‘periphery’ to the ‘center’ and toward ‘globality’” (xix).

For Dussel, postmodernism has in large part underscored the reversibility of terms and the arbitrariness of values and ethical systems, political parties, and ideologies. This way of looking at the world at times seems to endorse, according to Dussel, either a defeatist attitude or even a certain nihilism. Dussel thus critiques and often castigates postmodernism for being complicit with Eurocentric worldviews, even while questioning them. For instance, in their Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia (1983), Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari presented a postmodern interpretation of capitalism in which workers, class struggles, labor, and other traditional Marxian categories have been erased and replaced with one solitary category, capital, by which they mean the working of global market flows. Their ideas are for the most part still applicable to the great capitalist powers of the World Bank, the G8, the IMF, and other major global players. However, that is where their analysis of power ends and where Dussel’s Ethics begins. Great powers like the EU, the United...