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

With the turn to transnational approaches in American literature and American studies over the past twenty years, Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion is an important point of reference on the role of the intellectual in processes of critique and sociopolitical change and a useful commentary on much of Western philosophy. Originally published in Spanish in 1998, the book begins with a compelling argument that modernity is not simply the result of a cultural or social logic internal to Europe that expressed itself around the world, but that it is the result of Europe’s belief in its own centrality to world history. Familiar in its general outlines, Dussel ties this argument to his ethical position that intellectual provincialism has led to the oppression that defines modernity from the perspective of the marginalized and excluded populations of the world. However, he insists throughout that other exclusions would arise in any other system as a result of human finitude.

The body of Ethics of Liberation is divided into two halves, the first establishes a philosophical framework in three chapters and then a critical second set of three constructs his alternative ethics. He establishes three levels of analysis: human corporeal existence serves as the basis for factual and then normative truth claims, the question of inclusiveness drives his view of formal intersubjective validity for a given social system, and he evaluates the logical and empirical practicality of a given ethical position in terms of feasibility. Dussel then synthesizes these levels to create the basis for goodness claims with universal authority.

In all of this, two refrains mark Dussel’s position. First, he begins several chapters with the phrase “this is an ethics of life,” suggesting the wide scope of his work’s application. Second, he repeatedly says that others’ work is “necessary but not sufficient,” which marks his claim to subsume other philosophers’ perspectives and indicates the intended scope of his critical purview. In one of the most prolonged engagements, he argues that “the Frankfurt school is critical, a direct predecessor to the philosophy of liberation,” because it allowed him “to politicize ontology, but, from the beginning, [he] found a lack of positivity in their work, an insufficiently clear exteriority” (235). Dussel notes that the “certain space of critical independence” may have “implied the absence of a concrete social commitment” (235). With few exceptions, notably Marx and Levinas, this judgment that other writers lack awareness of material Otherness defines the analytical stance that Dussel takes throughout the book.

To put it mildly, the scope of Dussel’s analysis is enormous, and other readers have critiqued him for dealing incompletely with some thinkers, while others have applauded his historical breadth. It is worth noting in this regard that he sees this book as an “architecture” for later ethical and political writing on the question of liberation rather than a holistic treatment of all the questions that he raises throughout the course of the work (xv). Indeed, he insists throughout that while utopic in its impulses this is not intended to be a perfect ethics and instead argues for ongoing critique. Towards the end of the central fourth chapter “Ethical Criticism of the Prevailing System,” he argues that the human condition is defined, in social and ethical terms, by the need to “decide, even intersubjectively, in the ambiguous space between (a) perfect knowledge and drives (which are empirically impossible) and (b) the clear negation of life (which is ethically impossible)” (283). Evil, he continues, is the result of attempts to totalize knowledge and transcend the finiteness of human corporeal existence, which “produce[s] victims” who “accumulate in the course of history” (283). The gesture toward dialogue mirrors a central theme of the book that the work of ethical judgment can never end.

One of the insights he draws from the Frankfurt School is instructive in this register...