An Ontological Critique of the Trans-Ontology of Enrique Dussel

Logos i Ethos, 2021

The aim of this paper is to present Ricœur’s and Lé vinas’s approach to the concept of selfhood (French soi) as a response to the dispute over subjectivity which was initiated by the critics of modern tradition of the absolutization of Cartesian cogito. The debate on the notion of selfhood has not been closed yet. The author analyses two diff erent approaches to the problem. One appeals to the Hegelian dialectic, adjusting it to the formula “oneself as another” (discounting that part of the dialectical movement in which Hegel jumps to a vision of absolute knowledge). The other refers to the category of substitution. Both Ricœur and Lé vinas point to the Platonic opposition of the notions of “the Same” and “the Other.” Ricœur’s initial claim breaks with the established language of ontology. Moving beyond the circle of sameness-identity towards the dialectic of sameness- and selfhood-identity entails the transformation of the notion of otherness: it is no longer an antonym of “same,” ...

Zbornik radova Filozofskog fakulteta u Prištini, 2015

This paper discusses the idea of the Other in the works of the leading theoretician of the philosophy of liberation, Enrique Dussel. Although the philosophy of liberation is an authentic thought that establishes its principles in contrast to the fundamental propositions of European reflexive culture, the wider audience outside Latin America is little acquainted with it. It is a philosophy that analyzes the Other in a scope of dialectics of the center and periphery, relating the civilized and developed world to the idea of the first, and the rest of the world to the latter, for which the "first" one shows a direct and concrete interest. The practical sphere is brought into connection with the ontological one: the enslaved and exploited Other is marginalized to the periphery of being; in fact, he is made into non-being. His destruction is effected: as the one who is not me (multitude), the Other is at first made second-rated and thus less valuable (hierarchy) by the mere accidence of non being European (paradigm), only to be then easily thrown into non-existance, evened with nothingness (annihilation). Such an attitude implies an uncritical philosophy of domination, a particular imperial ontology, which is articulated as a hegemonic speech of (European) being and represents the theoretical completion of practical attitude toward the downtrodden Other.

Transmodernity Journal of Peripheral Cultural Production of the Luso Hispanic World, 2012

According to some of his critics, the work of Enrique Dussel fails to escape the illusions of modernism, despite his vigorous and revisionary critiques of it. For Horacio Cerutti Guldberg, Ofelia Schutte, and Santiago Castro-Gómez, Dussel's invocation of a we-subject among the poor, indeed, his very reference to macro-identities such as "the poor, women, blacks, and Indians," returns us to a modernist meta-narrative. And the problem with this meta-narrative is that it works to reify and fetishize the evident symptoms of disciplinary structures of representation, playing into the hands of such constituting structures, that is, rather than deconstructing them. As Castro-Gómez has put it, "With this, Dussel creates a second reduction: that of converting the poor in some kind of transcendent subject, through which Latin American history will find its meaning. This is the opposite side of postmodernity, because Dussel attempts not to decentralize the Enlightened subject, but to replace it by another absolute subject" (Crítica 39-40; quoted in Dussel, "Philosophy" 338). I want to suggest in this essay that what stymies the engagement with Dussel's work are these sorts of meta-philosophical issues. There are three in particular: (1) the question of the sorts of identity categories Dussel uses, which invoke group identities through impossibly large amalgamated terms familiar in modernist representations, without any nods to the fragmentation, intersectionality, or constructed character of group identities widely accepted today; (2) the question of the epistemological grounds for Dussel's claim to be able to think from the underside of history, to take the point of view of one of these amalgamated constructed categories as a privileged site for theory and philosophy, and (3) the very meta-narratives themselves that Dussel has advanced, contesting the Eurocentric and dominant (or metropolitan) post-colonial meta-narratives that offer explanations of the development of capitalism and its relationship to colonialism through offering, again, not a deconstruction, but a vigorous counter-narrative of a two-stage modernity process in which the New World plays a formative role, a narrative just as impossibly grandiose as any Hegel ever imagined. These three questions-the metaphysical question of identity, the epistemological question of standpoint, and the historiographical question of metanarrative-give rise to the critics' inability to position Dussel outside of the meta-positions of modernity, with its absolutism, universalism, and essentialism. Although I believe Dussel's work can be defended in all three domains, in this essay I will only be able to address one: the question of meta-narratives and, in particular, the meta-narrative of transmodernity. As the critics I mentioned above should suggest, the debate here is not exclusive to

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.

Peter Skafish: You are well known in Latin America, Europe, and Japan for developing the concepts of cosmological perspectivism and multinaturalism, but they haven't made much of a difference in the United States. Now, you are becoming better known there, and some Americans are asking: why ontology in anthropology?

Millennium: Journal of International Studies, 2017

This article argues that attention to representational practices and epistemology, however important for expanding the boundaries of International Relations as a field of study, has been insufficient for dealing with difference in world politics, where ontological conflicts are also at play. We suggest that IR, as a latecomer to the ‘ontological turn’, has yet to engage systematically with ‘singular world’ logics introduced by colonial modernity and their effacement of alternative worlds. In addition to exploring how even critical scholars concerned with the ‘othering’ and ‘worlding’ of difference sidestep issues of ontology, we critique the ontological violence performed by norms constructivism and the only limited openings offered by the Global IR project. Drawing on literatures from science and technology studies, anthropology, political ecology, standpoint feminism and decolonial thought, we examine the potentials of a politics of ontology for unmaking the colonial universe, cul...

Digitalizing the Global Text: Philosophy, Literature, and Culture (USC Press), 2019

Steele, The Ontological Turn: A New Problematic for Literature and Globalization, One of the key problems for the study of globalization and culture is coming up with a problematic that can perspicuously display the contribution of literature to normative debates about cultural values and economic forces. I say this because most Western theories of modernity and globalization are compromised by two fundamental philosophical mistakes that contribute to the mischaracterizations of the West and others. The first is the reduction to modernization to a process that subordinates the analysis of literature, culture and normativity to some larger force, such as rationalization, secularization, the division of labor or the movements of Empire. The second, which is sometimes combined with the first, I will call the “disengaged” understanding of reason, according to which we must abstract ourselves from culture and language in order to think through principles. We can see this most clearly in normative philosophy, where two disengaged strains of thought are dominant, moral/political constructivism (e.g., Rawls, Habermas) and utilitarianism. I think we can do better than this, by taking an ontological turn, a turn that will help display the changing shapes of a society’s collective imagination through time and the role that individual works of literature play in the construction and revision of these collective structures. I develop my argument in four steps. First, I will look at the work of Edward Said to illustrate the persistence of the unproductive Western assumptions about literature and world politics from a well-known thinker. I will then work through two forms of ontological investigation, a hermeneutic one proposed by Charles Taylor and a Foucauldian one developed by Talal Asad. In the third section, I show how the ontological turn enables us to discuss the globalization of religion with improved clarity because it permits us to analyze what the sociologist Olivier Roy calls “the exculturation of the religious.” In the last section, I will rectify an important lacuna in the work of ontological thinkers, which is how individual works of literature can argue with and through the collective imagination.

Postcolonial Studies, 2012

Bulletin of Latin American Research, 2015