- Length
- 240 pagesMartinez and Morkovsky, Philosophy of Liberation, Orbis Books, 1985
- Reading
- HardPresupposes texts it does not explain; a guide helps
- Availability
- In printA current standard edition is available
Philosophy of Liberation
A philosophy that begins by asking where the philosopher is standing, and answers that European thought has always spoken from a centre it mistook for the world. Dussel took Levinas' Other and asked who, in fact, that is.
- Date
- 1977
- Author
- Enrique Dussel
- Region
- Argentina and Mexico
- Language
- Spanish
- 1985 English, Aquilina Martinez and Christine Morkovsky The standard English version; in copyright Attested
Where it stands in the argument
- Position
- Reply — Answers a named earlier work
- Form
- Treatise
- Method
- Dialectical — Advance through contradiction and its resolution
- Transmission
- Translated — Reached its later readers in another language
- Standing
- Live — Still argued in current philosophical work
- Years back to what it answers
- 16 years
Written by a philosopher whose house was bombed and who was driven out of his country, and now the central text of a school taught across Latin America.
What the book says
A philosophy written from what its author calls the periphery, arguing that where you stand determines what you can see and that European philosophy has never noticed it was standing somewhere. Dussel's organising distinction is between totality and exteriority. A totality is a system that comprehends everything within it - and every philosophy from the Greeks onward, he argues, has been an account of being from the centre, in which whatever lies outside appears as undeveloped, primitive, or simply not yet included. Exteriority is what the system cannot absorb: the Other who is not a variation on the same, and who in the modern world is concretely the poor, the colonised, the indigenous, the woman, the periphery. From this comes his charge against modern philosophy. Descartes' thinking self, he argues, was preceded by a conquering self - the I who conquered America in 1492 established the position from which the I who thinks could later be discovered - so the modern subject is not a philosophical discovery but the self-image of a centre that had already taken the world.
What it argues
That the geopolitical location of thought is a philosophical fact rather than a biographical one. Every ontology, on Dussel's account, describes a totality and thereby defines an outside; the question is who occupies it, and the answer in the modern period is the population of the world Europe conquered. This makes the standard periodisation of philosophy an artefact: modernity is dated from Descartes or from the Enlightenment, and Dussel dates it from 1492, when Europe acquired a periphery and with it the position from which it could take itself for the universal. The ethical conclusion follows from the structure. The Other's claim is prior to the system and cannot be met by including them in it on the system's terms - inclusion is what a totality does - so liberation means the transformation of the system by those it excludes rather than their assimilation into it.
What it answered
Levinas on who the Other is, Heidegger on being, and the European philosophical canon as a whole - which he treats as regional thought that has claimed universality. He is also answering the developmentalism of his own period, which held that Latin America was behind and would catch up: on his analysis the periphery is not behind the centre but is what the centre requires, so the underdevelopment is a relation rather than a stage.
How it argues
By a formal architecture of numbered theses, working outward from ontology through erotics, pedagogics and politics - a structure borrowed from the European systematic tradition and used against it. The prose is technical and assumes Heidegger, Levinas, Marx and Hegel, which limits its readership considerably. What carries it is the persistence of a single question: from where, and for whom, is this being said.
The moment
Argentina in the 1970s. Dussel had trained in Spain, France and Germany, was teaching at Mendoza, and belonged to the group that formulated Latin American liberation philosophy alongside the liberation theology emerging in the same years. A bomb was placed at his house in 1973; he lost his university post in 1975 and left for Mexico, where he spent the rest of his career and where he died in 2023. The book was written in that displacement.
How it travelled
Into Latin American philosophy as a founding text, and later into the decolonial school that formed around Quijano, Mignolo and others, where the dating of modernity to 1492 and the analysis of coloniality became central. His debate with Apel in the 1990s, on whether discourse ethics can accommodate those excluded from the conversation, carried the position into European philosophy. In anglophone philosophy departments he remains little read, which is itself an illustration of his thesis.
The strongest objection
That the argument risks making a virtue of position rather than of reasoning. If a philosophy's validity depends on where it is spoken from, then a claim can be answered by locating its author, and the exchange stops being about whether anything is true - a difficulty Dussel shares with every standpoint theory and does not fully escape. His reply is that he is claiming an epistemic advantage rather than a guarantee: those excluded from a system can see its boundary, which those inside cannot, and that is a claim about what is visible from where rather than about who is entitled to speak. The narrower objection is Levinasian: relocating the Other from the face to a social category may be exactly the reduction to a totality that the analysis was designed to prevent.
Why read it
The opening sections on totality, exteriority and the geopolitics of philosophy, which contain the argument. The systematic middle is heavy going and assumes a great deal. Anyone wanting the position more accessibly should go to his later essays on transmodernity or to the decolonial literature that developed from it.
- First printed
- 1977
- First in English
- 1985
- Digitised
- No
Dussel later developed the position into an ethics of liberation and into the notion of transmodernity, and his multi-volume history of the church in Latin America and his work on Marx's manuscripts are separate large projects.
The 1985 English is the standard and is in copyright, as is the Spanish.
Where it stands
Live. Decolonial theory is a substantial field, the argument about the geopolitics of knowledge is active across several disciplines, and Dussel is its most systematic philosophical source.
On quoting this book
In copyright in Spanish and English. Nothing is quoted.
Contested
Whether the dating of modernity to 1492 is a historical claim or a philosophical reframing is argued, and it does substantial work either way. Whether his reading of Levinas is a development or a departure divides commentators, and Levinas himself did not endorse it. Whether liberation philosophy is philosophy or theology in another vocabulary is a charge made by critics in Argentina at the time. And whether the emphasis on the periphery's standpoint can be stated without collapsing into relativism is the standing methodological question.