The philosopher Enrique Dussel Ambrosini, in an archive image.CEFIME
The Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel died on Sunday night in Mexico City at the age of 89. His death caused an uproar among politicians and activists in the Latin American left movement, to which he contributed identity with his criticism of Eurocentrism and his desire to decolonize thought in the peripheries. Dussel’s death was also particularly lamented in Mexico, where he had lived since 1975, especially among members of Morena, a party that he had co-founded and in which he took on the role of ideologue and cadre trainer.
As one of the pioneers of liberation philosophy, the decolonial turn and the epistemology of the South, Dussel was also a historian and critic of Western thought, its concepts, its interpretation of reality, its foundations and its goals the others had no place or had a place as objects of study, always barbaric. Because Dussel wrote his works in the manner of successive “theses” and strands of thought, he suggested that domination arises in thought and proposed an epistemological break, a distancing from colonialism, machismo, racism and exclusion, and a new approach to otherness without sensitivity Prejudices. Since he proposed the creation of a system of thought based on oppression and therefore liberating, his philosophy was a political practice.
“Against the classical ontology of the center, from Hegel to Habermas, to name the most clear thing in Europe, a counter-discourse emerges, a philosophy of liberation of the periphery, the oppressed, the excluded, the shadow that has the light of being failed to light up the questioning silence without saying a word. Our thinking begins in non-existence, in nothingness, in the opaque, in the other, in the external, in the excluded, in the mystery of meaninglessness, in the cry of the poor. It is then a ‘barbaric philosophy’ that nevertheless attempts to be a project of trans- or meta-modernity,” wrote Dussel in his masterpiece “Philosophy of Liberation” (Fondo de Cultura Económica, 2011).
Dussel was educated at European universities and taught courses at American universities. In Mexico, he taught at UNAM and served as interim rector of the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), a popular school founded by Mexican President Andrés Manuel López Obrador as part of a project to provide children of poor families with higher educational opportunities. In 2020, he became secretary of the National Institute of Political Training of Morena, the school for López Obrador’s party cadres, where he taught seminars on political philosophy. “The party must be a school of politics, not a voting machine,” explained the thinker.
In his Philosophy of Liberation, the first edition of which dates from 1977, Dussel spoke of the importance of the geopolitical space in which thought takes place and pointed to the existence of an old and ever higher “wall”, a symbolic barrier, which began to emerge in 1492, the year of the conquest of America, and “which separates the developed north from the impoverished south”. In Dussel’s philosophical proposal, youth and popular culture are positioned against Western pedagogy, the wage worker and the farmer against capital, women and men against machismo, and the new generations against extractivism and the ecological destruction of the planet.
Friends who knew Dussel remember him as a tireless worker and as a sensitive and generous person towards his students. “What can I tell you personally? He was charming, a good man, very generous, he was always generous with his time and a teacher for several generations,” says Rafael Barajas, El Fisgón, cartoonist and director of the training institute. of Morena paintings. “He left a lot of the school between us. He had a triad of ethical behavior and he practiced them all [sus postulados]. He was truly an impeccable person and, moreover, impressively clear,” he added in an interview.
Barajas remembers that Dussel moved to Mexico after an attack on his home in Argentina. He points out that the philosopher also lived for a time in Palestine, where he worked as a carpenter, and recalls the philosophical debates he had with authors such as Merleau-Ponty, Habermas and Lévinas. “We must consider the story of Enrique Dussel in the light of the dominant discourse of the 1980s, when high-ranking officials sent their children to study in the United States and they all returned as neoliberal converts.” Dussel rethinks the need for us, our knowledge and ours To reclaim space in the world, to examine how our knowledge is constituted, a Eurocentric knowledge, in the logic of ancient Greece, of Western civilization, when we have other ancient civilizations here; “He criticized ideological and mental colonialism and reread philosophy through the history of Latin America,” explains El Fisgón.
The cartoonist points out that Dussel’s transition from book philosophy to political practice in the party represents a natural transition for a Marxist – that is, materialist – author like himself. “As a good Marxist, he was one of the philosophers who believed that the world had to be changed,” says Barajas, alluding to one of Karl Marx’s Feuerbach theses. “Therefore, he always welcomed the important transformation movements to which he had access and therefore joined Morena’s efforts. That explains it, and I think it’s no small thing,” he adds.
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