The Argentine philosopher Enrique Dussel died on Sunday night at the age of 89 in Mexico City. His death has caused shock among politicians and activists of the Latin American leftist movement, to which he contributed identity traits with his criticism of Eurocentrism and his drive for the decolonialization of thought in the peripheries. Dussel’s death has also been especially lamented in Mexico, where he had lived since 1975, and particularly among members of Morena, a party that he helped found and in which he assumed a role as ideologue and cadre trainer.
One of the references of the philosophy of liberation, of decolonial turn and the epistemology of the south, Dussel was also a historian and a critic of Western thought, its concepts, its interpretation of reality, its foundations and its purposes, in which the others They had no place, or they had a place as objects of study, always barbaric. Given to writing his works in the manner of successive “theses”, threads of thought, Dussel proposed that domination originates in thought and proposed a epistemological break, a distancing from colonialism, machismo, racism and exclusion, and an approach to otherness with a new sensitivity emptied of prejudices. As 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 lucid thing in Europe, a counterdiscourse arises, a Philosophy of the Liberation of the periphery, of the oppressed, of the excluded, the shadow that the light of being has not been able to illuminate, the questioning silence without a word yet. Our thinking begins from non-being, nothingness, the opaque, the other, exteriority, the excluded, the mystery of meaninglessness, from the cry of the poor. It is then a ‘barbaric philosophy’, which nevertheless attempts to be a project of trans or metamodernity,” wrote Dussel in his masterpiece, Liberation Philosophy (Economic Culture Fund, 2011).
Dussel completed his training in European universities and taught courses at American universities. In Mexico he taught at the UNAM, and was interim rector of the Autonomous University of Mexico City (UACM), a popular school created by the Mexican president, Andrés Manuel López Obrador, as part of a project to offer the children of families poor higher education opportunities. In 2020 he became secretary of the National Institute of Political Training of Morena, the cadre school of López Obrador’s party, where he taught political philosophy seminars. “The party must be a school of politics, not an electoral machine,” stated the thinker.
In its Liberation Philosophy, whose first edition dates back to 1977, Dussel spoke of the importance of the geopolitical space where thought occurs and pointed out the existence of an ancient and increasingly higher “wall,” a symbolic barrier that began to rise in 1492, the year of the conquest of America, and “that separates the developed north from the impoverished south.” In Dussel’s philosophical proposal, youth and popular culture are positioned against Western pedagogy, the salaried worker and the peasant against capital, women and men against machismo, and the new generations against extractivism and ecological destruction. of the planet.
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