One response to “In Memoriam: Enrique Dussel (1934-2023)”

1. Byron Davies

   November 7, 2023 at 3:49 pm

   This article by Jaime Ortega and Rodrigo Wesche in today's La Jornada is a quite good account of Dussel's thought, focusing on his contributions to Marxism: https://www.jornada.com.mx/2023/11/07/opinion/020a1pol

   Since it is in Spanish, I include my own translation below. Many Anglophone readers will be surprised by the authors' assessment that "There is no professional philosopher more recognized and more read by people outside the academic world;" but it strikes me as absolutely correct.

   Dussel: Marxism, Theology, and Politics

   Jaime Ortega and Rodrigo Wesche

   Enrique Dussel was, in addition to a philosopher of liberation, a tribute-bearer to the ideas of Karl Marx, to whose study he contributed. Exiled from his native Argentina, his journey brought him to Mexico toward the end of the 1970s. Although he already had a conception of the world that has been called Philosophy of Liberation, in his new residence he found an intellectual and academic world where Marxist debate was vital. He seriously took on the task of dialogue with this current, producing in the 1980s and early 90s a tetralogy that, to a large extent, remains unparalleled in Marxist studies. Here we point out some of the main hallmarks of his reflections and the reasons for their impact.

   First: Dussel ventured into the debates emerging not only from the 1857 Grundrisse, but also from various manuscripts from 1861-63, as well as of course commentaries on the first volume of Capital. His hypothesis was maintained throughout his first three works, and it rested on the fact that the fundamental category for Marxist analysis was not that of totality–as was suggested by thinkers from Lukács to Althusser–but rather that of exteriority. In the Grundrisse and subsequent texts, Dussel found that the category of “living labor” expressed that space of exteriority: that is, something not completely determined by the social relation of capital. With this hypothesis Dussel distanced himself from traditional Marxism, which regarded wage labor as the negation of capital (and not just another determination), as well as from Western Marxism, by pointing out that there were community forms not completely subsumed under the despotic command of capital. In addition, this allowed us to think that Capital: A Critique of Political Economy was not a book, but rather a great project that consisted of several drafts.

   Second: the originality of this Dusselian reading of Marx was completely determined by his theological training and his commitment to what at the time was called “the preferential option for the poor.” While it is true that other European philosophers and theologians had built bridges between Christianity and Marxism, and that liberation theologians had tied the emancipatory efforts of social struggles in Latin America to the liberating veins of Christianity, his 1993 work The Theological Metaphors of Marx demonstrated that the German philosopher was a deep connoisseur of the central theological and anthropological elements of Judaism and Christianity, as well as that–to a large extent–they inspired his reflections.

   Marx’s multiple biblical references were not merely a rhetorical issue, but rather a fundamental part of his critique of political economy and modernity. In this sense, there were at least two contributions of this innovative reading that confused Marxists as well as Christians (and continues to do so). Firstly, by pointing out that both perspectives relied on an anthropology that is either Semitic or materialist (depending on what one or the other wanted to call it)–in former case, expressed in mythical terms, in the latter in philosophical ones. Ultimately, the struggle for liberation animated by the Christians’ utopia of the Kingdom of God was the same as that of Marx’s Kingdom of Freedom, and in that way both sectors could join forces in their fight against domination.

   He also contributed to uncovering the Jacobin and Eurocentric prejudices of certain sectors of the left regarding religion. Marx recognized that modernity had unleashed a secularizing process that had collapsed the altars of traditional gods, but had also, at the same time, established capital, the modern State, and the doctrine of progress as new fetishes that structured society, which now had to be attacked. The critique of commodity fetishism was similar to the critique of the prophets of Israel against idols, since the underlying issue, according to Dussel’s reading, lay in questioning all those gods who entailed the domination of human beings and not opposing those gods who promoted the liberation of their believers.

   Third: following the crisis of historical socialism, Dussel did not renounce Marx, whom he kept alive even as new concepts—such as decoloniality—reared their heads. Dussel criticized Eurocentrism, but he also knew how to distance Marx from that perspective. Without abandoning the Latin American horizon–marked with blood and fire by national-popular experiences–he did not renounce the historical heritage bequeathed by Marx. All of this led him to accompany those frankest challenges to neoliberalism, beginning in 1999 with the presidency of Hugo Chávez in Venezuela. In this way he offered a reading that not only found its limits in what he called the “negative moment of critique”–destructive of the prevailing system–but also served to think about its “positive moment,” which involves the transition and construction of another system aimed at satisfying (as far as possible) the needs of those most in need.

   Fourth: the militant commitment to the causes of progressive governments became related to expressions that did not fit within the narrow frameworks of academic institutions. Dussel became, throughout Latin America, a trainer of cadres. There is no professional philosopher more recognized and more read by people outside the academic world. Dussel initiated dialogues and discussions with unions, as well as peasant, neighborhood, and party associations. In this process he never lowered or adapted the level of his speech: he continued to maintain it with a high claim to systematicity and density, since he understood that this was his endeavor as a professional. His departure on November 5 also marks the closing of a generation that placed its body and mind within the task of seeking dignity for the pueblos, in dialogue with the best of the traditions of our region.

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