Enrique Dussel

"First published in Spanish in 2006, Twenty Theses on Politics is a major statement on political philosophy from Enrique Dussel, one of Latin America's -- and the world's -- most important philosophers, and a founder of the philosophy of liberation. Synthesizing a half-century of his pioneering work in moral and political philosophy, Dussel presents a succinct rationale for the development of political alternatives to the exclusionary, exploitative institutions of neoliberal globalization. In twenty short, provocative theses he lays out the foundational elements for a politics of just and sustainable coexistence. Dussel first constructs a theory of political power and its institutionalization, taking on topics such as the purpose of politics and the fetishization of power. He insists that political projects must criticize or reject as unsustainable all political systems, actions, and institutions whose negative effects are suffered by oppressed or excluded victims. Turning to the deconstruction or transformation of political power, he explains the political principles of liberation and addresses matters such as reform and revolution. Twenty Theses on Politics is inspired by recent political transformations in Latin America. As Dussel writes in Thesis 15, regarding the liberation praxis of social and political movements, 'The winds that arrive from the South -- from Nestor Kirchner, Tabaré Vasquez, Luiz Inacio Lula da Silva, Evo Morales, Hugo Chavez, Fidel Castro, and so many others -- show us that things can be changed. The people must reclaim sovereignty!' Throughout the twenty theses Dussel engages with Latin American thinkers and activists and with radical political projects such as the World Social Forum. He is also in dialogue with the ideas of Marx, Hegel, Habermas, Rawls, and Negri, offering insights into the applications and limits of their thinking in light of recent Latin American political thought and practice."--Back cover.

"Enrique Dussel is considered one of the founding philosophers of liberation in the Latin American tradition, an influential arm of what is now called decoloniality. While he is astoundingly prolific, relatively few of his works can be found in English translation ? and none of these focus specifically on education. Founding members of the Latin American Philosophy of Education Society David I. Backer and Cecilia Diego bring to us Dussel?s The Pedagogics of Liberation: A Latin American Philosophy of Education, the first English translation of Dussel?s thinking on education, and also the first translation of any part of his landmark multi-volume work Towards an Ethics of Latin American Liberation. Dussel?s ouevre is an impressive intellectual mosaic that uses Europeans to disrupt European thinking. This mosaic has at its center French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, but also includes Ancient Greek philosophy, Thomist theology, modern Enlightenment philosophy, analytic philosophy of language, Marxism, psychoanalysis (Freud, Klein, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience), phenomenology (Sartre, Heidegger, Husserl, Hegel), critical theory (Frankfurt School, Habermas), and linguistics. Dussel joins these traditions to Latin American history, literature, and philosophy, specifically the work of Octavio Paz, Ivan Illich, and the philosophers of liberation whom Dussel studied with in Argentina before his exile to Mexico in the late 1970s. Drawing heavily from the ethics of Levinas, Dussel examines the dominating and liberating features of intimate, concrete, and observable interactions between different kinds of people who might sit down and have face-to-face encounters, specifically where there may be an inequality of knowledge and a responsibility to guide, teach, learn, care, or study: teacher?student, politician?citizen, doctor?patient, philosopher?nonphilosopher, and so on. Those occupying the superior position of these face-to-face encounters (teachers, politicians, doctors, philosophers) have a clear choice for Dussel when it comes to their pedagogics. They are either open to hearing the voice of the Other, disrupting their sense of what is and should be by a newness beyond what they know; or, following the dominant pedagogics, they can try to communicate and instruct their sense of what is and should be (which Dussel, in a Latin American context, associates with dominant cultures) to the (supposed) tabula rasas in their charge. Dussel calls that sense of what is and should be ?lo Mismo.? [The French in Levinas is ?le Même,? and Backer and Diego have translated Dussel?s ?lo Mismo? as ?the Same.?] This groundbreaking translation makes possible a face-to-face encounter between an Anglo Philosophy of Education and Latin American Pedagogics. ?Pedagogics? should be considered as a type of philosophical inquiry alongside ethics, economics, and politics. Dussel?s pedagogics is a decolonizing pedagogics, one rooted in the philosophy of liberation he has spent his epic career articulating. With an Introduction by renowned philosopher Linda Martin Alcoff, this book adds an essential voice to our conversations about teaching, learning, and studying, as well as critical theory in general."

"Postcolonialism and Political Theory explores the intersection between the political and the postcolonial through an engagement with, critique of, and challenge to some of the prevalent restrictive tenets and frameworks of Western political and social thought. It is a response to the call by postcolonial studies, as well as to the urgent need within world politics to turn toward a multiplicity - largely excluded from globally dominant discourses of community, subjectivity, power, and prosperity - constituted by otherness, radical alterity, or subordination to the newly reconsolidated West. The book offers a diverse range of essays that reexamine and open the boundaries of political and cultural modernity's historical domain; that look at how the racialized and gendered and cultured subject visualizes the social from elsewhere; that critique postcolonial theory's claim to celebrate diversity; and that complicate the notion of postcolonial politics within settler societies that continue to practice exile of the indigenous." "Postcolonialism and Political Theory is an ideal book for graduate and advanced undergraduate level study and for those working both disciplinarily and interdisciplinarily, both inside and outside academia."