Philosophy of Liberation (PL) was written shortly after Dussel fled in exile from Argentina. As such, the book unsurprisingly permeated with equal parts academic philosophy and political urgency. Additionally, various national liberation movements in the periphery motivated Dussel to write PL. Struggles for liberation in the periphery—galvanized by figures such as Ho Chi Minh, Patrice Lumumba, and ‘Che’ Guevara—were supported by important theoreticians; however, Dussel hoped PL would provide a strict philosophical backing for liberation struggles. Moreover, PL is wide in its reach: constantly vacillating and developing from phenomenology and ecology to Marxism and decoloniality to pedagogics and semiotics. With that being said, the aim of this short review is to highlight Dussel’s comments on sexuality and gender, analectical movement, and antifetishism.
Throughout PL are references to erotics, intimacy, sexuality, caress, nearness, Machismo, rhythm, and the like. Dussel has numerous uses and notions of eros. For instance, he uses eros to illustrate that critical intellectual action is not sufficient for a philosophy of liberation and to separate his notions of political intimacy and proximity from any pornographic notion. Correspondingly, Dussel uses eros to critique the crude economism or positivism that inflicts Left and Right political movements alike. Eros, for Dussel, demands the creation of a social order that is not centered around the phallocracy of the ego cogito, the aristocratic, the patriarchal, or the bourgeois family model—eros ushers in a political order that enjoys the proximity of the Other, disconnects Being from maleness, allows the plentitude of human love to transcend the commodification of social relations, and recognizes sexual alienation as a political issue to be overcome. As many womanist and feminist writers have made clear, eros not only situates desire as a political virtue, but appreciates the entire gambit of human subjectivity—a subjectivity that rational choice theory, positivism, and scientism do not even begin to encompass.
Furthermore, though analectical movement is a highly theoretical concept, it plays a decisive role in the evolution of PL. Dussel’s notion of analectical movement at once identifies the shortcomings of negative dialectics (especially the negative dialectics of the Frankfurt School) and acknowledges the “real human fact by which every person, every group or people is always situated ‘beyond’ the horizon of totality.” Unlike earlier critical theorists who ‘cast no die’ regarding the state of a post-capitalist society, Dussel’s analectics affirms rather than critiques the utopian visions and relations of some peripheral peoples. The analectical movement goes beyond critique and, in order to display what is impossible in the current system, affirms the exteriority of the peripheral. Importantly, analectics is connected to a concrete historical moment whose points of departure are ethics and praxis. Contrary to negative dialectics and European traditions of critical theory, Dussel’s analectics is concerned with the knowledge of how “to operate practically on the level of public, social, governmental, trade union, or military decision-making.” While analectics does not deny merit to negative dialectics, it gives negative dialectics an ethical conscience, a conscience that knows how to listen to the demands of the oppressed. Unlike current States, whose languages of numbers and rationalism inhibits them from responding to the protests of the oppressed, analectics gives struggles for liberation a necessary ethical vision. Underlying Dussel’s notions of eros and analectics is a reading of Marx that rightly propounds that there was no rupture between the young ethical Marx of pre-1845 and the mature or scientific Marx of 1857 and onward. Rather, Dussel holds, as his analectic principle makes clear, that the ethical and humanistic impulses in the early Marx are accentuated and supplement by the later Marx—Marx did not jettison his critical-ethical posture but nuanced and developed it. Analectics, as such, is a positive ethical moment that goes beyond the negativity of Adorno, Marcuse, and Horkheimer.
Lastly, Dussel’s theme of antifetishism is as original as it is strange. A fetish, of course, is an object made by human hands that nonetheless appears to be divine. Marx argued that capitalism is a social order oriented around the quasi-religious divinization of the commodity—an argument Dussel wholeheartedly agrees with. Furthermore, fetishism, propounds Dussel, can be the naturalization of what is socially constructed or cultural. “Every system tends to fetishize, totalize, absolutize itself,” says Dussel; the moment patriarchy, exchange value, or heteronormativity are taken to be written in the laws of nature, they become totalized, divinized, separated from history, and fetishized. Hence, antifetishism, for Dussel, is an explicitly negative moment and notion, it is a “atheism vis-à-vis the present system is a prerequisite for innovative, procreative, liberative praxis.” The practice of antifetishism is for those who dare to blaspheme the sacred and divinized state, market, or dominating pedagogics—it refuses to naturalize or divinize what is cultural constructed. Notably, fetishism of the system is accompanied with its own sacrificial logics: those in the periphery are quite literally sacrificed to atone for the gluttony, greed, and excess of the West. If capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and a host of other dominating structures become naturalized and divinized, then it is the duty for the philosopher of liberation to be a strict atheist towards such a system.
If nothing else, this brief review shows how PL is still germane. During a time when few other men were writing on patriarchy and colonization, Dussel’s radically egalitarian writings have proven to be prescient and courageous. His themes of eros, analectics, and antifetishism just begin to scratch the surface of what is a demanding and daring book.