Letter to a comrade who lives and resists: Enrique Dussel

El CLACSO Working Group on Political Philosophy. Undisciplined Humanities: Cosmos, Body and Utopia joins in the mourning that grips the Latin American and international philosophical community for the death of the philosopher of Argentine origin, Mexican by adoption, Enrique Dussel.

Dussel began his life as a philosophy teacher in the field he co-founded: liberation philosophy. His vocation as a teacher cost him his life, leading to an attack on his home and family and his forced exile from Argentina, from his native Mendoza, as a political exile.

Born in a “desert” region and driven by an intense philosophical vocation, he is undoubtedly one of the great figures of contemporary Latin American thought. His extensive and influential work has been translated into several languages. While it is difficult to summarize the importance of his thought in a few words, one of its main characteristics has certainly been his combating of all forms of “post” thought, which assume the history of ways of thinking and existing in terms of a discontinuous before and after. Enrique Dussel has taught us that overcoming the epistemic and existential problems of modernity must be sought through a “transposition” of oppressive reductionisms and binaries (transmodernity).

In this way, Dussel's thought and practice have shaped our critical understanding of the world. As members of the Political Philosophy Working Group of CLACSO, we have had
The opportunity to share directly with him, in person, his incisive critique of the political thought and processes of our continent, with a liberating and peaceful vision for our peoples. We all remember the dialogues held with Dussel and Guillermo Hoyos during the first meetings of the Political Philosophy Working Group in Bogotá (2004 and 2007) and in San José, Costa Rica, in 2006. During those days, when the academic discussions continued in the small buses in which our hosts transported us to dinners, and at the dinners themselves, his gestures were always generous—those of a perpetual learner, a visionary dialoguer, and a person of gentle nobility. His critical philosophical thinking, in which ethics, political action, and thought-from-our-America intersect, has inspired the work of our Group since those early years.

We are overcome with sadness upon learning of his departure, but we are also haunted by the memory of having shared, with attentive listening, a philosophical thought that he always conceived as both radical and situated: "There is no philosophy if one does not enter into a radical crisis and from pain and death a new man does not emerge."

November 7th 2023
CLACSO Working Groups
Political Philosophy. Undisciplined Humanities: Cosmos, Body, and Utopia

This text expresses the position of CLACSO Working Groups Political Philosophy. Undisciplined Humanities: Cosmos, Body, and Utopia and not necessarily that of the centers and institutions that make up the CLACSO international network, its Steering Committee or its Executive Secretariat.