Nuevo Itinerario (Aug 2018)

Marx in the ethics of Enrique Dussel. 200 years after the birth of Marx and 20 years of the Ethics of liberation in the era of globalization and exclusion

  • Bárbara Aguer

DOI
https://doi.org/10.30972/nvt.0133119
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 0, no. 13
pp. 3 – 31

Abstract

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At the end of the 20th century, in the context of the apparent consolidation of a unipolar world and the neoliberal project in Latin America, the philosopher Enrique Dussel set himself the task of delineating an ethics that offered the critical tools to challenge, from the Latin American experience, the modern / colonial / capitalist World System in its contemporary phase. For the elaboration of this project his reading about Marx's work will be unavoidable. In his ethics, Dussel offers an exegesis of Marx's work in the key of the Levinasian spatial metaphor; this allows him to make an interpretation that privileges the ethical and anthropological dimension before the economic one. In this analysis, the category of living labor is offered as the exteriority of capital and the category of pauper as the exteriority of the class. Emphasizing the Marxian anthropology that is contained in these notions and the intuitions present in the young Marx, Dussel manages to construct the universal material principle, fundamental articulator -although not unique- of all the architectural ethics of liberation

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