Enrique Dussel and the Philosophy of Liberation

Enrique Dussel (1934-2023), an Argentine-born philosopher and historian who spent most of his career in Mexico after being the target of a bombing at his home in Mendoza in 1973 amid Argentina's political violence, is the central systematic architect of what came to be called filosofía de la liberación, launched as an organized movement at a series of Argentine philosophy congresses in Córdoba and elsewhere between 1971 and 1976, alongside figures such as Rodolfo Kusch, Arturo Roig, and Juan Carlos Scannone. Dussel's foundational text, Filosofía de la liberación (1977, translated into English as Philosophy of Liberation, 1985), directly targets the ontology of Emmanuel Levinas's teacher-adjacent framework and, more pointedly, Martin Heidegger's fundamental ontology, arguing that both remain trapped within a "totality" — a self-enclosed system of meaning centered on the European philosophical subject — that structurally cannot make room for a genuine Other outside its own categories.