Professor Dr. Dr. h.c. mult. Enrique Dussel (Mexico City)
Location: Curtis Auditorium, Herschel Building
29th October 2010, 5:30pm - 6:30pm

This year's bicentenary of Latin American independence provides an opportune moment to reflect about the continent's long history of exclusion and exploitation but also recent political transformations. From Luiz Inásio ‘Lula’ da Silva in Brazil and Nestor and Cristina Kirchner in Argentina to Hugo Chávez in Venezuela and Evo Morales in Bolivia, the people in Latin America reclaim sovereignty. This lecture is a further development from Professor Dussel's groundbreaking study Twenty Theses on Politics which was first published by Duke University Press in 2006 and explores the foundational elements for a politics of just and sustainable coexistence. Dussel argues against a fetishisation of power and insists that political projects must criticise or reject as unsustainable all political systems, actions, and institutions whose negative effects are suffered by oppressed or excluded victims. He 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 and others and offers insights into the applications and limits of their thinking in light of recent Latin American political thought and practice.

The Speaker:

Enrique Dussel is one of the world’s most important philosophers, and a founder of the philosophy of liberation. Born in Argentina in 1934, he was forced into political exile in 1975. He became a Mexican citizen and teaches as Professor of Ethics at the Universidad Autónoma Metropolitana and the Universidad Nacional Autónoma de México. Dussel obtained Doctorates in Philosophy from the Universidad Complutense de Madrid, and in History from the Sorbonne. The Université de Fribourg in Switzerland and Universidad de San Andrés in Bolivia awarded him Doctorates 'honoris causa.' He was a visiting professor at the Universities of Harvard, Duke, Notre Dame, Frankfurt, and others. In 2010, he taught as the Albertus Magnus Professor at Cologne University, Germany. Dussel is the author of more than fifty books, including Beyond Philosophy: Ethics, History, Marxism, and Liberation Theology; The Invention of the Americas: Eclipse of the ‘Other’ and the Myth of Modernity; and Philosophy of Liberation.