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Similar kinds of questions arise regarding Medina’s discussion of the epistemic barriers faced by the meta insensitive person. It is not entirely clear how to intervene upon the mutually reinforcing cycle of irstorder and metaignorance. If exposure to others is distorted by meta insensitivities, and if metainsensitivities are conirmed by what one encounters, where precisely can we ind hope for transformation? What speciic practices, experiences, encounters, or educational approaches would disrupt the cycle of insensitivity? Medina’s work provides fertile ground for future explorations of these sorts of issues. In order to reveal the connections between epistemology, ethical agency, and our social and political context, Medina draws from a variety of methodological resources, including feminist standpoint theory, race theory, pragmatism (especially that of William James), Latina feminism, and virtue epistemology, among many others. He brings this diversity of approaches into conversation, grounding the discussion in an original and helpful set of core concepts and principles. The text is astonishingly multidirectional, yet the analysis is sustained and approachable, even for those readers who lack familiarity with some of the many theorists with whom Medina deals. One reason this ambitious enterprise is successful is that Medina never loses sight of the realworld problems that his theoretical explorations are tied to. The book should appeal to multiple audiences, including those who are interested in epistemology, in the dynamics of social movements, in philosophy of race or feminist philosophy, or to anyone who is interested in how the study of philosophy is inluenced by social and political context. Finally, the Epistemology of Resistance is also a thoughtprovoking and genuinely useful guide for those who are seeking to become more responsible epistemic agents.
Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion Enrique Dussel. Translated by Eduardo Mendieta, Camilo Pérez Bustillo, Yolanda Angulo, and Nelson Maldonado Torres (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013). 752 pages. ISBN 9780822352129.
Reviewed by Don T. Deere DEPAUL UNIVERSIT Y
Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation in the Age of Globalization and Exclusion brings together the diversity of traditions and problems on which he has worked throughout his career. The presence of his engagement with Emmanuel Levinas and Martin Heidegger, which plays a more central role in his earlier work, for example, in Philosophy of Liberation (1977), is here informed by his extensive study of Karl Marx developed in his trilogy during the 1980s (1985–1990), and his subsequent engagement with the discourse ethics of KarlOtto Apel and Jürgen Habermas (1994 and 1998). Here, Dussel engages in a broad dialogue with thinkers from other traditions. Dussel ofers us an ethical Marx who is critical of the destruction of life and the alienation of the human SPRING 2014 | VOLUME 13 | NUMBER 2
under modern capitalism, coupled with a concern for the responsibility to the other, the excluded, the victim (foci taken from Levinas), and the necessary emphasis on the intersubjective character of ethics developed in Apel. Yet, Dussel’s thought is not reducible to the work of any one of these thinkers: he ofers us a singularly new work, one which must be worked through in great depth and studied with care if we are to answer the challenge of developing an ethics of liberation. The challenge of developing an ethics of liberation is a call to produce the lourishing of human life in an age where there is a greater degree of poverty and exclusion of large portions of humanity than at any other moment in human history. Dussel presents a challenge that is not just a theoretical call to revise and rethink our own ethical categories as we work beyond the impasses of neoAristoteleanism and neoKantianism, but a practical call: a philosophy which has as its aim not merely the interpretation of the world but its transformation. This call to transformation is the task of a practical and critical material philosophy in the same vein for which Marx famously advocated in his eleventh thesis on Feuerbach. The most central category of this ethics is undoubtedly life. As Dussel reminds us at the outset of each chapter, “This is an ethics of life” (55, 108, 158, 215, 291, 355). Life not understood here in an abstract sense “but rather [as] a mode of reality of each concrete human being who is also the absolute prerequisite and ultimate demand of all forms of liberation” (xv). Human life is a mode of reality in the sense that it evaluates its situation and responds to its circumstances. The process of human life is open and exposed to the experiences of privation, pain, and sufering but also to satiation, pleasure, and lourishing. That is to say, Dussel begins from the fact of human life as never fully indemniied from pain and sufering—that is, a life that also strives towards an experience of lourishing and reproduction of its existence. At the individual and collective level, Dussel points out the vulnerability of human life and the inevitable exclusion or oppression of some over all the rest. Not only is it impossible for each individual to be indemniied from sufering, it is empirically, though not logically, inevitable that victimization will occur to some degree. On the one hand, human life is naturally exposed to sufering, yet, on the other hand, there are always social and political systems in place that produce victims. Critical ethics always begins from the “real existence of the ‘victims,’. . . . That is to say, the ‘fact’ that there are victims in any and all systems is a categorical conclusion, and it is because of this that criticism is equally inevitable” (379). The negative point of departure of this text begins then from this inevitability of sufering and of systemic processes which produce victims, coupled with the urgent demand to respond critically to such a system. In the last instance, the critical exigency of Ethics springs from the imminent destruction of the human species on a mass scale. “Ethics is an ethics grounded in an avowed airmation of life in the face of collective murder and suicide that humanity is headed toward if it does not change the direction of its irrational behavior” (xv). This starting point also points to the necessity of a geopolitics of knowledge, which shifts the geography of reason away from the center of the worldsystem, a center which is PAGE 17