Abstract
Chapter 3, on the Analectic Method offers an account of the transition from everyday naive involvement in the world to critical ethical consciousness and from dialectical to ana-dialectical methodology. It discusses the impact of Levinas’s work on Dussel’s account of the key moment of these transitions: the experience of the face-to-face encounter with victims of the prevailing system whom Dussel refers to as the Other. This experience provides an occasion for the one receiving the revelation of the Other to see more clearly those structural features of the prevailing system that cause the Other’s suffering. At the same time, the one receiving the revelation of the Other becomes increasingly aware of his or her own co-responsibility to critique and ultimately transform the unjust socio-economic order.
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Notes
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“Phenomenology, as its name implies concerns itself with what appears and how it appears from the horizon of the world , the system, Being. Epiphany , on the other hand, is the revelation of the oppressed, the poor ––never a mere appearance or a mere phenomenon, but always maintaining a metaphysical exteriority . Those who reveal themselves transcend the system and continually question the given. Epiphany is the beginning of real liberation” (Dussel 1977/1985, 16; see also 1979/1995, 119; 1973/2014b, 160–162; 1974b, 188, note 44).
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As Barber points out “Dussel readily admits these difficulties of translation, for he recognizes that the passage from one world to another in an adequate, complete, perfect manner is impossible, insofar as one word carries in its train the totality of a world that is untranslatable and that needs to be uncovered if that word is to be understood. Within this understanding of language, every word usage becomes essentially analogical , meaning the same and yet not quite the same to conversants” (1998, 54). Dussel observes, “The Other cannot be comprehended from my horizon, because he or she lives from his or her horizon, from his or her liberty, as exteriority of ontology and sense” (Dussel 1974a, 283).
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Dussel refers to this pre-reflective ethical response as pre-discursive or pre-originary ethical reason.
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“One is ethical prior to being theoretical or scientific; one is practical before being explicative; prior to explanation; one rises out of indignation and not just from the discovery of a new intellectual matrix” (Dussel 2016, 129 [9.52]).
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Buddhist monk Thich Nhat Hanh refers to such receptivity to the Other as one of the miracles of mindfulness (1998, 64–65).
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Unless there is some pathology present, we are already equipped with an original sensibility for the plight of the Other . For Dussel, this communal sensibility is derived from our birth from inside maternal corporeality and the experience of taking initial nutrition from the body of another human being, the mother (Dussel 1979/1995, 118; 1977/1985, 18–19 [2.13–2.14]; 2016, 12–13 [1.06–1.08]). Human communality is also hardwired in the cognitive-affective features of our lived bodies as part of our evolved adaptive genetic inheritance (Dussel 1998/2013, 68, 69). We therefore enter the face-to-face encounter already predisposed towards openness to the revelation of the humanity of the Other , a revelation which evokes our co-responsibility for the community of human life even before we have a chance to fully comprehend its theoretical and practical implications. It is, however, possible for us to lose this sensibility.
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For an in-depth discussion of the phenomenology of the Other in Levinas and Dussel, see Barber (1998), especially Chapter 3: Overcoming Levinas : Analectical Method and Ethical Hermeneutics.
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Walter D. Mignolo points out that “world-system analysis operates from inside the system, while dependency theory was a response from the exteriority of the system—not the exterior, but the exteriority ” (2008, 230).
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Dussel uses the term ana-lectico and ana-dia-lectico to refer to the same passage from the dialectic method that has application as an analytical tool within the totality to the more critical point of view of exteriority . In Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana Vol. II (Towards an Ethic of Latin American Liberation Vol. II) (1973/2014b, 161), Dussel uses both terms. In 14 tesis de etica (Fourteen Theses on Ethics) (2016, 120 [9.17], note 7), Dussel uses the term ana-dia-lectico and gives the following etymology: “The ana- (beyond) indicates positive transcendence of the Other ; the dia- refers to the passage; the logos is the totality . It is a ‘passage / beyond / the totality / from the positive alterity ,’ whose potential is not the mere negation of the negation, but the prior moment: the affirmation of the exteriority as origin and potential of the first negation.” According to Cerutti-Guldberg (2006), Argentine theologian Juan Carlos Scannone was the first to use the term “analectic”, though “[the one] who has undoubtedly done the most for the elaboration and diffusion of this term is Enrique Dussel” (372).
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For a discussion of Hitlerism, see Maldonado-Torres (2008).
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As Dussel remarks in volume I of Para una ética de la liberación latinoamericana, “the ‘face-to-face’ as original experience, would be, nothing less, that from which the ontological order … remains open; it is the beyond of the worldly totality , prior to [this totality ] itself and original” (1973/2014b, 120).
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Barber describes what is required for this “practical option for the Other ” in poetic terms: “One must silence the dominating word, open oneself interrogatively to the provocation of the poor one, and know how to remain in the ‘desert’ with an attentive ear” (1998, 68).
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The solidary bond that we form with the Other if we opt to assume our co-responsibility for human life is not one based on the desire to fill a particular lack. The desire for a relationship of solidarity from which we seek nothing in terms of personal gain, is, for Levinas , as well as Dussel, a love of justice . “This love of the face-to-face, of the Other as other, is the supreme act of the human being and no act of comprehension nor interpretation can compare to it” (Dussel 1973/2014b, 115). This love is not without its obligations. Dussel refers to the commitment to co-responsibility for the Other as service, a term he derives from the Hebrew, habodah , which refers to a relationship that is grounded in a trans-ontological bond rather than one anchored in the instrumental complex of the totality (1973/2014b, 94, 102–103).
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Mills, F.B. (2018). The Analectic Method. In: Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-94550-7_3
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