Enrique Dussel's Transmodernism

According to some of his critics, the work of Enrique Dussel fails to escape the illusions of modernism, despite his vigorous and revisionary critiques of it. For Horacio Cerutti Guldberg, Ofelia Schutte, and Santiago Castro-Gómez, Dussel’s invocation of a we-subject among the poor, indeed, his very reference to macro-identities such as “the poor, women, blacks, and Indians,”returns us to a modernist meta-narrative. And the problem with this meta-narrative is that it works to reify and fetishize the evident symptoms of disciplinary structures of representation, playing into the hands of such constituting structures, that is, rather than deconstructing them. As Castro-Gómez has put it, “With this, Dussel creates a second reduction: that of converting the poor in some kind of transcendent subject, through which Latin American history will find its meaning. This is the opposite side of postmodernity, because Dussel attempts not to de-centralize the Enlightened subject, but to replace it by another absolute subject”(Crítica 39-40; quoted in Dussel,“Philosophy”338).