Alteration of Exteriority

On the “New Totality”, Political Subjectivity and Messianic Key in Enrique Dussel. A Debate with Emmanuel Levinas

Abstract

Dussel's challenge to Levinasian ethics was that exteriority as a mere critical place was not enough to think about politics and, therefore, it was necessary to move to another Totality to respond (at a political and economic level) to the demands of the other. Thus, for this perspective, exteriority is understood as a moment that is reinstated in a dialectic that returns to the moment of Totality, although this is postulated as new. We consider it very pertinent to address the problem of the necessary “passage” from ethics to politics, which Dussel had to resolve through a new Totality. However, we believe that this problem should be reopened by reconsidering some elements of the relationship between exteriority and Totality, which Levinas himself raises. Thus, it is essential to raise some questions that allow us a more complex vision of the political interpellation of Levinasian ethics from the Latin American condition of exclusion. The questions are: if ethical exteriority is taken as a starting point for the construction of a new Totality, is “totality” really a correct category? Because a “Totality” that had exteriority as its foundation would not properly have the constitution of a Totality, since what movement or effect would exteriority have on the Totality? And in the so-called “passage” from ethics to politics, don't both exteriority and Totality change their constitution? Faced with these problematizations we see a fundamental axis: that it is necessary to accept that in the passage from ethics to politics a necessary alteration of exteriority is committed. This would imply accounting for the transfiguration that exteriority undergoes to politically confront the Totality.