The Ethical Turn, or Levinas in Latin America

Abstract

When did we, as a field, turn “toward” ethics – if we can say that we did – and from what did we turn away? The turn to ethics tends to presuppose a turn away from politics or a substitution of one for the other. This essay focuses upon four types of readings of ethical philosophy in Latin American and Latinamericanist thought: theological, literary, political, and deconstructive. The first section evaluates Enrique Dussel’s assimilation of the work of Emmanuel Levinas into his own philosophy of Latin American liberation. The second section juxtaposes Dussel’s Levinasianism with Doris Sommer’s ostensibly very different Levinasian approach to literary studies in order to expose the common logic between the two thinkers. The third section unpacks the debate over the relation between ethics and political militancy that surfaces in Argentina following the publication of Oscar Del Barco’s letter “No matarás”. The final section considers several recent, more deconstructive approaches to ethics in Latin American Studies that refuse the logic of recognition-identification on which one paradigm of substitution turns, and which provide new, unfamiliar concepts of ethics, politics, and the relation between the two.