The Pedagogics of Liberation

Front matter

enrique dussel

PEDAGOGICS OF LIBERATION PEDAGOGICS OF LIBERATION PEDAGOGICS OF LIBERATION PEDAGOGICS OF LIBERATION a latin american philosophy of education translated by david i. backer and cecilia diego with a new preface and a foreword by linda martín alcoff

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Contents

Foreword : 11 Translators' Preface - 31 Preface to the English Edition - 39

Preliminary Words - 47

Limits of a Dialectical Interpretation of Pedagogics - 81 Meta-physical Description of Pedagogics - 105 Economy and Pedagogics - 123

Preface to the English Edition

This pedagogics (a philosophical text, not a pedagogical or empirical text) is part of a much more extensive work written over a period of five semesters between 1970 and 1975. It was in 1975 that I was fired from the Universidad Nacional de Cuyo in Argentina, due to a military dictatorship that officially took power in 1976 in my patria chica (my patria grande being Latin America, the Caribbean, and the latinos in the United States). 1975 was also the year I began my exile in Mexico. Having discovered that my book The Ethics of Liberation' had been quite abstract, addressing fundamental principles in the first two volumes, which gave it the initial mark of a categorical-theoretical framework, I developed the next four parts to give the book a more concrete orientation: the erotics (which today we would associate with questions about gender and the liberation of women and other consequences of gender), the pedagogics (which is the third volume of the Ethics, and is comprised of this book in English translation, covering the liberation of children, young people,

1 Enrique Dussel, Ethics of Liberation: In the Age of Globalization and Exclusion, trans. Alejandro A. Vallega, Nelson Maldonado-Torres, Eduardo Mendieta, Yolanda Angulo, and Camilo Pérez Bustillo (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013).

and the peoples culture), the politics (liberation of brothers, sisters, and friends), and three further books on anti-fetishism (addressing the question of reverence and sacrilege viz. practical totalities).

Pedagogics of Liberation, which you hold in your hands, is therefore part of a wide-ranging philosophical inquiry that makes certain presuppositions. This Pedagogics must be situated within the totality of that larger critical project.

Linda Martín Alcoff's introduction to this volume offers many explanations. I would therefore like to use this Prologue to position this text, which is almost forty years old, on the horizon of the Global South.

This short book gives voice to many discoveries that were developed over the years preceding it, but its principal and original insight is to consider the question of pedagogics in a geopolitical, cultural, and global context. More specifically, its aim is to think through the universal pretensions of Eurocentric pedagogics (the universality claim of Eurocentrism), as well as those of North America, thereby reclaiming the colonial (or neocolonial) periphery' right to its proper Latin American history — a history whose particularity they did not know because of modernity’s domination. Here we see "the provincialization” of the United States and Europe. In other words, without asking the question itself yet, the book is about the pedagogical foundations of epistemological decolonization, which occupies us today. And I would alert readers that in 1973, when I was drafting this very manuscript, the project to decolonize knowledge was articulated, before Edward Said did so in literature with his Orientalism, and before those in subaltern studies, like Rajanit Guha, did so for history in India, or before J.F. Lyotard's Eurocentric postmodernism was developed.*

2 Edward W. Said, Orientalism (New York: Vintage, 1979); Ranajit Guha and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, eds., Selected Subaltern Studies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1988); Jean-François Lyotard, The Postmodern Condition: A Report on Knowledge, trans. Geoffrey Bennington and Brian Massumi (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1984).