Levinas's hegemonic identity politics, radical philosophy, and the unfinished project of decolonization

ENNelson Maldonado-Torres’s essay takes up both the problem of postcoloniality and the question of Eurocentrism, but in a shift of register. Whereas Drichel’s essay addresses the postcolonial in general and Eisenstadt treats the intra-Levinasian problem of Eurocentrism, Maldonado-Torres turns to the Latin American appropriation of Levinas and its implications for formulating strategies of decolonial thinking. In particular, Maldonado-Torres takes up the work of Enrique Dussel in light of recent scholarly debates around radicalizingг Levinas. Without an accounting for Dussel’s work and other appropriations of Levinas in the global south, efforts to radicalize Levinasian thinking - bringing his thought to bear on contemporary social and political issues - risk repeating the often conservative gestures and prerogatives in Levinas’s texts. Maldonado-Torres also critiques how many Levinasian criticisms of identity politics, despite their liberatory pretensions, turn on a pathologization of subaltern subjects. This critique is taken up by Maldonado-Torres in the name of a robust notion of decolonial otherness, forged with such force and profundity in Dussel’s work, that installs critical responsibilities and epistemological disruptions into the very foundations of Western thinking. A thought from outside the Levinasian outside, as it were.