Ethics of Liberation or Liberation from Ethics? by Bruno Bosteels

To underscore this point, we could turn to a Latin American thinker who would seem to be the radical opposite of Badiou. I am referring to Enrique Dussel, who in his lifelong philosophical project, leading up to the recent synthesis in Ética de la liberación, has attempted to combine an ethics of the Other with the reinscription of Latin American specificity as a concrete Other of European modernity.

Here, however, I must go against the grain one last time. Dussel himself, in fact, explicitly quotes Badiou in his most recent version of Etica de la liberación: not as an opponent, as one might have expected, but in order to support his own argument. More specifically, Dussel wholeheartedly embraces Badiou's definition of the subject as the bearer of a truth that results from fidelity to the event: "I call 'subject' the bearer of a fidelity, the one who bears a process of truth," as Badiou writes in his Ethics. "The subject, therefore, in no way pre-exists the process. He is absolutely nonexistent in the situation 'before' the event. We might say that the process of truth induces a subject. "8 What interests Dussel is el devenir-sujeto de la víctima ("the becoming-subject of the victim")-which is why, rather than staring himself blind at the polemic between Other and Same, victim and subject, he can actually find an ally in Badiou. From victims and injustice, in other words, we need to move to subjectivization and justice-that is, to a really transformative act, which Dussel still describes in strictly Marxist or Marxian terms as the equivalent of revolution: "The 'question of the subject' (in its inter-subjective, socio-historical sense, as the emergence of the diverse subjects of new social movements in the diagrams of Power), is thus exactly the problematic of the becoming ethico-critical of the community of victims. "9