The Dialectic Between the Two Faces of Political Discourse in Mature Modernity

In 1992, Dussel shook the Eurocentric academic world by presenting eight lectures at the University of Frankfurt—these will later be published under the title 1492: El encubrimiento del Otro. The thesis of this work was countercultural and novel since it exposed Modernity as a phenomenon with two faces. Dussel, in the nineties considered that modernity has on the one hand, an emancipatory side and, on the other hand, an irrational myth that justifies violence; the argumentative thread that supports this quality of myth is articulated with Eurocentrism whose concomitant component is the developmentalist fallacy. Subsequently, in 2007 Dussel published Política de la Liberación: Historia Mundial y Crítica, where he expounds a counter narrative, understood as a narrative of an anti-traditional tradition. The purpose of the text is to deconstruct political philosophy and the history of politics. In this order of ideas, it can be seen that there is an argumentative coherence in those mature works in which modernity is apprehended as a phenomenon composed of a duality, a phenomenon that must be overcome and, at the same time, one that cannot be denied because as Dussel describes, Latin America has been (for better or for worse) a principal participant in the world history of modern politics. The purpose of this paper is to understand how political discourse in mature modernity is conceptualized by politics of liberation in order to briefly glimpse both faces of modernity.