The Context of Modern Politics

Under the guiding thread of a de-struction of world political history, and from the position of suffering living corporality, Enrique Dussel presents the context of modern politics in the fifth section of Política de la liberación: Historia mundial y crítica. Modernity is not in this case a merely intra-European phenomenon that belongs to a periodization of history enunciated from the West. It is, on the contrary, a moment that arose from the experience of colonization of the non-European Other. As Dussel argues, 1492 will be the moment of the ‘birth’ of Modernity as a concept, the concrete moment of the ‘origin’ of a very particular ‘myth’ of sacrificial violence and, at the same time, a process of ‘covering up’ of the non-European. Understanding the context of the emergence of this colonizing experience, that is to say, of the other worlds of life before and outside of this European Modernity, is the objective of this fifth section. For this, four moments are addressed in the text: China, the Ottoman Empire, pre-modern and eastern Venice, the Italian Renaissance.