Political theology from the global south: Enrique Dussel and the poetics of liberation

Abstract

In recent decades, thinkers like Alain Badiou, Slavoj Žižek, and Giorgio Agamben have argued for a serious political engagement with early Christian thought and its emphasis on collectivity and community. Notwithstanding their important theoretical contributions, these writers often remain within a limited Eurocentric framework, foreclosing the possibility of a truly decolonial political theology. Crucially, their relatively recent reappraisals tend to ignore important precursors of Christian Marxism from the Global South, namely liberation theology and the philosophy of liberation, as elaborated by the Latin American philosopher Enrique Dussel. This essay contextualizes Dussel’s liberational thought in the contexts of political theology and literary representation. It pays particular attention to Dussel’s study of the Theological Metaphors of Marx by synthesizing a model of literary inquiry based on his philosophy and applying it to a reading of counter-hegemonic poetry by the Caribbean poet Pedro Mir, namely his long poem “Countersong to Walt Whitman.” This reading makes explicit the implicit theological dimension of Mir’s poetic text. Finally, the essay conceptualizes this interpretive model as a poetics of liberation: a mode of engagement with mutually determining discourses – politics, poetics, aesthetics – as well as a mode of reading which unravels the transformation of these discourses in lyrical forms. Writing from the periphery of the US empire, Mir therefore constructs a mode of address which arms itself with both political and theological discourses, however implicitly. To the empire’s miraculous state of exception, Mir counterpoises a redemptive state of rebellion.