Material negativity and critical universality: the reconstruction of the political in the philosophy of liberation

Abstract

This article departs from a diagnosis of the structural limits of modern Eurocentric political philosophy —particularly in its liberal and procedural strands — to argue that it operates through a dual insufficiency: the abstraction of the materiality of life as the primary normative criterion of politics and the undue universalization of historical experiences rooted in the Global North. Such a framework tends to reduce politics either to institutional formalism or to its exclusive understanding as domination, thereby compromising the construction of a normative theory capable of confronting the contradictions of the modern-colonial and capitalist system. The central hypothesis advanced here is that Enrique Dussel’s Philosophy of Liberation offers a normative-realistic reconstruction of the political able to overcome these limits. By methodologically situating reflection in the epistemic locus of the victims and articulating material negativity with the creative moment of politics, Dussel reinscribes domination as an
internal moment — rather than the essence — of political processes. The criterion of the production and reproduction of communal life allows for a distinction between legitimate and fetishized exercises of power, thereby reconstructing universality as a situated critical task.