Notes on Enrique Dussel, "Eurocentrism and Modernity"

Dussel, Enrique. “Eurocentrism and Modernity.” boundary, vol. 20, no. 3, 1993, pp. 65-76. 

Escobar cites Dussel's work a lot in the article we read, most memorably when Dussel describes "Hegel's writing [as] tak[ing] on something of the sonority of Wagner's trumpets" (71). Dussel states his basic argument in the second sentence of this lecture: 

In these lectures, I will argue that modernity is, in fact, a European phenomenon, but one constituted in a dialectical relation with a non-European alterity that is its ultimate content. Modernity appears when Europe affirms itself as the "center" of a World History that it inaugurates; the "periphery" that surrounds this center is consequently part of its self-definition. The occlusion of this periphery (and of the role of Spain and Portugal in the formation of the modern world system from the late fifteenth to the mid-seventeenth centuries) leads the major contemporary thinkers of the "center" into a Eurocentric fallacy in their understanding of modernity. If their understanding of the genealogy of modernity is thus partial and provincial, their attempts at a critique or defense of it are likewise unilateral and, in part, false. (65)

As others (Quijano, I believe) have mentioned, Dussel establishes 1492 as the "date of the 'birth' of modernity" (66), since European modernity had to have a non-European other to compare itself with in order to "constitute itself as a unified ego exploring, conquering, colonizing an alterity that gave back its image of itself" (66).  Most of the rest of this lecture is Dussel's uncovering the Eurocentric bias of the main thinkers of Enlightenment to show how they viewed non-European (and even non-Northern European) societies either as not being at the pinnacle of history ("Universal History," in Hegel's terms) or as being outside of history entirely (as Hegel describes Africa). 

Dussel concludes with the need for a "trans-modernity" "in which both modernity and its negated alterity (the victims) co-realize themselves in a process of mutual creative fertilization" (76).