Abstract

This dissertation is focused on the work of three figures who share a fundamental impetus to rethink the question of the human in post-imperial ways: Emmanuel Levinas, Frantz Fanon, and Enrique Dussel. I provide an account of major themes in their work in light of their response to a European master morality of domination and control. I also spell out their alternative visions of human existence and social life. ;The first chapter of the dissertation offers an analysis of the Levinasian description and critique of the philosophy of Hitlerism and of its alleged links with liberalism and with other apparent alternative philosophical positions. The second chapter spells out Levinas's strategy to confront the Western paradigm of violence and war that, according to him, undergirds dominant Western conceptions of the human. As innovative and productive as Levinas attempt is, I argue that his account of ethics and human fraternity is skewed by his inability to successfully bridge the gap between the ethical and the political. ;The third and the fourth chapter are dedicated to the analysis of the work of Frantz Fanon, which arguably provides a more successful effort to link the ethical and the political. The third chapter focuses on the betrayal of the search for human fraternity by the project of sustaining an Imperial World. It describes how certain ideas of God are fundamental in the effort to maintain master morality alive. The fourth chapter demonstrates in turn how the slave's search for recognition becomes, for Fanon, a consistent expression of the search for human fraternity. In the fifth and final chapter I evaluate Enrique Dussel's appropriation of Levinas's work through my analysis of the work of Levinas and Fanon. I argue that, although there are points in which Dussel should have been Fanonian instead of Levinasian, his work contributes in important ways to the Levinasian and Fanonian attempt to overcome the paradigm of violence and war and the Western master morality of aggression and control. This work is a contribution to the study of religious thought and to its links with phenomenology, critical theory, ethics, and political philosophy