ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on four types of readings of ethical philosophy in Latin American and Latin Americanist thought, which author characterize, loosely, as theological, literary, political, and deconstructive. It examines Enrique Dussel's assimilation of the work of Emmanuel Levinas into his own philosophy of Latin American liberation. The chapter presents Dussel's Levinasianism with Doris Sommer's ostensibly very different Levinasian approach to literary studies, focusing upon her analysis of Mario Vargas Llosa's El hablador. It describes the relation between ethics and political militancy that surfaces in Argentina following the publication of philosopher Oscar del Barco's letter "No Mataras". The chapter suggests that the opposition between ethics and politics obscures or overlooks that which could be promising in ethical and political thinking. It also presents more deconstructive approaches to ethics in Latin American studies that refuse the logic of recognition-identification on which one paradigm of substitution turns, and which provide new, unfamiliar concepts of ethics, politics, and the relation between the two.
