Enrique Dussel, "The Theological Metaphors of Marx" (Duke UP, 2024)–A Conversation with Camilo Pérez-Bustillo and Eduardo Mendieta

·56 min·5 clips

Enrique Dussel's final book, translated 30 years after its Spanish release, emerged as a tribute after his death.

Dussel does not fit cleanly inside one field. The guest describes him as a thinker who has to be read across different angles, especially where questions usually kept apart start pressing on each other. Fragmentation is the problem on the table. The book sits inside a serious debate about liberation theology and Marxism, with Dussel close to the center of that argument. The irony lands hard. Liberation theologians were attacked from the right as hidden Marxists or communists, while many were doing dangerous work across Latin America. That danger gives the conversation its weight. The guest brings in political prisoners, killings, and grassroots liberation theology work through the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s, with a smaller presence still carrying on now. Bishops are part of the story too. Vatican documents, Latin American bishops' conferences, and church disputes are treated as part of the same intellectual and political history, not side notes. Dussel was not watching from a distance. He is described as both a participant in that history and one of the people who helped make it, which changes how the book's theological language sounds. The metaphors are not decorative; they carry memory, pressure, and argument. The conversation keeps returning to the point that The Theological Metaphors of Marx cannot be separated from Dussel's long involvement with church structures and liberation theology struggles. His earlier work matters. Before this book, he had already written a 20-volume history of the church in Latin America and spent 20 or 30 years moving through Vatican and related theological circles. That timeline matters for interpretation. The result is a slow, scholarly conversation about Marx, theology, and Latin American history as tangled fields. The tone is deliberate, almost seminar-like, and asks listeners to stay with biography, persecution, institutional memory, and the long afterlife of liberation theology.

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