According to some of his critics, the work of Enrique Dussel fails to escape the illusions of modernism, despite his vigorous and revisionary critiques of it. For Horacio Cerutti Guldberg, Ofelia Schutte, and Santiago Castro-Gómez, Dussel's invocation of a we-subject among the poor, indeed, his very reference to macro-identities such as "the poor, women, blacks, and Indians," returns us to a modernist meta-narrative. And the problem with this meta-narrative is that it works to reify and

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... e the evident symptoms of disciplinary structures of representation, playing into the hands of such constituting structures, that is, rather than deconstructing them. As Castro-Gómez has put it, "With this, Dussel creates a second reduction: that of converting the poor in some kind of transcendent subject, through which Latin American history will find its meaning. This is the opposite side of postmodernity, because Dussel attempts not to de-centralize the Enlightened subject, but to replace it by another absolute subject" (Crítica 39-40; quoted in Dussel, "Philosophy" 338). I want to suggest in this essay that what stymies the engagement with Dussel's work are these sorts of meta-philosophical issues. There are three in particular: (1) the question of the sorts of identity categories Dussel uses, which invoke group identities through impossibly large amalgamated terms familiar in modernist representations, without any nods to the fragmentation, intersectionality, or constructed character of group identities widely accepted today; (2) the question of the epistemological grounds for Dussel's claim to be able to think from the underside of history, to take the point of view of one of these amalgamated constructed categories as a privileged site for theory and philosophy, and (3) the very meta-narratives themselves that Dussel has advanced, contesting the Eurocentric and dominant (or metropolitan) post-colonial meta-narratives that offer explanations of the development of capitalism and its relationship to colonialism through offering, again, not a deconstruction, but a vigorous counter-narrative of a two-stage modernity process in which the New World plays a formative role, a narrative just as impossibly grandiose as any Hegel ever imagined. These three questions-the metaphysical question of identity, the epistemological question of standpoint, and the historiographical question of metanarrative-give rise to the critics' inability to position Dussel outside of the meta-positions of modernity, with its absolutism, universalism, and essentialism. Although I believe Dussel's work can be defended in all three domains, in this essay I will only be able to address one: the question of meta-narratives and, in particular, the meta-narrative of transmodernity. As the critics I mentioned above should suggest, the debate here is not exclusive to