Marx and Freud in Latin America. Bruno Bosteels

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      3

      ON THE SUBJECT OF THE DIALECTIC

      Not All Theory Is Gray

      What the enormous effort put into Dialéctica de la conciencia suggests is first and foremost the author’s conviction that perhaps not all theoretical work is dull or superfluous, despite the fact that, from personal reflections and diary entries jotted down in the heat of the moment during and right after the events of 1968 in Mexico, Revueltas seems to have been rather fond of Goethe’s one-liner according to which, in comparison with the golden tree of life, all theory is but a gray and deadening undertaking. “Gris es toda teoría,” without the latter half of the original sentence, “verde es el árbol de oro de la vida,” in fact serves as the recurrent header for a number of these reflections, published posthumously under the title México 68: Juventud y revolución: “All theory is gray, the golden tree of life is green.”1 The quote, which also appears as an inscription on Revueltas’s tombstone, may remind some readers of Lenin’s famous witticism, written just one month after the events of October 1917 in the Postscript to The State and Revolution, that “it is more pleasant and useful to undertake the ‘experience of revolution’ than to write about it.”2 Nowadays, this downplaying of theoretical writing, whether in favor of direct experience or of life pure and simple, would no doubt sit well with many critics, especially those who would be all too happy to oppose in very similar terms the green pastures of literary and cultural studies to the drab landscape of so-called theory. And yet, in all cases we should perhaps be wary of drawing too quick a conclusion about the significance of theoretical work, or the lack thereof.

      Lenin, to begin with, is also the author of another one-liner that was constantly invoked during the worldwide sequence of events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, by anyone from Che Guevara to followers of Chairman Mao: “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”3 Like Lenin, who considered the study of Hegel’s notoriously difficult Science of Logic no less vital a task than answering the question of What Is to Be Done?, most of Revueltas’s work during the final years of his life, many of which were spent in captivity in the Lecumberri prison for his alleged role as one of the intellectual instigators of the 1968 student-popular movement, was devoted to what can only be described as an ongoing effort of theoretical speculation. This is particularly evident in Dialéctica de la conciencia. The intense intellectual labor displayed in the pages of this often obscure volume should serve as a warning that, for a theoretician, it is not necessarily the case that the neighbor’s grass is always greener. Or, rather, if we are to follow in Hegel’s footsteps, the grayness of theory and philosophy may well have a function all of its own—not to celebrate the eternal fountain of life, of novelty, and of rejuvenation, but to come to know what is, just before it turns into the massive inertia of what was, at the hour of dusk. “When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood,” Hegel writes in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right: “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”4 As for linguistic obscurity, Revueltas had this to say in one of his last interviews:

      What happens is something that Ernst Bloch explains with regard to the “obscure’’ language of Hegel: it is obscurity imposed for reasons of precision, says Bloch. We should remember that the obscure, expressed as such with exactitude, is something completely different from the clear, expressed with obscurity . . . The first is adequate precision for what is said and sayable . . . The second, pretension and dilettantism.5

      On our end, finally, the newfound resistance to, or weariness with, theory, combined with a flourishing enthusiasm for cultural studies, can at least in part be explained by a failure to absorb exactly the kind of intellectual work found in writings such as these posthumous ones by Revueltas. Perhaps, then, by returning to these writings, we receive a chance not only to resurrect a colossal but largely neglected figure in the political and intellectual history of the twentieth century, but also to make a case, over and above the wholesale assumption of the model of cultural studies, for the simultaneous foundation of a model of critical theory in, and from, Latin America. Cultural criticism and critical theory, from this point of view, do not come to stand in stark opposition so much as they can begin to operate in terms of a productive disjunction within each of the two fields—neither of which lives up to its promise without the polemical input of the other. One urgent task, in my view, consists in an unremitting effort to return to those fragmented and often forgotten discussions, such as the ones left unanswered and unfinished by Revueltas, which in this case tackle the functions of culture, ideology, and politics in the name of a certain Karl Marx.

      Cogito and the Unconscious

      The fundamental question, of course, remains: Which Marx? At first, the answer to this question may appear to be fairly straightforward in the case of Revueltas. Dialéctica de la conciencia would thus simply present us with one more variation on the theme of humanism in the so-called “young Marx,” the one associated principally with the Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts of 1844, for whom the alienation and reappropriation of our human essence would constitute the core principle of communism. Rather than seeking to locate the source of the dialectic in the objectivity of nature, as Engels would later attempt somewhat desperately in his Anti-Dühring, Marx in his Manuscripts of 1844 starts out from, and ultimately promises what it would mean to return to, the human subject as a generic being, or species-being. Such would also be the beginning and end of the dialectic adopted by Revueltas. In fact, as Jorge Fuentes Morúa amply demonstrates in his recent intellectual biography, José Revueltas: una biografía intelectual, the author of Dialéctica de la conciencia was one of the very first intellectuals in any part of the world to study and appreciate the critical importance of Marx’s Manuscripts, which were already published in Mexico by the end of 1937, in a Spanish version that is now impossible to find, under the title Economía política y filosofía, translated by two exiles from Nazi Germany:

      Revueltas used Economía política y filosofía; we have been able to study his annotations to this book. These glosses give us insight into the questions that attracted the author’s attention with greatest intensity. These interests of a philosophical nature, which were developed in his literary, political, and theoretical texts, refer in substance to different perspectives on alienation and the situation of the human being when confronted with the development of capitalism and technology.6

      Fuentes Morúa is thus able to follow up on his painstaking bibliographical reconstruction by reaffirming the centrality of the concepts of alienation and reification in both narrative and theoretical writings by Revueltas, tracing their influence back to the philosophical anthropology found in Marx’s 1844 Manuscripts.

      To this reading of the presence of the early Marx in Revueltas, we all know from our textbooks how to oppose the rigorous anti-humanism of the school of Althusser, Lacan, or Foucault. In fact, according to the author of For Marx, the very notion of a dialectic of consciousness is devoid of all meaning. “For there is no true critique which is not immanent and already real and material before it is conscious,” Althusser writes on the occasion of his analysis of Brechtian theater, to which he adds the following key principle:

      If we carry our analysis of this condition a little further we can easily find in it Marx’s fundamental principle that it is impossible for any form of ideological consciousness to contain in itself, through its own internal dialectic, an escape from itself, that, strictly СКАЧАТЬ