Bosteels, Bruno - Hegel in Mexico Memory and Alienation in The Posthumous Writings by José Revueltas

The South Central Modern Language Association
Hegel in Mexico: Memory and Alienation in the Posthumous Writings by Jos Revueltas Author(s): Bruno Bosteels and Jos Revueltas Source: South Central Review, Vol. 21, No. 3, Memory and Nation in Contemporary Mexico (Fall, 2004), pp. 46-69 Published by: The Johns Hopkins University Press on behalf of The South Central Modern Language
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inMexico: inthePosthumous Alienation and Memory Hegel Revueltas* byJose Writings

BrunoBosteels
Not All Theory is Grey In personal reflections and diaryentriesjotted down in the heat of the movement of 1968 moment duringand right after the student-popular in Mexico, Jose Revueltas reveals his fondness for Goethe's one-liner accordingto which, in comparisonwith the golden tree of life, all theory is but a grey and deadeningundertaking. "Grises toda teoria" without the latterhalf of the original sentence, "verdees el drbol de oro de la vida" in fact serves as the recurrent headerfor a numberof these reflecthe title Mexico 68: Juventud under tions, published posthumously revolution (Mexico 68: Youth and Revolution).1The quote, which I understandappears as an inscription on Revueltas's tombstone, may remindsome readersof Lenin'sfamouswitticism,written just one month afterthe events of October19 17 in the postscriptto TheState and Revolution, that "it is more pleasantand useful to undertakethe 'experience of revolution'thanto write aboutit."2Today,this downplayingof theoreticalwriting,whetherin favor of directexperienceor of life pure and simple, would no doubt sit well with many critics, especially thosewho in similar terms and they are everywhere growing in number would be only all too happy to oppose, say, the green pasturesof literary and culturalstudies to the drablandscapeof so-called theory.And yet, in all threecases we shouldperhapsbe wary of drawingtoo quick a conclusion aboutthe significance, or lack thereof, of theoreticalwork. Lenin, to begin with, is also the authorof anotherone-liner that is constantlyinvoked duringthe worldwide sequenceof events of the late sixties and early seventies, from Che Guevaraall the way to followers of Chairman Mao: "Without revolutionary theorytherecan be no revoLike who considered the studyof Hegel's movement."3 Lenin, lutionary notoriouslydifficultScience of Logic no less vital a task thananswering the questionof WhatIs ToBe Done?, most of Revueltas'swork during the final years of his life, many of which were spent in captivityfor his alleged role as one of the intellectual instigatorsbehind the 1968 stu South CentralReview 21.3 (Fall 2004): 46-69.
HEGELIN MEXICO / BOSTEELS
47
movement,is devoted to what can only be describedas an dent-popular in theoreticalspeculation.This is particularly effort evident in ongoing the variousdrafts,letters,readingnotes, andbibliographicalentriesthat constitute the bulk of materials for anothervolume, Dialectica de la conciencia (Dialectic of Consciousness), which was also published posthumously.The intense intellectuallabor displayed in the pages of this often obscurevolume should serve as a warningthat surely not all theory is grey. Nor is it the case that the neighbor's grass is always if we areto follow in Hegel's footsteps,the greyness greener.Or,rather, of theory and philosophy may well have a function all of its own- not to celebratethe eternalfountainof life, of novelty, and of rejuvenation but to come to know what is, just before it turnsinto the massive inertia of what was, at the hour of dusk. "Whenphilosophy paints its grey in grey, one formof life has become old, andby means of grey it cannotbe rejuvenated,but only known," Hegel writes in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right: "The owl of Minerva,takes its flight only when the shades of night are gathering."4 As for linguistic obscurity,Revueltas has this to say in one of his last interviews: What is something that Ernst Blochexplains withregard happens tothe"obscure" of forreasons language Hegel: obscurity imposed of precision, Bloch. We should remember that the obscure, says as suchwithexactitude, is something difexpressed completely ferentfromthe clear,expressed withobscurity. . . . Thefirstis of whatis saidandsayable. . . . Thesecond, adequate precision and dilettantism.5 pretension On our end, finally, the newfound resistance to, or tiredness from, theory,combinedwith a flourishingenthusiasmfor culturalstudies,can at least in part be explained by a failure to absorb exactly the kind of intellectualwork found in writings such as these posthumousones by Revueltas. Perhaps,then, by returningto these writings, we receive a chance not only to resurrecta colossal but largely neglected figure in the political and intellectualhistoryof the twentiethcentury,but also to make a case, over and above the wholesale assumptionof the model of culturalstudies, for the simultaneousfoundationof a model of critical criticismandcriticaltheory, theoryin, andfrom,LatinAmerica.Cultural from this point of view, do not come to stand in stark opposition so much as they can begin to operatein terms of a productivedisjunction within each of the two fields- neitherof which lives up to its promise without the polemical input of the other.
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SOUTH CENTRAL REVIEW
The initial working hypothesis behind this argumentholds that the appealof culturalstudies,beyond theirofficial birthplacesin the Frankfurtand Birminghamschools, is inseparablefrom a process of oblivion or interruption with regardto the once very lively debates about the - debatesthatuntil the late and causality efficacy of symbolic practices sixties and early seventies, in terms of the relative autonomyand specific efficacy of the superstructure, for instance,were dominatedby the inevitablelegacies of Marxism.In the U.S., where these legacies never achieved the status of a culturaldominantto begin with, any potential curtailed theymighthavehadwas further by the effectsof deconstruction, the earliertextual trendof which was then only partiallycompensated own laterturnto ethics andpolitics andby for,bothby deconstruction's the short-livedrivalry with new historicism.As for Latin America, if we were to ask ourselves in which countries,aside from those heavily markedby U.S. -influence, the model of culturalstudies, or culturalcrithe antique, has achieved a notable degree of academicrespectability, swers- Argentina,Chile, Brazil- would almost without exception include regions where the military regimes put a violent end to the radicalization of left-wing intellectuallife, includinga brutalstop to all public debates about the revolutionarypromise of Marxism, while in - Mexico or Cuba,for instance - manyauthorsfor years othercountries might seem to have been doing culturalcriticismalready,albeitwithout knowing it, perhapsbecause in these cases the influence of Marxism, though certainlywaning today,has neverthelessbeen a constant. To counteractthis uneven development and resist the processes of oblivion, whether active or involuntary,that might explain the newfangledappealof much of what we do today,one urgenttask in my eyes can only consist of an unremittingeffort to returnto those fragmented and often forgottendiscussions, such as the ones left unansweredand unfinishedby Revueltas,which in this case tackle the functionsof culture, ideology, and politics in the name of a certainMarx.
COGITO AND THE UNCONSCIOUS
The fundamentalquestion of course remains:Which Marx?At first, in the answer to this question may appearto be fairly straightforward the case of Revueltas. Dialectica de la conciencia would thus simply presentus with one more variationon the theme of humanismin the socalled "youngMarx,"the one associatedprincipallywith the Economic and Philosophic Manuscriptsof 1844, for whom the alienationand re-
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of our humanessence would constitutethe core principle appropriation of communism.Ratherthan seek to locate the source of the dialectic in the objectivity of nature, as Engels would attemptsomewhat desperately later on in his Anti-Duhring,Marx in his Manuscripts of 1844 startsout from, and ultimately promises what it would mean to return to, the humansubjectas a generic being, or species-being. Such would also be the beginning and end-all of the dialectic adoptedby Revueltas. In fact, as Jorge Fuentes Morua amply documents in his recent Jose Revueltas: una biografia intelectual, the author of Dialectica de la conciencia was one of the very first intellectuals, in any part of the world, to study and appreciatethe criticalimportanceof Marx'sManuwhich were alreadypublishedin Mexico by the end of 1937, in scripts^ a Spanishversionthatis now impossibleto find,underthe titleEconomia politica yfilosofia, translatedby two exiles from Nazi Germany: usedEconomia Revueltas politica filosofia;we havebeenable to studyhis annotations to thisbook.Theseglossesgive us inthatcalledthe author's attention with sightintothe questions interests of a These nature, philosophical greatestintensity. in his literary, whichweredeveloped politicalandtheoretical to different on alienation texts,referin substance perspectives of thehuman when confronted withthe andthe situation being of and development capitalism technology.6 FuentesMoruais thusableto follow up on his painstaking bibliographical reconstructionby reaffirmingthe centrality of the concepts of alienation and reification in both narrative and theoretical writings by Revueltas, tracingtheir influence back to the philosophical anthropology found in Marx's 1844 Manuscripts. To this readingof the presence of the earlyMarxin Revueltas,we all of know from our textbookshow to oppose the rigorousantihumanism the school of Althusser, Lacan, or Foucault. In fact, according to the authorof For Marx, the very notion of a dialectic of consciousness is devoid of all meaning."Forthereis no truecritiquewhich is not immanent and already real and material before it is conscious," Althusser writes on the occasion of his analysis of Brechtiantheater,to which he adds the following key principle: If we carry of thiscondition a littlefurther ouranalysis we can in that it find it Marx's fundamental is principle easily imposto containin sible for any formof ideologicalconsciousness an escapefromitself, its own internal dialectic, itself,through
50
no thereis no dialectic that, strictly speaking, of consciousness: dialecticof consciousness whichcouldreachrealityitself by virtueof its owncontradictions; in short, therecanbe no "phein theHegelian doesnot sense:forconsciousness nomenology" accedeto therealthrough butby its owninternal development, theradical of whatis otherthanitself.1 discovery In short, any dialectic would have to come to terms with the radical discovery of a certainunconscious as the real or materialother of consciousness. Insteadof the transparency of man as self-presentsubject, this alternativeversion of the materialistdialectic would posit the primordialopacity and externalityof certainsymbolic structures.Indeed, if we follow Lacan, this is precisely how we might define the unconscious: "Thisexteriorityof the symbolic with regardto man is the very notion of the unconscious."8 Cogito or the unconscious, the subject or the structure:In all their simplified glory, these now familiaralternativessum up what remains perhapsthe last really greatpolitico-philosophicalbattle in the twenti- a true example, moreover,of the Althusseriannotion that eth century In its most ex"philosophyrepresentsthe class struggle in theory."9 tremeandvitriolic form,this polemic quicklyturnedout to be a didlogo de sordos (dialogue of the deaf) opposing the "bourgeoishumanists" who followed the young Marx of the Manuscriptsof 1844 to the "dogmatic neo-Stalinists"who stuck to the mature and scientific Marx of Capital. Hegel, in this context, is often little more than a code-nameto denouncethe persistenceof humanistand idealist elements in the early trendis not wholly incompatiblewith a Marx, even if the antihumanist returnto Hegel of its own, providedthatwe abandonthe Phenomenology of the Spirit in favor of the Science of Logic. In France but also abroad,as in much of Latin America, Sartreand Althusser gave this polemic the impetus of their lifelong work and the auraof theirproper names. As Alain Badiou writes: of politicsareclear, it is thephilosopher's Whenthemediations of a foundation. to subsume themin the direction imperative in thismatter as Thelastdebate thetenants of liberty, opposed reflective to thetenants of thestructure, founding transparency, asprescription of a regime Sartre Althusser: of causality. against thismeant,atbottom, the Causeagainst the cause.10 Therewould seem to be little doubt as to where exactly in this debate, or on which side, we should place Revueltas, since he has nothing but
51
scorn for Althusser while he constantly expresses his admirationfor Sartre.In reality,however, things are not as straightforward and clearcut as they appearat first sight. In a lucid preface to Dialectica de la conciencia, to be sure, Henri Lefebvre draws our attentionto this very debateregardingthe foundation or groundof the dialectic. He concludes by highlightingthe originality of the answer given by Revueltas: "FromEngels to Revueltas, there occurs not only a change in perspective and meaning but also a polar inversion.Insteadof being encounteredin the object (nature),the foundationof the dialectic is discovered in the subject'41 This conclusion would seem to confirmthe initial suspicion aboutthe understanding of the dialectic in the traditionalhumanist terms of liberty, conof the self. Lefebvre,however,continues sciousness,andthe transparency his remarksby immediately insisting on the subject's internalcontradictions: Revueltas showsthatthisis not an effectof language, a disorder of discourse, a residualabsurdity a but, on the contrary, or betteryet, a concatenation of situations, inherent situation, in thesubjectas such:by reasonof the factthatit is nota substance(as is the case forCartesians) nora result(as is the case forvulgar materialists andnaturalists) buta specificactivity as well as a complexandcontradictory knotof relations to "the other,"of initiatives,memory,adhesionto the presentand forthetimeto come.12 projects of the dialectic Clearlymuch more is involved in this understanding thaneithera mere change in perspectiveor, even, an inversionbetween substanceand subject. In fact, the subject's consciousness, reason, or self-presence is always situatedin tense contradictionwith its internal other:the unconscious,unreason,or negativity.This contradictory unity is precisely what defines the dialectic, as opposed to a merely logical of polaropposites in an inertrelationof mutualexternalunderstanding or ity antinomy."Revueltas shows the contradictions'in the act' according to how they operatein consciousness,"Lefebvre adds, before hinting at a surprising family resemblance in this regard between Revueltas and the work of certain members of the FrankfurtSchool: "At certainmoments Revueltas' quest comes close to Adorno's 'negative dialectics.' Most often he distances himself from it, but along a path that leads in the same direction."13 Following this useful lead, I want to examine in more detail where this path actually takes us. But, ratherthan seeking an approximationwith Adorno, in the end I will
52
suggest that the posthumouswritings of Revueltas in fact show more elective affinities with the thoughtof WalterBenjamin. In any event, instead of accepting the familiar schemes with which intellectualhistorianstryto pigeonholewhatthey often call "thethought of '68, '"14 we should come to grasphow subject and structurestandto each otherin a relationof antagonisticarticulation throughthe scission or separation of each one of the two terms. Thus, if among later Althusserianssuch as Badiou, the systematicformalizationof the structureundercertainconditions,which he calls events, pinpointsa symptomatic blindness, or incompleteness, the presence of which already presupposesthe inscriptionof a subject,then conversely we can expect to find remnantsof the opacity of the structure,or what Sartrewould have called elements of the practico-inert,in the midst of the subject's efforts at reaching consciousness accordingto Revueltas. Hegel himself, in fact, alreadyhinted at this possibility to see the first role of the subject, of spirit or of the I, not as a schoolbook example of synthesis and sublationbut as the power to split reality into the real and the unreal, the power to sunderthe concrete accordingto the actual and the non-actual,which is but anotherway of expressingthe force of the other of consciousness, of death even, within consciousness itself. "Forit is only because the concretedoes divide itself, and make itself into something non-actual,thatit is self-moving. The activity of separationis the the most astonishingand mightiest power and work of understanding, of powers, or ratherthe absolutepower,"Hegel famously wrote in his preface to the Phenomenologyof Spirit:
holds its The circlethatremainsself-enclosedand,like substance, moments together,is an immediaterelationship,one therefore which has nothing astonishingabout it. But that an accident as such, detachedfromwhat circumscribes it, what is boundand is actualonly in its context with others,should attainan existence - this is the tremendous of its own anda separate freedom power of the negative; it is the energy of thought,of the pure "I."15
Ratherthanopposing subjectand substanceas two self-enclosed circles without intersection,as happens in common textbook versions of the the real task of the opposition between humanism and structuralism, dialectic thereforemust consist in coming to grips with the articulation of the two throughthe internaldivision of their oneness. For Revueltas, consciousness always follows a logic of uneven development and only on rareoccasions reaches moments of identity,or near identity,with the real. There is always a lag, a gap, or an anachro-
53
nism, leading to spectralor fantasmaticstructuresof social consciousness. In a text on "The Present Significance of the Russian October Revolution,"also published in Dialectica de la conciencia, Revueltas repeatedlyinsists on this unevenness:
Whatis especially important is to notice thatsuch relations(between rationalconsciousness andpraxis) are uneven and they act in relationsof identity only in determinatemomentsof historical development {momentswhich, in their most elevated expression, can be counted in years). But even such identity is never absolute, since in every case, in orderto act upon praxis (and convert itself into praxis), rationalconsciousness is mediated by ideology or ideologies.16 More often than not, reason and ideology are intertwined; in order to become practical, all truths must pass through a moment of ideology. At the same time, there are also contradictions, not just between consciousness and social being or practice, but within consciousness as such, due to the persistence of forms of division, hierarchy, and alienation within reason. In several texts from Mexico 68, this process is described in terms of a divide, or a dialectical split, between consciousness, or conciencia, and knowledge, or conocimiento. "Consciousness knows itself in the act but it ignores the nature of the known. This fact carries with it the insertion of a contradiction between consciousness and knowledge," Revueltas writes, to which he adds a long explanation: The question turns out to be not so simple when we approach the knowledge of consciousness from the point of view of its internal nature, as constant mobility and transformation,and andalienation. As mobilityandtransexternally,as contradiction is consciousness formation, always unhappywith what knowlit with. This edge provides changes what it knows (it discovers new data and reveals what is hidden beneath its new objectivity) but it also transformsconsciousness itself and submitsit to the anxiety of absolute non-knowledge, to the extreme point where a given impotencecould turnit into an unrealconsciousness. As for the external,its externalization, consciousness is in itself and in its other, in the form of religion, civil society, the State,as consciousnessalienatedfromitself thatno longerknows itself, in this exteriorization,as individualand free consciousness of itself. The State,religion,civil society arethe consciousness of itself of the others, accumulatedthroughouttime by historicalknowledge.17
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Reason here has to come to grips with its intrinsic other. In fact, its concretemovement is nothing but the process of its own self-splitting. Far from singing the stately glories of spiritas self-consciousness fully coming into its own, the dialectic tells the story of this ongoing scission between consciousness and knowledge, as well as between cogito and the unconscious. Such a story, which makes for an almost impossible narration, always involves the risk of absolutenon-knowledge,irretrievable anxiety,or downrightmadness. Finally, one importantcorollaryof this internallydivided natureof consciousness is that, just as there lies a rational kernel even within ideology, revolutionarythought can also become alienated into mere ideology, which it always carrieswith it as a shadow.At that moment, the split natureof all elements of the dialectic is erased in favor of a false purity:ideology without reason, or revolutionaryreason without the truthof practice. reachesa pointwhere,by Everyideology,without exception, virtue of itsproper nature as ideology, it mustrenounce allcritithat the it avail itself "rational kernel" of which could cism, is, in the periodsof revolutionary its as conditions ascent,given consciousness alienated ontoa concrete praxis.18 For Revueltas, this last moment is precisely the one that defines the crisis of Marxismafter the death of Lenin, and even more so after the watershedyear of 1927, when the living ghost of Trotskystartsto wander in exile throughmuch of Europe,before meeting his untimelydeath in Mexico. It is also the moment, however, when ideology loses its rational kernel,andthe roadis opened for a maddeningand suicidalexasto become nuclear, perationof the conflict, which increasinglythreatens between the United States and the Soviet Union. Marxism in Crisis Indeed, anotherway of addressingthe complex question of how to situatethis writer'stheoreticalwork would be to drawout all the consequences of the otherwise unsurprisingfact that for Revueltas, by the early seventies, Marxism is caught in a deep crisis. In this sense, too, Revueltas is much closer to Althusser than either one of them, or, for thatmatter,any of theircritics, would be willing to admit."Marxin his the headingunderwhich Althusserin the seventies collected Limits,"19 his of many thoughts that were to be published only after his death,
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could thus very well serve as a subtitle for the posthumousDialectica de la conciencia as well. Revueltas is certainly not proposing an uncriticalreturnto some pristineorthodoxyor hidden doctrinalkernel of the early Marx. The aim is rathermore contorted,as can be gleaned from the proposedplan of study that is includedin the latterhalf of the book by way of framingits impressiverangeof notes, quotes, and interpretive glosses, most of them written between 1968 and 1971 in the Lecumberri prison of Mexico City. If Revueltas seeks to come to terms with the fundamentalconcepts of alienation, consciousness, and the philosophy of praxis implied in the Manuscriptsof the young Marx, this is primarilyintendedto provide himself with the means to understandthe dogmatic and revisionist deformationsof the dialectic in the latter half of the twentieth century, at the hands of so-called vulgar, acritical, or non-reflective Marxism. Marx's theory of alienation and ideology thus serves as a criticaltool with which to analyze, and hopefully undo the effects of, the ideological alienationof Marxismitself. Along this complex trajectoryRevueltas finds a symptomaticturning point precisely in the split between the early Marxand otherYoung Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach,or Arnold Ruge. As he writes in his "GeneralPlan of Study": It is a question of leadingthisinvestigation toward a clarificationof thecurrent crisisof Marxism. Thepointof departure for is situated at the moment of transition this investigation when Marxism discerns itself as such,separating itself fromcritical the latter to societyandits economiphilosophy by extending cal foundations.20 In the operationswith which criticalphilosophybecomes first dialectical and then materialist,a logic of the social is containedthat,once it is cut off from the concrete understandingof society as a contradictory totality,might paradoxicallyserve to explain the principles of its very own deformation.Revueltas finds this process at work not only in the official doctrineof Stalinism or in the inertiaof many Soviet-oriented Partiesbut also in the ideologicalradicalismof anothertypiCommunist cal productof the sixties, the ultraleftist groups,orgrupusculos,throughout much of Europeand LatinAmerica. One of the originally planned titles for the main text in Dialectica de la conciencia hintedprecisely at this secondaryaspect of the crisis of Marxism:"Lalocura brujulardel
marxismoen Mexico (ensayo ontologico sobre los grupusculos

marxistas)"(TheAimlessness of Mexican Marxism[OntologicalEssay
56
on Marxist SplinterGroups]).21 This ambitiousplan to arriveat a dialecticalontologyof groupformations, which is muchindebtedto Sartre's projectin his own unfinishedCritiqueof Dialectical Reason, obviously did not come to full fruition in Revueltas's notes for Dialectica de la conciencia. The readerwill find, however, long passages in which the internalcrisis of criticalconsciousness, as explainedthroughthe notion of thought'sself-alienationand compass madness, is tied to the proliferationof extreme left-wing groups, all proclaimingtheir fidelity to a hyperideologicalform of Marxism. Let us look in more detail at a brief instance of this self-reflexive critiqueof Marxism.As a startingpoint, the theoreticalactivity of consciousness can be situatedon two levels, or as two kinds of act: Toputthisin themostgeneral functions way,theory by wayof twoactsthatbelongto thesameprocessof knowledge. First,in it with itself as abstract thosewho thinktheoryandconfront as praxis, whenit adequately, and,second,concretely, thought; thatis, in waysconsistent withitself,transforms theobject proposedto it.22 Wheneverthis regime of consistency is interrupted, the innernecessity of the concept, from being a moving restlessness, turnsinto the baleful objectivity of the practico-inert.For Revueltas, it is in this gap, in this "no man's land"between a sequence of thought and its logical consequences, that the "false consciousness"of so-called vulgar or acritical Marxismfinds its niche. Thus, he continuesin a lengthy passage thatis worth quotingextensively, if for no otherreasonthanto give a sense of the idiosyncraticstyle of Revueltas:
The internal contradictionsof knowledge that are unresolved (that do not resolve themselves) in their immediatebecoming, in different ways, give way to certain inevitable fissures between a proposed (that is, not yet given) sequence and its consequence within the process, which establishes a provisionally empty space, a kind of "no man's land,"which interposesitself between the prefiguration of the concept andthe objective realthat has not been conceptualized.Thus, in a true act of ity yet "falseconsciousness"with of the of usurpation rights rationality, its hosts occupies this "no man's land" of knowledge and decrees on it its absolute dogmatic sovereignty.Such is the point where, under the protection of said sovereignty, this concrete self-sufficient form of being flourishes, self-absorbedand im-
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permeableto questioning, that representsthe false consciousness of vulgar Marxism.Hence, the examinationof contradictions will allow us to clarify the fact- hidden underneathall - that practice without kinds of demagogic and leftist phrases praxis is nothing but compass madness, a loss of the magnetic pole of knowledge- which defines, however, in essence, the activity of "Marxist"groupuscles and of vulgar Marxism as a whole, from which fatally follows an objective deformationof the revolutionaryprocesses, with the correlativesuccession of the greathistoricaldefeats sufferedby the workingclass during the last decades in Mexico.23
We can thus observe how it is througha dialecticaltheory of the inherent contradictionsbetween consciousness and its other, as well as of into opposites, that Revueltas seeks to reconstruct their transformation the crisis of Marxismbased on his own readingsof Marxfrom the time of the latter's split with the Young Hegelians. In the Ban of the Dialectic Everythingin this context ultimately depends on our understanding of what is meantby dialecticalthinking."Thepoint is to be clear about the subjectof the dialectic,"Badiou also writes:"Thedialecticityof the dialectic consists precisely in having a conceptualhistory and in dividing the Hegelian matrixto the point where it turnsout to be essentially a doctrine of the event, and not the guided adventureof the spirit.A Thus, when Revueltas writes to his politics, ratherthan a history."24 Andrea:"Wemust returnto Hegel's Phenomenology,whether daughter or when he writes to her in a differentletter:"We we want to or not,"25 have to go back openly to Hegel, to the young Marx and to political economy 'beyond' Capital,that is to say, to the ignored' Marxism,the Marxism that was bracketed for over fifty years and not only by the aim is still to come to a concreteunderstanding of the Stalinism,"26 notion of the dialectic: "All the contradictionsof Marxism in Mexico can be summed up as resistance to, and ignorance of, the dialectic."27 of the dialectic. We are still bannedfrom a properunderstanding Right from the beginning of Dialectica de la conciencia, Revueltas may very well have seemed to echo Sartre'sposition, in the latter's polemic with Heidegger,that it is above all a questionof man, that is, a questionnot of being but of the humanbeing. In his case, however, the affirmation"Antetodo se trata de la cuestion hombre"(Morethanany-
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thing it's a question of Man) is immediately followed by the question "Pero, enfin, ique es el hombre?"(But, in the end, what is Man?), to which the author of the "Theses on Feuerbach"is allowed to reply: "KarlMarxproposesto us an illuminatinganswer.'Man is the world of men,' he says. The world of humanbeings, in other words, society, its modes of production,religion, the State: a changing world which has never been the same throughoutits history."28 It is at this point thatthe otherwisetraditional,humanist,or idealist image of Hegel's method is displaced by the search for a materialistdialectic of society as a concrete and contradictory totality.How, then, can we come to know this unknowable apparently totalitythatconstitutesthe properobjectof dialectical reason? Revueltas does not answer this last question in any manner.Instead,in the remainingpages of the full draft straightforward of his essay, he weaves the discussion in and out of three examples, which he prefersto call "cognitiveanecdotes," derivedrespectivelyfrom the postal system, from archaeology,and from architecture. The essential determination of society as an object of thoughtcannot be discernedin the immediateknowledgeof the senses: "Youshouldnot look for it in the direct and immediatereportof the senses but in a vast andcomplexset of internal relationsandcorrelations."29 Thismuchlarger horizon, however, remainsas invisible or unknowableto our everyday thoughtsand habits as the complete functioningof the postal system is for the individualwho almost unawaresdrops off a letter in the mail:
Our individualhas written a letter,he has "worked"on it, but he ignores the fact thatthis whole vast set of activities (writing, sealing the letter,buying stamps and attachingthem, introducing the letterin the dropoffbox) is insertedin a mass of human work that is common, general, total, constant, active, past, present, and historical in the most plastic sense of the word, this invisible matterin which the lines of communicationare drawn and draw themselves, from the time when one of them discovered himself in "the others"and succeeded in inventing and emitting the first "signs of identity,"a first scream, a first smoke signal, a first letter.The postal system reveals nothingto our individual,even though it allows him at least to be this human being in whom he does not yet perceive himself, but in whom he no doubt will one day come to perceive himself no sooner than he assumes consciousness of it.30
WhatRevueltasis afterin this as well as in the othertwo anecdotesis not so much an orthodox,Lukacsianor Kosikian,totality as the identi-
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cal subject-objectof history,but rathersomethingmore along the lines of a cognitive map, or a situationalunderstanding of the system, as defined in more recent years by FredricJameson. If now we turnto the second case, when an archaeologistdecides to employ a group of local bricklayersto help him out with the task of digging up the objects on his site, a split immediately sets apartthe manual labor of the diggers from the larger cultural and intellectual knowledge regardingthe objects of their labor.The diggers would thus be deprived of the consciousness involved in their very own labor. Revueltasinsists, however,in this case even more so thanwith the brief example of the letterwriter,that these bricklayersnow turnedinto anthropologicallaborers,too, areperhapson the verge of a special kind of consciousness:
Nevertheless, what happenedto them in the passage from one job to the other has an extraordinary meaning. The "world of men" placed them socially as "anthropological laborers,"in a situation where they were "on the verge of realizing a true humanform of labor,"on the verge of convertingthemselves into real humanbeings andnot only because of the fact- which they will have commentedupon with mockingjoy- of having served for some days for this "crazyguy" who contractedthem for a strangeand incomprehensibleactivity, and paid them, to boot, with an unusual generosity. They were "on the verge," yes, but this "on the verge" stayed there, suspended, without resolving itself, like a fantasmaticemanationabove the anthropological work that disappeared,in the same way that the vagrant flames of fuegos fatuos float over the graves of a cemetery. However, such being "on the verge" repeats itself and remainsin the labor of bricklayingto which they returned,because in a certain sense and in a new but essential form, they continueto be "anthropologists" on theirjob as house builders.31
Nothing seems to be ever lost for good when it comes to the consciousness of humanwork. For the most part,however, even while being perthe common mass of generic humanlaborvanishes haps indestructible, intothe depthsof a spectralor fantasmatic or evaporates type of memory, a collective yet transhistorical memorythatis closer to the unconscious thanto consciousness, and in which experiences are accumulated,preserved, and repeatedfrom times immemorial,until those raremoments when, as in a suddenact of awakening,they reenterthe field of vision. Freudand Lacanhad alreadyinsisted on the indestructible natureof the unconscious.The memoryof desire is unlike any otherform or kind
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of memory,precisely because of the fact that nothing is ever forgotten by desire. Lacanthus recalls thatFreud'sdiscovery is very much bound up with the discovery of "this inextinguishabledurationof desire, a feature which is not the least paradoxicalone of the unconscious, as Freudnever tired of insisting."32 For Lacan, of course, the locus of this kind of is other than a certain automatismof none peculiar memory languageitself. It is inscribedin traces, archives,bodies, and traditions as in a machine-likestructure,or on a magical writing pad:
Thereis no otherway of conceiving the indestructibility of unconscious desire- in the absence of a need which, when forbidden satisfaction, does not sicken and die, even if it means the destructionof the organismitself. It is in a memory,comparable to what is called by that name in our modern thinkingmachines (which are in turnbased on an electronic realization of the composition of signification), it is in this sort of memory that is found the chain that insists on reproducingitself in the transference,and which is the chain of dead desire.33
Freud himself had suggested in Totemand Taboo and again, even more clearly, in Moses and Monotheism,that the latency and partial returnof repressedmaterialsbe seen as phenomenacharacteristic not only of the life of the individualbut of the history of the humanspecies as well. Speakingof the difference,or gap, between the official history of Moses and the oral tradition,Freud suggests that what is forgotten nonetheless survives elsewhere: "Whathas been deleted or altered in the writtenversion might quite well have been preserveduninjuredin the tradition."34 There are thus permanenttraces of this history that remain, even if for the most partthey were wardedoff and forgotten.Here Freudadvancesone of his boldest claims: "I hold thatthe concordance between the individual and the mass is in this point almost complete. The masses, too, retainan impressionof the past in unconsciousmemory traces."35 Memory here becomes both onto- and phylogenetic. In fact, the notion of the returnof the repressedleads the psychoanalystto the surprisingconclusion thatif the idea of a collective unconsciousmakes any sense at all, it is only because the unconscious, understoodin this way, is always alreadycollective to begin with:
The term "repressed"is here used not in its technical sense. Here I mean somethingpast, vanished,and overcome in the life of a people, which I ventureto treat as equivalentto repressed material in the mental life of the individual. In what psycho-
HEGEL IN MEXICO / bOSTEELS
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logical form the past existed during its period of darknesswe cannotas yet tell. It is not easy to translatethe concepts of individual psychology into mass psychology, and I do not think that much is to be gained by introducingthe concept of a "collective" unconscious- the content of the unconscious is collective anyhow, a generalpossession of mankind.36
unconsciousmemory, FreudandLacan'snotionof an inextinguishable the of insurmountable appearance conceptualdistances, is furdespite thermorenot unrelatedto the notion of a species-like memory that acquiresalmost cosmic dimensionsin the writings of HenriBergson and, afterhim, with Gilles Deleuze. This is the memory of an all-embracing - a realm that is neitherreal nor past, of life itself as pure recollection merelypossible but actuallyvirtual,andvirtuallyactual,at all times. As Deleuze explains:
What Bergson calls "purerecollection" has no psychological existence. This is why it is called virtual, inactive, and unconscious. All these words are dangerous,in particular,the word from "unconscious" which, since Freud,has become inseparable an especially effective and active psychological existence. We must nevertheless be clear at this point that Bergson does not use the word "unconscious"to denote a psychological reality outside consciousness, but to denote a nonpsychological reality- being as it is in itself.37
This is memory not just as the agency of language, not even as the unwrittenand obscure record of the human species, but directly as a of being, memory as immemorialontology. structure WhatRevueltasaddsto this notion of an unconscious,indestructible, andquasi ontological memoryis the political questionof its rudeawakening. He is certainlynot the only one in the period of the late sixties and early seventies to tackle the possibility of a collective popular memory. In his testimonial novel L'Etabli (The Assembly Line), the FrenchMaoist RobertLinhartalso writes in the end: "Nothingis lost, nothing is forgottenin the indefinitely mixed memory of the working class. Otherstrikes,othercommittees,otheracts will find inspirationin - as well as in ours, the trace of which I will laterdiscover, past strikes mixed up with so many others. . . ,"38 Revueltas, though, is precisely in the recoveryof thesetraces,in theirfantasmatic interested reinscription Whathappens,in otherwords, with the consciousor even resurrection. ness thatthe bricklayersin his second anecdotewere "on the verge"of
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acquiring?Once this spectralconsciousness sinks back into the depths of a latent collective unconscious, where it will remain and insist as a virtualmemory of the humanspecies, how can such remnantsbe made to reemerge,by what kind of act- political or theoretical? Before we turnto the theory of the act, however, we must consider how, when the samebricklayerspartakein an architect'sprojectto build a privatehome, which is then sold to the homeowner,a supplementary alienationof humanwork takes place in the selling of propertyand the juridicalpassage of the house fromthe handsof the bricklayers,through the architect'splans, to the homeowner's enjoyment.Simplistic as this third and final cognitive anecdote may seem, we should nevertheless not ignore the powerful effects of alienation,here in the sense of separationand subtraction,on the generalreserve of humanlabor: Thisalienation, thethingfromthe object(makwhichsunders - at the roots - afing it intoa thingwithout object),radically fects the subjectandstripshim of his essence.Placedbefore thesubtraction of his objectintothething,he doesnotceaseto in some will be present possesstheobject(giventhattheobject in front andappears of thatstripped place),buthe leadsit astray of mereamnesia, consciousas empty thing... in thecondition ness, hiddenfromhis genericI, exactlyas if one saidthatan individual forgotwherehis or herhouseis.39 For Revueltas, all architecture is in fact a preemptedform of archaeolthe task of critical reason consists precisely in an operation ogy. Indeed, similar to the uncovering of an archaeologylatent within every architecturalstructure. As Revueltaswrites in one of his more ominous passages: "Archaewill disappear," not because of ology states: this piece of architecture some vague Heracliteanawarenessof the flow of time behindthe rapid succession of architectural styles and fashions, "butbecause archaeology as such consists in thinking about and questioning (in consciousness) the how andwhy of the contradictions by virtueof whose antagonisms culturesand civilizations disappear."40 In this and otherpassages fromDialectica de la conciencia, Revueltascomes extremelyclose to a definition of dialectical and historicalmaterialismthat is similarto the - the refuse and deone found in the fragmentsand annotatedremains bris of modernity,as it were- takenup and reusedby WalterBenjamin in his unfinished TheArcadesProject. "Herewe are of course not talking about archaeology as a scientific discipline," Revueltas explains, and he adds:
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We are referring,rather,to an archaeologyunderstoodas a particular form of historical consciousness, in the same sense as when we talked aboutarchitecture. Archaeology,then, appears as a rethinking,as the repetitionin consciousness of past architectures (culturalformationsand so on), and these, in turn, as determinateforms of the totality of a historical consciousness in movement, which is nothing but the movement of its selfdestruction.41
If the task of theoryis revealedin the principlethatall architecture is in an anticipated this must be understood the sense archaeology, rigorous of coming to know the past laborthat vanished or disappearedinto the monumentalpresence of the present. History, seen in this dialectical sense, is not an accumulationof culturalriches so much as the largescale vanishing of misery into the unconscious of humanity'sconstituAs Revueltas writes: tive, generic, and originaryprehistory.
In this way, as self-historicizationwithout rest (which never reachesquietude),historyis a constantrepetitionof itself in the continuous mind of human beings, in their generic mind and - the unconscious that is first ahistorical unconscious memory andthenhistoricaland social- (not in the vulgarsense in which one says "historyrepeatsitself," but as presence produced,and producingitself, within the limits of humaneternity),the natural history of man that goes back over itself without end.42
How, then, does humanityescape from the almost mystical slumber of its generalintellect and unconscious memory?Here, both Revueltas andBenjamin,like so many otherWesternMarxists,seem to have been inspiredby a statementof principlethatappearsin a letterfromMarxto Arnold Ruge. "Ourelection cry must be: Reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through the analysis of mystical consciousness that is unclear to itself, whether it appearsin a religious or a political form,"Marxhadwrittento his friendandfellow YoungHegelian:"Then people will see thatthe world has long possessed the dreamof a thingandthatit only needs to possess the consciousness of this thing in order Benjamin would turn this election cry into the really to possess it."43 cornerstoneof his dialectical method as a materialisthistorian. "The realizationof dreamelements in the course of waking up is the canonof dialectics. It is paradigmaticfor the thinkerand binding for the historian,"Benjaminwrites in one of his notebooksfor TheArcadesProject, in which he also wonders:"Isawakeningperhapsthe synthesisof dream
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Then consciousness(as thesis) andwakingconsciousness(as antithesis)? the moment of awakeningwould be identical with the 'now of recog- face."44 - surrealist Is this nizability,'in which things put on theirtrue view of awakening,this "now of recognizability"as "a supremelydialectical point of rupture" or surrealist"flash,"not also reminiscentof the momentwhen consciousness suddenlyis "on the verge"of forming itself, "onthe verge"of burstinginto our field of visibility, accordingto Revueltas?What Revueltas is afterin his "cognitive anecdotes"would be an experienceakin to the formationof "dialecticalimages"for Benjamin:
In the dialectical image, what has been within a particularepoch is always, simultaneously,"what has been from time immemorial."As such, however, it is manifest, on each occasion, only to a quite specific epoch- namely, the one in which humanity,rubbingits eyes, recognizes just this particulardream image as such. It is at this moment that the historiantakes up, with regardto that image, the task of dreaminterpretation.45
As for the imminence of this act, an act which is never fully presentto the mind but ratherlurksbehind the scene as somethingthat is always on the verge of, or on the point of, occurring,this too is seen as a decisive aspect of the dialectical method:
Still to be established is the connection between presence of mind and the "method"of dialectical materialism.It's not just that one will always be able to detect a dialectical process in presence of mind, regardedas one of the highest forms of appropriatebehavior.What is even more decisive is that the dialectician cannot look on history as anything other than a constellation of dangerswhich he is always, as he follows its development in his thought,on the point of averting.46
of a The task of criticalreason,then, is much closer to the interpretation dreamthan to a simple exercise of the cogito's presence of mind and nearlydivine self-consciousness.Revueltas,like Benjamin,finally proposes to see the activity of thoughtas a secular,or profaneillumination: - in virtueas much as in "Consciousness,freedandbaredof all divinity vice- puts things on their feet that were standingon their head, it illuminatesthem, and it profanesthem."47
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"Hegel and I": Toward a Theory of the Act In a remarkablyenigmatic short story, "Hegel ," published in 1973 as the planned onset for a futurenovel on the same subject that would never see the light, Revueltasreturnsonce more to this notion of the profane illuminationthat takes place whenever an emergent consciousness is on the verge of breakingthroughthe monumentalobliterationof generic humanmemory and work. On this occasion, he describes such moments in terms of "acts,"that is, truly "profoundacts," which completely change the seemingly eternalparadigmsof existing knowledge in light of a truththat is both historical and yet part of an the conimmemorialpast that runs through,and sometimes interrupts, tinuumof humanhistory. Hegel, in the story,is the nicknamefor a prisoner,a paraplegicwho from his wheelchair exchanges anecdotes and philosophical musings with his cellmate, a thinly disguised alter ego of Revueltas himself. "It is a questioning of Hegelian philosophy, referredto the prison," the who arrivesin prison is a authorexplains in an interview:"A character bankrobbercalled Hegel because he robbed a bank on Hegel Street. takes up the posiEveryone calls him Hegel. From there the narrator tions of Hegel in order to demonstratethat the prison is the State."48 Fromthe conversationswith this Hegel, or Jeguel, as the story insists is the correctMexican pronunciation,we obtain not only a theory of the State as a prison-likepanopticonbut also the outline for a provocative theory of the act, to be more precise, a theory of the theoreticalact- of what it means to reach consciousness in the act of theory. Trueacts have no witnesses in history;in other words, there are no testimonies of the truly profound acts of consciousness. Rather,they belong to the silent reserve of an unconscious and immemorialrecollection, the memory of that which has not taken place. "Theprofound to jump up fromthe bottom of act lies within you, lurkingandprepared that of from the non-event,"Hegel says, andthe memory yourmemory: approves: anonymousnarrator
He's right: our acts, our profound acts as he says, constitute thatpartof memorythatdoes not acceptremembering, forwhich it does not matterwhethertherearewitnesses or not. Nobody is witness to nobody and nothing, each one carrieshis or her own recollection of the unseen, or the unheard-of,without testimonies.49
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Withoutmemory, without testimony, unwitnessed yet recordedin the blank pages of a collective unconscious, profoundacts are those acts that define not only a subject's emergent consciousness but this very subjectas well. Subjectsare local instancesof such acts. "You,"or "I," in this version of 'Hegel and I," are but the result of the profoundacts of history, whether in 1968 or in 1917, in 1905 or in 1871, acts that forever will have changed the conditions of politics in history.This is not a blind voluntaristicaccountof the subject'scapacityfor action and intervention,since it is not the subjectbut the act that is first. The act is not our own doing so much as it is us who are the result, or the local instance, of the act. In Hegel's words:
Thus, insofar as you are here (I mean, here in prison or wherever you are, it doesn't matter),insofar as you stand in and are a certain site, you have something to do with this act. It is inscribed in your ancient memory, in the strangestpart of your memory, in your estranged memory, unsaid and unwritten, unthought,never felt, which is that which moves you in the directionof such an act. So strangethat it is a memorywithout language,lacking all propersigns, a memorythathas to find its own way by means of the most unexpectedof all means. Thus, this memoryrepeats,without ourbeing awareof it, all the frustrations prior to its occurrence, until it succeeds in luckying againuponthe originalprofoundactwhich, for thisreasonalone, is yours. But only for this reason, because it is yours without belonging to you. The opposite is the case: you arethe one who belongs to the act, by which, in the end, you cease to belong to yourself.50
Revueltas,farfromproposingtheoryas the grey act of self-consciousness, respondsto the events of 1968 with the demandfor a theoryof the act thatwould be able to accountfor the process by which the frustrated - acts of rebellion such as the acts of past revolutions and uprisings railworkers'strikeof 1958- arewoken up fromtheirslumberand,from being unconsciousrecollections of the non-event,breakout of the shell of available knowledge in order to produce the categories for an unheard-of truth.As a prolonged theoretical act, the events themselves cannotbe seized without sacrificingtheir very nature,unless the interpretive frameworkitself is attunedto the eventfulnessof the events. To his friends and fellow militants of May 1968 in France, for example, Revueltas sends a public letter throughour postal system with the following message: "Yourmassive action, which immediatelyturns into
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historicalpraxis, from the first moment on, possesses the peculiarnature of being at the same time a greattheoreticalleap, a radicalsubversion of the theory mediated, deformed, fetishized by the epigones of This radical subversionmust be theorizedwithout losing its Stalin."51 subversivenessin the no man's land of a theorywithoutpractice.Writprison, Revueltas asks nothing less ing from his cell in the Lecumberri from his fellow Mexicans. "I believe," he writes against all odds in 1976 in a collection of essays aboutthe massacrein Tlatelolco, "thatthe experience of 1968 is a highly positive one, and one that will bring enormous benefits, provided that we know how to theorize the pheIt is this attemptat theory,which is anythingbut grey, or nomenon."52 which is grey in a peculiarsense that does not exclude the rejuvenation of a truthbeyond all availableknowledge of what is, thatfromthe pages of Dialectica de la conciencia urges us to returnto the shadowy presence of Hegel in Mexico.
NOTES
* A first version of this paperwas presentedas a public lecture for the Department of RomanceLanguagesat the University of Michigan,Ann Arbor(February13, 2004). I would like to thankthe audience for their valuable comments and contributions.For the invitationto speak, special thanksgo to my dear friends CristinaMoreiras-Menor and GarethWilliams. All translationsfrom the novels of Revueltas are mine, unless otherwise noted. 1. Jose Revueltas,Mexico 68: Juventudy revolution, eds. AndreaRevueltas and Philippe Cheron(Mexico, DF: Era, 1978). It is Jose Emilio Pacheco who restitutesthe complete version of Goethe's phrase, in his prologue "Revueltas el arbol de oro," in Las evocaciones requeridas (Memorias, diarios, correspondencia) , eds. Andrea Revueltas and Philippe Cheron (Mexico, DF: Era, 1987), 11-12. Pacheco also expresses his surpriseat finding a predilection for this phrase in "the novelist with the most theoreticalmentalitythat ever existed" (11). 2. V. I. Lenin, The State and Revolution, trans. Robert Service (London: Penguin, 1992), 111. 3. See, for example, Ernesto "Che"Guevara,Obra revolucionaria, ed. Roberto FernandezRetamar(Mexico, DF: Era, 1963), 507; or Mao Tsetung,Five Essays on Philosophy (Peking: Foreign LanguagesPress), 58. 4. G. W. F. Hegel, Philosophy of Right, trans. S. W. Dyde (Kitchener:Batoche Books, 2001), 20. We might also think of Michel Foucault when he writes: "GenealIt operateson a field of entangled ogy is grey, meticulous, and patiently documentary. and confused parchments,on documents that have been scratchedover and recopied in Language, Counter-memory, Pracmanytimes,"in "Nietzsche,Genealogy,History," tice. SelectedEssays andInterviewsbyMichelFoucault,ed. DonaldF. Bouchard(Ithaca: Cornell University Press, 1977), 139. My thanks to Rodrigo Mier for bringing these colorful resonances to my attention.
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5. Revueltas quoted by Andrea Revueltas, "Aproximacionesa la obra teoricopolitica de Jose Revueltas,"in Revueltas en la mira (Mexico, DF: UAM/Molinos de Viento, 1984), 98 (note 2). Ernst Bloch's original comment can be found in Sujetoobjeto. El pensamiento de Hegel, trans. Wenceslao Roces et al. (Mexico, DF: Fondo de CulturaEconomica, 1983), 23. 6. JorgeFuentesMorua,Jose Revueltas. Una biografia intelectual (Mexico, DF: UAM Iztapalapa/Miguel Angel Porrua,2001), 157. 7. Louis Althusser,For Marx, trans. Ben Brewster (London:Verso, 1969), 143. 8. JacquesLacan,"Situationde la psychanalyse en 1956," in Ecrits (Paris:Seuil, 1966), 469. This text is not included in the selected writings translatedinto English. 9. Louis Althusser,Lenin and Philosophy and OtherEssays, trans.Ben Brewster (New York:Monthly Review Press, 1971), 18. 10. Alain Badiou, Peut-on penser lapolitique? (Paris: Seuil, 1985), 10. 11. Henri Lefebvre, "Prologo," in Jose Revueltas, Dialectica de la conciencia, eds. AndreaRevueltas and Philippe Cheron(Mexico, DF: Era, 1982), 14. 12. Lefebvre, "Prologo,"14. 13. Lefebvre, "Prologo,"13-14. 14. Luc Ferry and Alain Renaut, French Philosophy of the Sixties: An Essay on trans.MarcH. S. Cattani(Amherst:University of MassachusettsPress, Antihumanism, 1990). 15. Hegel, Phenomenology of Spirit, trans.A. V. Miller (Oxford:Oxford University Press), 13-14. 16. Revueltas, Dialectica, 219. 17. Revueltas, Mexico 68, 115. 18. Revueltas, Dialectica, 225. 19. Althusser, "Marx dans ses limites (1978)," in Ecrits philosophiques et politiques, ed. Francois Matheron,vol. I (Paris: Stock/IMEC, 1994), 367-538. 20. Revueltas, Dialectica, 86. 21. Revueltas, Dialectica, 15. See also Jean-PaulSartre,Critique of Dialectical Reason,vol. I, Theoryof Practical Ensembles,trans.Alan SheridanSmith,ed. Jonathan Ree (London:Verso, 1976). 22. Revueltas, Dialectica, 19. 23. Revueltas,Dialectica, 22-23. Comparewith Lacan:"Wemight have foreseen the ways by which the imaginary,in order to rejoin the real, must find the no man s land that, by effacing their frontier,opens access to it," in "Situation,"464. 24. Badiou, Peut-on penser la politique, 84. 25. Revueltas, Cuestionamientose intenciones: ensayos, eds. Andrea Revueltas and Philippe Cheron,vol. II (Mexico, DF: Era, 1978), 252. 26. Revueltas, Las evocaciones requeridas,vol. Ill, 244. 27. Revueltas, Dialectica, 246 (note 4). 28. Revueltas, Dialectica, 25. See also Marx, "Theses on Feuerbach":"But the essence of man is no abstractioninherentin each single individual. In reality, it is the ensemble of the social relations"(Thesis 6). 29. Revueltas, Dialectica, 28. 30. Revueltas, Dialectica, 28. 3 1. Revueltas, Dialectica, 28. 32. Lacan, "Situation,"467.
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33. Lacan,"Agency of the Letterin the Unconscious,"in Ecrits:A Selection, trans. Alan Sheridan(New York:W. W. Norton, 1977), 167. 34. Sigmund Freud,Moses and Monotheism,trans. KatherineJones (New York: Vintage Books, 1939), 85. 35. Freud,Moses, 121. 36. Freud,Moses, 170. 37. Gilles Deleuze, Bergsonism, trans. Hugh Tomlinson and BarbaraHabberiam (New York:Zone Books, 1991), 55-56. When Deleuze in a later work describes the event as something by which this virtual memory is actualized and brought to the surface, he uses an image very similar to the untranslatable"fuegosfatuos" from Revueltas's anecdote: The event subsists in language,but it happensto things. Things andpropositions are less in a situationof radicalduality and more on the two sides of a frontier representedby sense. This frontier does not mingle or reunite them (for there is no more monism here than dualism); it is rathersomething along the line of an articulationof their difference: body/language. Comparingthe event to a mist rising over the prairie,we could say that this mist rises precisely at the frontier, at the juncture of things and propositions. Deleuze, Logic of Sense, trans. Mark Lester, with Charles Stivale, ed. ConstantinV. Boundas (New York:ColumbiaUniversity Press, 1990), 24. 38. RobertLinhart,L'Etabli (Paris:Minuit, 1978), 132. 39. Revueltas, Dialectica, 40-41 . 40. Revueltas, Dialectica, 35-36. 41. Revueltas, Dialectica, 36. 42. Revueltas, Dialectica, 24-25. 43. Marx quoted in WalterBenjamin, TheArcades Project, trans.HowardEiland andKevin McLaughlin,ed. Rolf Tiedemann(Cambridge:BelknapPress/Harvard University Press, 1999), 467. 44. Benjamin,Arcades, 464, 364. 45. Benjamin,Arcades, 462. 46. Benjamin,Arcades, 469-70. 47. Revueltas, Las evocaciones requeridas,48. 48. Revueltas, Conversacionescon Jose Revueltas,compiledby AndreaRevueltas and Philippe Cheron(Mexico, DF: Era, 2001), 77. 49. Revueltas, "Hegel yo . . . ," in Material de los suenos (Mexico, DF: Era, 1979), 20, 13. 50. Revueltas, "Hegel yo . . . ," 20. 5 1. Revueltas, Mexico 68, 26. 52. Revueltas, Mexico 68,21.

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