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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 speaking, there is no dialectic of consciousness: no dialectic of consciousness which could reach reality itself by virtue of its own contradictions; in short, there can be no “phenomenology” in the Hegelian sense: for consciousness does not accede to the real through its own internal development, but by the radical discovery of what is other than itself.7

In short, any dialectic would have to come to terms with the radical discovery of a certain unconscious as the real or material other of consciousness. Instead of the transparency of man as self-present subject, this alternative version of the materialist dialectic would posit the primordial opacity and externality of certain symbolic structures, often under the influence of a new appreciation of psychoanalysis. Indeed, if we follow Lacan, this is precisely how we might define the unconscious: “This exteriority of the symbolic with regard to 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 familiar alternatives sum up what remains perhaps the last really great politico-philosophical battle in the twentieth century—a true example, moreover, of the Althusserian notion that “philosophy represents the class struggle in theory.”9 In its most extreme and vitriolic form, this polemic quickly turned out to be a diálogo de sordos opposing the “bourgeois humanists” who followed the young Marx of the Manuscripts of 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 codename to denounce the persistence of humanist and idealist elements in the early Marx. Both in France and abroad, as in much of Latin America, Sartre and Althusser gave this polemic the impetus of their lifelong work and the aura of their proper names. As Alain Badiou writes:

When the mediations of politics are clear, it is the philosopher’s imperative to subsume them in the direction of a foundation. The last debate in this matter opposed the tenants of liberty, as founding reflective transparency, to the tenants of the structure, as prescription of a regime of causality. Sartre against Althusser: this meant, at bottom, the Cause against the cause.10

There would seem to be little doubt as to where exactly in this debate, or on which side, we should place Revueltas, since he had nothing but scorn for Althusser while he constantly expressed his admiration for Sartre. In reality, however, things are not as straightforward or as clear-cut as they first appear.

In a lucid Preface to Dialéctica de la conciencia, Henri Lefebvre draws our attention to this very debate regarding the foundation or ground of the dialectic. He concludes by highlighting the originality of the answer given by Revueltas: “From Engels to Revueltas, there occurs not only a change in perspective and meaning but also a polar inversion. Instead of being encountered in the object (nature), the foundation of the dialectic is discovered in the subject.”11 This conclusion would seem to confirm the initial suspicion about the understanding of the dialectic in the traditional humanist terms of liberty, consciousness, and the transparency of the self. Lefebvre, however, continues his remarks by immediately insisting on the subject’s internal contradictions:

Revueltas shows that this is not an effect of language, a disorder of discourse, a residual absurdity but, on the contrary, a situation, or better yet, a concatenation of situations, inherent in the subject as such: by reason of the fact that it is not a substance (as is the case for Cartesians) nor a result (as is the case for vulgar materialists and naturalists) but a specific activity as well as a complex and contradictory knot of relations to “the other,” of initiatives, memory, adhesion to the present and projects for the time to come.12

Clearly much more is involved in this understanding of the dialectic than either a mere change in perspective, or even an inversion between substance and subject. In fact, the subject’s consciousness, reason, or self-presence is always situated in tense contradiction with its internal other: the unconscious, unreason, or negativity. This contradictory unity is precisely what defines the dialectic, as opposed to a merely logical understanding of polar opposites in an inert relation of mutual externality or antinomy. “Revueltas shows the contradictions ‘in the act’ according to how they operate in consciousness,” Lefebvre adds, before hinting at a surprising family resemblance in this regard between Revueltas and the work of certain members of the Frankfurt School: “At certain moments 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. Rather than seeking an approximation with Adorno, however, I will in the end suggest that the posthumous writings of Revueltas in fact show more elective affinities with the thought of Walter Benjamin.

In any event, instead of accepting the familiar schemes with which intellectual historians try to pigeonhole what they often disparagingly call “the thought of ’68,”14 we should come to grasp how subject and structure, not unlike Marxism and psychoanalysis in general, stand to each other in a relation of antagonistic articulation through the scission or separation of each of the two terms. Thus, if among later Althusserians the systematic formalization of the structure under certain conditions, which they call events, pinpoints a symptomatic blindness, or incompleteness, the presence of which already presupposes the inscription of a subject, then conversely we can expect to find remnants of the opacity of the structure, or what Sartre would have called elements of the practico-inert, in the midst of the subject’s efforts at reaching consciousness. Hegel himself, in fact, had already hinted at this possibility of seeing the first role of the subject, of spirit, or of the I, not as a schoolbook example of synthesis and sublation, but as the power to split reality into the real and the unreal, the power to sunder the concrete according to the actual and the non-actual, which is but another way of expressing the force of the other of consciousness, of death even, within consciousness itself. “For it is only because the concrete does divide itself, and make itself into something non-actual, that it is self-moving. The activity of separation is the power and work of understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power,” Hegel famously wrote in his Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit:

The circle that remains self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its moments together, is an immediate relationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure “I.”15

Rather than opposing subject and substance as two self-enclosed circles without intersection, the real task of the dialectic must therefore consist in coming to grips with the articulation of the two through the internal division of their oneness.

For Revueltas, consciousness always follows a logic of uneven development and only on rare occasions reaches moments of identity, or near identity, with the real. There is always a lag, a gap, or an anachronism, leading to spectral or phantasmatic structures of social consciousness. In a text on “The Present Significance of the Russian October Revolution,” also published in Dialéctica de la conciencia, Revueltas repeatedly insists on this unevenness:

What is especially important is to notice that such relations (between rational consciousness and praxis) are uneven and they act in relations of identity only in determinate moments of historical development (moments which, in their most elevated expression, can be counted in years). But even such identity is never absolute, since in every case, in order to act upon praxis (and convert itself into praxis), rational consciousness 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 México 68, this process is described in terms of a divide, or a dialectical contradiction, 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 externally, as contradiction and alienation. As mobility and transformation, consciousness is always unhappy with what knowledge provides it with. This changes what it knows (it discovers new data and reveals what is hidden beneath its new objectivity) but it also transforms consciousness itself and submits it to the anxiety of absolute non-knowledge, to the extreme point where a given impotence could turn it into an unreal consciousness. As for the external, its externalization, consciousness is in itself and in its other, in the form of religion, civil society, the state, as consciousness alienated from itself that no longer knows itself, in this exteriorization, as individual and free consciousness in itself. The state, religion, civil society are the consciousness of itself of the others, accumulated throughout time by historical knowledge.17

Reason here has to come to grips with its intrinsic other. In fact, its concrete movement is nothing but the process of its own self-splitting. Far from singing the stately glories of spirit as 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 narrative, always involves the risk of absolute non-knowledge, irretrievable anxiety, or downright madness.

Finally, one important corollary of this internally divided nature of consciousness is that, just as there lies a rational kernel even within ideology, radical or revolutionary thought can also become alienated into mere ideology, which it always carries with it as a shadow. At this moment, the split nature of all elements of the dialectic is erased in favor of a false purity: ideology without reason, or revolutionary reason without the truth of practice. “Every ideology, without exception, reaches a point where, by virtue of its proper nature as ideology, it must renounce all criticism, that is, the ‘rational kernel’ of which it could avail itself in the periods of revolutionary ascent, given its conditions as consciousness alienated onto a concrete praxis.”18 For Revueltas, this last moment is precisely the one that defines the crisis of Marxism after the death of Lenin, and even more so after the watershed year of 1927, when the living ghost of Trotsky started to wander in exile through much of Europe, before meeting his untimely death in Mexico. It is also the moment, however, when ideology lost its rational kernel, and the road was opened for a maddening and suicidal exasperation of the conflict, which increasingly threatened to become nuclear, between the United States and the Soviet Union.

Marx in his Limits

Indeed, another way of addressing the complex question of how to situate this writer’s theoretical work would be to draw out all the consequences of the otherwise unsurprising fact that for Revueltas, by the early 1970s, Marxism was caught in a deep crisis. In this sense, too, Revueltas is much closer to Althusser than either one of them—or, for that matter, any of their critics—would be willing to admit. “Marx in his Limits,”19 the heading under which, in the 1970s, Althusser collected many of his thoughts that were to be published only after his death, could thus very well serve as a subtitle for the posthumous Dialéctica de la conciencia as well. Revueltas is certainly not proposing an uncritical return to some pristine orthodoxy or hidden doctrinal kernel of the early Marx. The aim is rather more contorted, as can be gleaned from the proposed plan of study that is included in the latter half of the book by way of framing its impressive range of notes, quotes, and interpretive glosses, most of them written between 1968 and 1971 in Mexico City’s Lecumberri prison. If Revueltas sought to come to terms with the fundamental concepts of alienation, consciousness, and the philosophy of praxis implied in the Manuscripts of the young Marx, this was primarily in order to provide himself with the means to understand the dogmatic and revisionist deformations of the dialectic in the latter half of the twentieth century, at the hands of so-called vulgar, uncritical, or non-reflective Marxism. Marx’s theory of alienation and ideology thus serves as a critical tool with which to analyze, and hopefully undo the effects of, the ideological alienation of Marxism itself.

Along this complex trajectory Revueltas found a symptomatic turning point precisely in the split between the early Marx and other Young Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach or Arnold Ruge. As he wrote in his “General Plan of Study”: “It is a question of leading this investigation toward a clarification of the current crisis of Marxism. The point of departure for this investigation is situated at the moment of transition when Marxism discerns itself as such, separating itself from critical philosophy by extending the latter to society and its economic foundations.”20 In the operations with which critical philosophy becomes first dialectical, and then materialist, a logic of the social is contained that, once it is cut off from the concrete understanding of society as a contradictory totality, might paradoxically serve to explain the principles of its very own deformation. Revueltas finds this process at work not only in the official doctrine of Stalinism or in the inertia of many Soviet-oriented Communist parties, but also in the ideological radicalism of another typical product of the 1960s: the ultraleftist groups, or grupúsculos, throughout much of Europe and Latin America. One of the early titles for the main text in Dialéctica de la conciencia hinted precisely at this secondary aspect of the crisis of Marxism: La locura brujular del marxismo en México (ensayo ontoló­gico sobre los grupúsculos marxistas).21 This ambitious plan to arrive at a dialectical ontology of group formations, which is much indebted to Sartre’s project in his own unfinished Critique of Dialectical Reason (the first volume of which is significantly subtitled Theory of Practical Ensembles), obviously did not come to full fruition in Revueltas’s notes for Dialéctica de la conciencia. But the reader will find long passages in which the internal crisis of critical consciousness, as explained through the notion of thought’s self-alienation and disorientation, is tied to the proliferation of extreme left-wing groups, all proclaiming their fidelity to an hyper-ideological form of Marxism.

Let us look in more detail at a brief instance of this self-reflexive critique of Marxism. As a starting point, the theoretical activity of consciousness can be situated on two levels, or as two kinds of act: “To put this in the most general way, theory functions by way of two acts that belong to the same process of knowledge. First, in those who think theory and confront it with itself as abstract thought; and, second, concretely, as praxis, when it adequately, that is, in ways consistent with itself, transforms the object proposed to it.”22 Whenever this regime of consistency is interrupted, the inner necessity of the concept, from being a moving restlessness, turns into 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 uncritical Marxism finds its niche. In a passage that is worth quoting extensively, if for no other reason than to give a sense of his idiosyncratic style, Revueltas continues:

The internal contradictions of knowledge that are unresolved (that do not resolve themselves) in their immediate becoming, 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 interposes itself between the prefiguration of the concept and the objective reality that has not yet been conceptualized. Thus, in a true act of usurpation of the rights of rationality, “false consciousness” with its hosts occupies this “no man’s land” of knowledge and declares over 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-absorbed and impermeable to questioning, that represents the false consciousness of vulgar Marxism. Hence, the examination of contradictions will allow us to clarify the fact—hidden underneath all kinds of demagogic and leftist phrases—that practice without praxis is nothing but a maddening sense of disorientation, 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 deformation of the revolutionary processes, with the correlative succession of the great historical defeats suffered by the working class during the last decades in Mexico.23

We can thus observe how it is through a dialectical theory of the inherent contradictions between consciousness and its other, as well as of their transformation into their opposites, that Revueltas seeks to reconstruct the crisis of Marxism based on his own readings of Marx from the time of the latter’s split with the Young Hegelians.

The Dialectic Revisited

Everything in this context ultimately depends on our understanding of what is meant by dialectical thinking. “The point is to be clear about the subject of the dialectic,” Badiou also writes: “The dialecticity of the dialectic consists precisely in having a conceptual history and in dividing the Hegelian matrix to the point where it turns out to be essentially a doctrine of the event, and not the guided adventure of the spirit. A politics, rather than a history.”24 Thus, when Revueltas wrote to his daughter Andrea, “We must return to Hegel’s Phenomenology, whether we want to or not,”25 or when he wrote to her in another letter, “We 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 Stalinism,” his aim was still to come to a concrete understanding of the notion of the dialectic: “All the contradictions of Marxism in Mexico can be summed up as resistance to, and ignorance of, the dialectic.”26 How, then, does Revueltas define the dialectic?

Right from the beginning of Dialéctica de la conciencia, Revueltas may very well have seemed to echo Sartre’s position, in the latter’s polemic with Heidegger, that it is above all a question of man—that is, a question not of being but of the human being. In his case, however, the affirmation “Ante todo se trata de la cuestión hombre” is immediately followed by the question “Pero, en fin, ¿qué es el hombre?”—to which the author of the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is allowed to reply: “Karl Marx proposes to us an illuminating answer. ‘Man is the world of men,’ he says. The world of human beings—in other words, society, its modes of production, religion, the state: a changing world which has never been the same throughout its history.”27 It is at this point that the otherwise traditional, humanist, or idealist image of Hegel’s method is displaced by the search for a materialist dialectic of society as a concrete and contradictory totality. How, then, can we come to know this apparently unknowable totality that constitutes the proper object of dialectical reason? Revueltas does not answer this last question in any straightforward manner. Instead, in the remaining pages of the full draft of his essay, he weaves the discussion in and out of three examples, which he prefers to call “cognitive anecdotes,” derived respectively from the postal system, from archaeology, and from architecture.

The essential determination of society as an object of thought cannot be discerned in the immediate knowledge of the senses: “You should not look for it in the direct and immediate report of the senses but in a vast and complex set of internal relations and correlations.”28 This much larger horizon, however, remains as invisible or unknowable to our everyday thoughts and habits as the complete functioning of the postal system is for the individual who absentmindedly drops off a letter in the mail:

Our individual has written a letter, he has “worked” on it, but he ignores the fact that this whole vast set of activities (writing, sealing the letter, buying stamps and attaching them, depositing the letter into a postbox) is inserted within 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 matter in which the lines of communication are 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 nothing to 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 as soon as he assumes consciousness of it.29

What Revueltas is after in this, as well as in the other two passages, is not so much an orthodox, Lukácsian or Kosikian, totality as the identical subject-object of history, but rather something more along the lines of a cognitive map, or a situational understanding of the system, as defined in more recent years by Fredric Jameson.

If we turn now to the second case, in which an archaeologist decides to employ a group of local bricklayers to help him with the task of digging up the objects on his site, a split immediately sets apart the manual labor of the diggers from the larger cultural and intellectual knowledge regarding the objects of their labor. The diggers are thus deprived of the consciousness involved in their very own labor. Revueltas insists, however, in this case even more so than in the brief example of the letter-writer, that these bricklayers now turned into anthropological laborers, too, are perhaps on the verge of a special kind of consciousness:

Nevertheless, what happened to 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 human form of labor, “on the verge of” converting themselves into real human beings and not only because of the fact—which they will have commented upon with mocking joy—of having served for some days for this “crazy guy” who contracted them for a strange and incomprehensible activity, 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 phantasmatic emanation above 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 remains in the labor of bricklaying to which they returned, because in a certain sense and in a new but essential form, they continue to be “anthropologists” on their job as house-builders.30

Nothing ever seems to be lost for good when it comes to the consciousness of human work. For the most part, however, even while being perhaps indestructible, the common mass of generic human labor vanishes or evaporates into the depths of a spectral or phantasmatic type of memory, a collective yet transhistorical memory that is closer to the unconscious than to consciousness, and in which experiences are accumulated, preserved, and repeated from time immemorial, until those rare moments when, as in a sudden act of awakening, they re-enter the field of vision.

Freud and Lacan had already insisted on the indestructible nature of the unconscious. The memory of desire is unlike any other form or kind of memory, precisely because of the fact that nothing is ever forgotten by desire. Lacan thus recalls that Freud’s discovery is very much bound up with the discovery of “the inextinguishable duration of desire, a feature of the unconscious which is hardly the least paradoxical, even though Freud never gives it up.”31 For Lacan, of course, the locus of this peculiar kind of memory is none other than a certain automatism of language itself. It is inscribed in traces, archives, bodies, and traditions as in a machine-like structure, or on a magical writing pad similar to the one famously invoked by Freud:

There is no other way to conceive of the indestructibility of unconscious desire—given that there is no need which, when its satiation is forbidden, does not wither, in extreme cases through the very wasting away of the organism itself. It is in a kind of memory, comparable to what goes by that name in our modern thinking-machines (which are based on an electronic realization of signifying composition), that the chain is found which insists by reproducing itself in the transference, and which is the chain of a dead desire.32

Freud himself had suggested in Totem and Taboo—and again, even more clearly, in Moses and Monotheism—that the latency and partial return of repressed materials be seen as phenomena characteristic not only of the life of the individual, but of the history of the human species as well. Speaking of the difference, or gap, between the official history of Moses and the oral tradition, Freud suggests that what is forgotten nonetheless survives elsewhere: “What has been deleted or altered in the written version might quite well have been preserved uninjured in the tradition.”33 There are thus permanent traces of this history that remain, even if they were mostly warded off and repressed. Here Freud advances one of his boldest claims: “I hold that the concordance between the individual and the mass is in this point almost complete. The masses, too, retain an impression of the past in unconscious memory traces.”34 Memory here becomes both onto- and phylogenetic in ways that do not necessarily lead us back to racially coded and ideological notions of primitivism. In fact, the notion of the return of the repressed leads the psychoanalyst to the surprising conclusion that if the idea of a collective unconscious makes any sense at all, it is only because the unconscious, understood in this way, is always already collective to begin with:

The term “repressed” is here used not in its technical sense. Here I mean something past, vanished, and overcome in the life of a people, which I venture to treat as equivalent to repressed material in the mental life of the individual. In what psychological form the past existed during its period of darkness we cannot as yet tell. It is not easy to translate the concepts of individual psychology into mass psychology, and I do not think that much is to be gained by introducing the concept of a “collective” unconscious—the content of the unconscious is collective anyhow, a general possession of mankind.35

Freud and Lacan’s notion of an inextinguishable unconscious memory—despite the appearance of insurmountable conceptual distances, not to mention a certain Jungian family resemblance—is furthermore not unrelated to the notion of a species-like memory that acquires almost cosmic dimensions in the writings of Henri Bergson and, after him, with Gilles Deleuze. This is the memory of an all-embracing past, of life itself as pure recollection—a realm that is neither real nor merely possible, but actually virtual and virtually actual at all times. “What Bergson calls ‘pure recollection’ has no psychological existence. This is why it is called virtual, inactive, and unconscious. All these words are dangerous, in particular, the word ‘unconscious’ which, since Freud, has become inseparable from an especially effective and active psychological existence,” Deleuze explains: “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.”36 This is memory not just as the agency of language, not even as the unwritten and obscure record of the human species, but directly as a structure of being: memory as immemorial ontology.

Far from falling for a Jungian interpretation, what Revueltas adds to this notion of an unconscious, indestructible, and quasi-ontological memory is the political question of its rude awakening. In this sense, he is certainly not the only one during the late 1960s and early 1970s to tackle the possibility of a collective popular memory. In his testimonial novel L’Etabli (The Assembly Line), the French Maoist Robert Linhart also writes: “Nothing is lost, nothing is forgotten in the indefinitely mixed memory of the working class. Other strikes, other committees, other acts will find inspiration in past strikes—as well as in ours, the trace of which I will later discover, mixed up with so many others . . .”37 Revueltas, though, is precisely interested in the recovery of these traces, in their phantasmatic reinscription or even resurrection. What happens, in other words, with the consciousness that the bricklayers in his second anecdote were “on the verge” of acquiring? Once this spectral consciousness sinks back into the depths of a latent collective unconscious, where it will remain insistently as a virtual memory of the human species, how can such remnants be made to re-emerge? By what kind of act—whether political or theoretical?

Before we turn to the theory of the act, however, we must consider how—when the same bricklayers partake in an architect’s project to build a private home, which is then sold to the homeowner—a supplementary alienation of human work takes place in the selling of property and the juridical passage of the house from the hands of the bricklayers, through the architect’s plans, 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 separation and subtraction, on the general reserve of human labor:

This alienation, which sunders the thing from the object (making it into a thing without object), radically—at the roots—affects the subject and strips him of his essence. Placed before the subtraction of his object into the thing, he does not cease to possess the object (given that the object will be present in some place), but he leads it astray and appears in front of that stripped thing . . . in the condition of mere amnesia, as empty consciousness, hidden from his generic I, exactly as if one said that an individual forgot where his or her house is.38

For Revueltas, all architecture is in fact a preemptive form of archaeology. Indeed, the task of critical reason consists precisely in an operation similar to the uncovering of an archaeology latent within every architectural structure.

As Revueltas writes in one of his more ominous passages, “Archaeology states: this piece of architecture will disappear”—not because of some vague Heraclitean awareness of the flow of time behind the rapid succession of architectural styles and fashions, “but because archaeology as such consists in thinking about and questioning (in consciousness) the how and why of the contradictions by virtue of whose antagonisms cultures and civilizations disappear.”39 In this and other passages from Dialéctica de la conciencia, Revueltas comes extremely close to a definition of dialectical and historical materialism that is similar to the one found in the fragments and annotated remains—the refuse and debris of modernity, as it were—taken up and reused by Benjamin in his unfinished Arcades Project. “Here we are of course not talking about archaeology as a scientific discipline,” Revueltas explains:

We are referring, rather, to an archaeology understood as a particular form of historical consciousness, in the same sense as when we talked about architecture. Archaeology, then, appears as a rethinking, as the repetition in consciousness of past architectures (cultural formations and so on), and these, in turn, as determinate forms of the totality of a historical consciousness in movement, which is nothing but the movement of its self-destruction.40

If the task of theory is revealed in the principle that all architecture is an anticipated archaeology, this must be understood in the rigorous sense of coming to know the past labor that vanished or disappeared into the monumental presence of the present. History, seen in this dialectical sense, is not an accumulation of cultural riches so much as the large-scale vanishing of misery into the unconscious of humanity’s constitutive, generic, and originary prehistory. As Revueltas writes,

In this way, as self-historicization without rest (which never reaches quietude), history is a constant repetition of itself in the continuous mind of human beings, in their generic mind and unconscious memory—the unconscious that is first ahistorical and then historical and social—(not in the vulgar sense in which one says “history repeats itself,” but as presence produced, and producing itself, within the limits of human eternity), the natural history of man that goes back over itself without end.41

How, then, does humanity escape from the almost mystical slumber of its general intellect and unconscious memory? Here, both Revueltas and Benjamin, like so many other Western Marxists, seem to have been inspired by a statement of principle that appears in a letter from Marx to Arnold Ruge. “Our election cry must be: Reform of consciousness not through dogmas, but through the analysis of mystical consciousness that is unclear to itself, whether it appears in a religious or a political form,” Marx had written to his friend and fellow Young Hegelian: “Then people will see that the world has long possessed the dream of a thing—and that it only needs to possess the consciousness of this thing in order really to possess it.”42 Benjamin would turn this election cry into the cornerstone of his dialectical method as a materialist historian. “The realization of dream elements in the course of waking up is the canon of dialectics. It is paradigmatic for the thinker and binding for the historian,” Benjamin wrote in his notebooks for The Arcades Project, in which he also wondered: “Is awakening perhaps the synthesis of dream consciousness (as thesis) and waking consciousness (as antithesis)? Then the moment of awakening would be identical with the ‘now of recognizability,’ in which things put on their true—surrealist—face.”43 Is this view of awakening, this “now of recognizability” as “a supremely dialectical point of rupture” or surrealist “flash,” not also reminiscent of the moment when consciousness is suddenly “on the verge” of forming itself, “on the verge” of bursting into our field of visibility, according to Revueltas?

What Revueltas is seeking in his “cognitive anecdotes” would thus be an experience akin to the formation of “dialectical images” for Benjamin:

In the dialectical image, what has been within a particular epoch 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, rubbing its eyes, recognizes just this particular dream image as such. It is at this moment that the historian takes up, with regard to that image, the task of dream interpretation.44

As for the imminence of this act, which is never fully present to the mind but rather lurks behind the scenes as something that 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, regarded as one of the highest forms of appropriate behavior. What is even more decisive is that the dialectician cannot look on history as anything other than a constellation of dangers which he is always, as he follows its development in his thought, on the point of averting.45

The task of critical reason, then, is much closer to the interpretation of a dream than to a simple exercise of the cogito’s presence of mind and nearly divine self-consciousness. Revueltas, like Benjamin, finally proposes to see the activity of thought as a secular, or profane illumination: “Consciousness, freed and bared of all divinity—in virtue as much as in vice—puts things on their feet that were standing on their head, it illuminates them, and it profanes them.”46

Acts of Theory

In a remarkably enigmatic short story, “Hegel y yo”, published in 1973 as the opening of a planned future novel or series of narratives on the same subject that would never see the light, Revueltas returned once more to this notion of the profane illumination that takes place whenever an emergent consciousness is on the verge of breaking through the monumental obliteration of generic human memory and work. On this occasion, he describes such moments in terms of “acts”—that is, truly “profound acts,” which completely change the seemingly eternal paradigms of existing knowledge in light of a truth that is both historical and yet part of an immemorial past that runs through, and sometimes interrupts, the continuum of human history.

Despite its unfinished nature, “Hegel and I” represents a culminating moment in the long trajectory of Revueltas as a narrator and a thinker. These two activities, narration and thought, are inseparable here perhaps more so than in any of his other stories, or in most of his already quite intellectualized novels. The story, in fact, seems to take up and try to solve some of the deadlocks present in Revueltas’s strictly theoretical writings from the same period, the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of which have been published posthumously by Andrea Revueltas and Philippe Cheron in volumes such as Dialéctica de la conciencia and México 68: Juventud y revolución.

“Hegel,” in the story, is the nickname of a prisoner, a paraplegic who 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, referred to the prison,” the author explained in an interview: “A character who arrives in prison is a bank-robber called ‘Hegel’ because he robbed a bank on Hegel Street. Everyone calls him ‘Hegel.’ From there the narrator takes up the positions of Hegel in order to demonstrate that the prison is the state.”47 From this character, in fact, we obtain not only a theory of the state as a prison-like panopticon, but also the outline for a provocative theory of the act; or, to be more precise, a theory of the theoretical act—of what it means to reach consciousness in the act of theory.

True acts 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 immemorial recollection, the counter-memory of that which has not taken place. “The profound act lies within you, lurking and prepared to jump up from the bottom of your memory: from that memory of the non-event [esa memoria de lo no-ocurrido],” says “Hegel,” and the anonymous narrator approves: “He’s right: our acts, our profound acts as he says, constitute that part of memory that does not accept remembering, for which it does not matter whether there are witnesses or not. Nobody is witness to nobody and nothing, each one carries his or her own recollection of the unseen, or the unheard-of, without testimonies.”48 Without memory, without testimony, unwitnessed yet recorded in the blank pages of a collective unconscious, profound acts are those acts that define not only a subject’s emergent consciousness but this very subject as well. Subjects are local instances of such acts.

“You,” or “I,” according to “Hegel and I,” are but the result of the profound acts of history, whether in 1968 or 1917, in 1905 or 1871—acts that forever will have changed the conditions of politics in history. This is not a blind voluntaristic account of the subject’s capacity for action and intervention, since it is not the subject but the act that is first. The act is not our own doing so much as it is we who are the result, or the local instance, of the act. In the words of “Hegel”:

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 strangest part of your memory, in your estranged memory, unsaid and unwritten, unthought, never felt, which is that which moves you in the direction of such an act. So strange that it is a memory without language, lacking all proper signs, a memory that has to find its own way by means of the most unexpected of all means. Thus, this memory repeats, without our being aware of it, all the frustrations prior to its occurrence, until it succeeds in chancing again upon the original profound act which, for this reason alone, is yours. But only for this reason, because it is yours without belonging to you. The opposite is the case: you are the one who belongs to the act, by which, in the end, you cease to belong to yourself.49

The act not only constitutes the brief occurrence of an identity of thinking and being, but it also would seem retroactively to redeem past errors and failures of history. I would even suggest that, through the notion of a repetition of the memory of lo no-ocurrido—that is, literally “the unhappened” or “the non-occurred”—Revueltas is inverting the logic of Hegel’s sublation which, as Žižek frequently reminds us, amounts to a kind of Ungeschehenmachen, incidentally the same German term that Freud uses in his own understanding of denegation. While Hegel famously located this capacity to unmake history in the notion of Christian forgiveness, Žižek extends its field of application to include the core of Hegel’s logic as a whole:

One is thus able to conceive of Ungeschehenmachen, the highest manifestation of negativity, as the Hegelian version of “death drive”: it is not an accidental or marginal element in the Hegelian edifice, but rather designates the crucial moment of the dialectical process, the so-called moment of the “negation of negation,” the inversion of the “antithesis” into the “synthesis”: the “reconciliation” proper to synthesis is not a surpassing or suspension (whether it be “dialectical”) of scission on some higher plane, but a retroactive reversal which means that there never was any scission to begin with—“synthesis” retroactively annuls this scission.50

For Revueltas, however, the aim of the profound acts of history is not symbolically, or at the level of the spirit, to unmake what did happen, but rather to allow that what did not happen be made to happen. Therein lies not the retroactive annihilation of scission so much as the redemptive introduction of a scission where previously none existed.

Insofar as it relates not to the actual events of the past but to the repetition of their halo of absence, the act proper has no beginning or end. “Where the devil did these things begin?” the narrator in “Hegel and I” asks himself: “It is not the things themselves that I recall but their halo, their periphery, that which lies beyond what circumscribes and defines them.”51 It is only afterwards that historians—and perhaps philosophers of history such as Hegel—can name, date, and interpret the events that are repeated but not registered or witnessed in such an immemorial act:

It is an act that accepts all forms: committing it, perpetrating it, consummating it, realizing it. It simply is beyond all moral qualification. Qualifying it is left to those who annotate it and date it—that is, to the journalists and the historians, who must then necessarily adjust it to a determinate critical norm that is in force, whereby they only erase its traces and falsify it, erecting it into a Myth that is more or less valid and acceptable during a certain period of time: Landru, Ghengis Khan, Galileo, Napoleon, the Marquis de Sade, Jesus Christ, or Lenin, it’s all the same.52

Revueltas himself thus responds to the acts and events of 1968 with the demand for a theory of the act that would be able to account for the process by which the frustrated acts of past revolutions and uprisings—acts of rebellion such as the railworkers’ strike of 1958–59 in Mexico—are awoken from their slumber and, from being unconscious recollections of the non-event, break out of the shell of available knowledge in order to produce the categories for an unheard-of truth.

As prolonged theoretical acts, though, events cannot be seized without sacrificing their nature, unless the interpretive framework itself is attuned to reflect this very event-like nature itself. To his friends and fellow militants of May 1968 in France, for example, Revueltas sent a public letter with the following message: “Your massive action, which immediately turns into historical praxis, from the first moment on possesses the peculiar nature of being at the same time a great theoretical leap, a radical subversion of the theory mediated, deformed, fetishized by the epigones of Stalin.”53 This radical subversion in turn must be theorized without losing its subversiveness in the no-man’s-land of a theory without practice. Writing from his cell in Lecumberri, Revueltas asked nothing less from his fellow Mexicans. “I believe,” he wrote against all odds in 1976, in a collection of essays about the massacre in Tlatelolco, “that the experience of 1968 is a highly positive one, and one that will bring enormous benefits, provided that we know how to theorize the phenomenon.”54