Marx and Freud in Latin America. Bruno Bosteels
as Jacobo: “The conclusion to be derived from this, if we introduce into our study of the problem the concepts of a humanist ethics, the concepts that stem from an ethical development of Marxism, can only be the most overwhelming and terrible conclusion, especially considering the parties that come into power.”43 The conclusion in question holds that the exercise of dogmatism on behalf of the “leading brains” of the communist movement, in Mexico as much as elsewhere in the world, with its “consoling tautology” that “the party is the party,” in reality involves “the most absolute ethical nihilism, the negation of all ethics, ciphered in the concept: to us everything is permitted.”44
If, on the other hand, “thought and practice . . . are identified as twin brothers in metaphysics and in dogma,” then it is understandable that Jacobo, in addition to an ethical inflection of the party, would also propose a philosophico-anthropological reflection about “man as erroneous being.”45 This reflection is part of the “essay” in which Jacobo has invested “close to three months of conscientious and patient labor,” no doubt similar to the labor it would take Revueltas a few years later to write his own unfinished and posthumous essay, Dialéctica de la conciencia. Jacobo reads from this text, which again is worth quoting at length so as to get a taste of the sheer syntactical complexity of the dialectical sentence:
Man is an erroneous being—he began to read with his eyes, in silence; a being that never finishes by establishing itself anywhere; therein lies precisely his revolutionary and tragic, unpacifiable condition. He does not aspire to realize himself to another degree—and this is to say, in this he finds his supreme realization—to another degree—he repeated to himself—beyond what can have the thickness of a hair, that is, this space that for eternal eternity, and without their being a power capable of remedying this, will leave uncovered the maximum coincidence of the concept with the conceived, of the idea with its object: to reduce the error to a hair’s breadth thus constitutes, at the most, the highest victory that he can obtain; nothing and nobody will be able to grant him exactitude. However, the space occupied in space and in time, in the cosmos, by the thickness of a hair, is an abyss without measure, more profound, more extensive, more tangible, less reduced, though perhaps more solitary, than the galaxy to which belongs the planet where this strange and hallucinating consciousness lives that we human beings are.46
What Jacobo proposes in this “essay” can be read as a new metaphysics—or rather an anti-metaphysics—of error and equivocity, against dogma and exactitude. Indeed, if the identity of being and thinking defines the basic premise of all metaphysical dogmatism, then human conscience or consciousness (conciencia in Spanish meaning both) can avoid dogmatism only by accepting an infinitesimal distance, or minimal gap, between the concept and the thing conceived.
We could say that Revueltas in Los errores accepts the need for a revision of the Hegelian dialectic in ways that are similar to what Adorno, around the same time, proposed with his “negative dialectics,” according to which no concept ever completely covers its content without leaving behind some leftover, or remnant of nonidentity: “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy.”47 Or, to use the almost perfectly comparable words of Badiou: “To begin with, a dialectical mode of thinking will be recognized by its conflict with representation. A thinking of this type pinpoints some unrepresentable point in its midst, which reveals that one touches upon the real.”48 Much of Revueltas’s intellectual work as a novelist and a theorist during the 1960s and 1970s is devoted to such a reformulation of the dialectic, as the conception of the non-conceptual or the representation of the unrepresentable.
In the case of Los errores, however, it is not difficult to guess where the ethics of the party and the metaphysics of error will end up. Both arguments could in fact be invoked—not without taking on airs of moral superiority—in order to stop, interrupt, or prohibit any attempt to organize politics, as well as any project of approaching the truth of consciousness. Not only would all organizational matters then be displaced onto moral issues, which could be framed in terms of honesty and betrayal, or good and evil, but, what is more, this could even lead to a position for which the knowledge of our finitude—that is, our essential nature as “erroneous beings”—would always be morally superior and theoretically more radical that any given action, which in comparison cannot but appear “dogmatic,” “totalitarian,” “voluntaristic,” and so on. In full melodramatic mode, we would end up with the attitude of the “beautiful soul” from Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit:
It lacks the power to externalize itself, the power to make itself into a Thing, and to endure [mere] being. It lives in dread of besmirching the splendour of its inner being by action and an existence; and, in order to preserve the purity of its heart, it flees from contact with the actual world, and persists in its self-willed impotence to renounce its self which is reduced to the extreme of ultimate abstraction, and to give itself a substantial existence, or to transform its thought into being and put its trust in the absolute difference [between thought and being]. The hollow object which it has produced for itself now fills it, therefore, with a sense of emptiness. Its activity is a yearning which merely loses itself as consciousness becomes an object devoid of substance, and, rising above this loss, and falling back on itself, finds itself only as a lost soul. In this transparent purity of its moments, an unhappy, so-called “beautiful soul,” its light dies away with it, and it vanishes like a shapeless vapour that dissolves into thin air.49
This road toward the transparent beauty of good unhappy conscience based on the wisdom of our essential finitude, now openly post-communist if not actually anticommunist, may very well have been prefigured, unbeknownst to the author, in the double proposal of a humanist ethics of the party and a metaphysics of irreducible error. The history of the 1970s and 1980s, with its peremptory declarations of the “end of ideology,” the “death” of Marxism, or the “ethical turn,” would end up confirming the extent to which the defense of liberal democracy, with its absolute rejection of communism-as-totalitarianism, also adopted some of the features of this same “beautiful soul” who at least knows that its inactivity protects it from the Evil incurred by anyone intent upon imposing, here and now, some Good.
Indeed, in the decades following the publication of Los errores, the roles of ethics and politics seem to have been inverted. When Revueltas, through Jacobo and Ismael, speaks of an “ethics of the party” or an “ethics of Marxism,” ethics is still subordinated to politics, keeping the latter in check. Ethics, in other words, would provide the political process with certain practical maxims for maintaining its consistency. At the same time, there seems to be a suggestion that there exists no ethics outside the concrete thought-practice of a party, league, or group: “There is no ethics in general. There are only—eventually—ethics of processes by which we treat the possibilities of a situation.”50 Such ethical considerations, however, can also become detached from the political processes in question, even to the point of subduing all politics as such. Here, then, we enter the terrain of a moralization of politics that no longer depends specifically on any militant procedure but that instead begins to undermine the sheer possibility of such forms of practice in general. This is because the new categorical imperative and the dominant moral judgment that it enables, whether of respect for the other or of compassion for the victim, teach us that the supreme value of our time consists in avoiding at all costs the production of more sacrificial victims. “Politics is subordinated to ethics, to the single perspective that really matters in this conception of things: the sympathetic and indignant judgement of the spectator of the circumstances,” writes Badiou: “Such is the accusation so often repeated over the last fifteen years: every revolutionary project stigmatized as ‘utopian’ turns, we are told, into totalitarian nightmare. Every will to inscribe an idea of justice or equality turns bad. Every collective will to the Good creates Evil.”51
Revueltas, with his tireless critique of communist dogmatism, may have opened the door for those moralizing discourses that, even in left-wing variations, can barely dissimulate their strong undercurrent of vulgar anticommunism. The challenge he bequeaths to us thus consists in thinking the crimes of communism without converting the inevitability of error into the melodramatic premise for a complex of moral superiority that would deny that anything good might still emerge from Marxism—let