Marx and Freud in Latin America. Bruno Bosteels
just the usual one of crime, deception, and betrayal. There are whole generations who know little or nothing about those “rebels of yesteryear,” and much less understand how they would have been able to “captivate” the impoverished peasants and workers with the “fury” of their language.
On the one hand, all memory seems to have been broken, and many radical intellectuals and activists from the 1960s and ’70s—for a variety of motives that include guilt, shame, the risk of infamy, or purely and simply the fear of ridicule if they were to vindicate their old fidelities—are accomplices to the oblivion insofar as they refuse to work through, in a quasi-analytical sense of the expression, the internal genealogy of their militant experiences. Thus, the fury of subversion remains, unelaborated, in the drawer of nostalgias, with precious few militants publicly risking the ordeal of self-criticism. What is more, the situation hardly changes if, on the other hand, we are also made privy to the opposite excess, as a wealth of personal testimonies and confessions accumulates in which the inflation of memory seems to be little more than another, more spectacular form of the same forgetfulness. As in the case of the polemic about militancy and violence unleashed in Argentina by the recent epistolary confession of Óscar del Barco (“No matarás: Thou shalt not kill”4), we certainly are treated to a heated debate, but what still remains partially hidden from view is the politico-theoretical archive and everything that might be contained therein, in terms of relevant materials for rethinking the effective legacy of Marx and Marxism in Latin America. And we could argue that the same is true, though with less spectacular effect because oblivion also has been more spontaneous, of that strange hybrid of Freudo-Marxism in Latin America.
How to go against the complacency that is barely concealed behind this bipolar consensus, with its furtive silences on the one hand and its clamorous self-accusations on the other? In the first place, we should insist on something that we know only too well when it comes to domestic appliances, but that we prefer to ignore when we approach the creations of the intellect—namely, the fact that everything that is produced and consumed in this world bears from the start a certain expiration date, or the stamp of a planned obsolescence. Theories do not escape this rule, no matter how much it pains scholars and intellectuals to admit it. As a secondary effect of this obsolescence, however, we should also consider the possibility that novelty may be nothing more than the outcome of a prior oblivion. As Jorge Luis Borges remarks in the epigraph to his story “The Immortal,” quoting Francis Bacon’s Essays: “Solomon saith: There is no new thing upon the earth. So that as Plato had an imagination, that all knowledge was but remembrance; so Solomon giveth his sentence, that all novelty is but oblivion.”5 This grave pronouncement applies equally to the products of criticism and theory. Here, too, all novelty is perhaps but oblivion.
In fact, the history of the concepts used in studies of politics, art, literature, and culture as well as their combination in what we can still call critical theory today appears to be riddled with holes that are very much due to the kind of silence mentioned above—a not-saying that is partly the result of voluntary omissions and partly the effect of unconscious or phantasmatic slippages. Forgetfulness, in other words, is never entirely by chance, nor can it be attributed simply to a taste for novelty on the part of overzealous artists or intellectuals in search of personal fame and fortune. After all, as the Situationist Guy Debord had already observed more than twenty years ago, in his Comments on the Society of the Spectacle, itself a reflection upon his book from twenty years before: “Spectacular domination’s first priority was to eradicate historical knowledge in general; beginning with just about all rational information and commentary on the most recent past.” And, about the events of 1968 in particular, Debord adds: “The more important something is, the more it is hidden. Nothing in the last twenty years has been so thoroughly coated in obedient lies as the history of May 1968.”6 If today, more than forty years after the original publication of The Society of the Spectacle, the vast majority of radicals from the 1960s and ’70s dedicate mere elegies to the twilight of their broken idols, those who were barely born at the time can only guess where all the elephants have gone to die while radical thinking disguises itself in one fancy terminology after another, each more delightfully innovative and invariably pathbreaking than the previous novelty. Thus, instead of a true polemic, let alone a genealogical work of counter-memory, what comes to dominate is a manic-depressive oscillation between silence and noise, easily coopted and swept up in the frenzied celebrations in honor of the death of communism and the worldwide victory of neoliberalism.
The current appeal of cultural studies, for example, beyond its official birthplaces in the Frankfurt and Birmingham Schools, is inseparable from a process of oblivion or interruption whereby critics and theorists seem to have lost track of the once very lively debates about the causality and efficacy of symbolic practices—debates that until the late 1960s and early ’70s were dominated by the inevitable legacies of Marx and Marxism. In the United States, where these legacies never achieved a culturally dominant status to begin with, any potential they might have had was further curtailed by the effects of deconstruction, whose earlier textual trend was then only partially compensated for both by deconstruction’s own turn to ethics and politics and by its short-lived rivalry with new historicism. As for Latin America, if we were to ask ourselves in which countries the model of cultural studies, or cultural critique, has achieved a notable degree of intellectual intensity and academic respectability, the answers—Argentina, Chile, Brazil—almost without exception include regions where the military regimes put a violent end to the radicalization of left-wing intellectual life, including a brutal stop to all public debates about the revolutionary promise of Marxism, while in other countries—Mexico or Cuba, for instance—many authors for years might seem to have been doing cultural criticism already, albeit sans le savoir, like Molière’s comedian, perhaps because in these cases the influence of Marxism, though certainly also waning today, has nevertheless remained a strong undercurrent.
In Latin America, the reasons for amnesia are if possible even more complex. Not only has there been an obvious interruption of memory due to the military coups and the onslaught of neoliberalism but, in addition, this lack of a continuous dialogue with the realities of the region can already be found in the works of Marx and Freud themselves. In fact, we could say that the history of the relation of Marx and Freud to Latin America is the history of a triple desencuentro, or a three-fold missed encounter.
In the first place, we find a missed encounter already within the writings of Marx. Thanks to José Aricó’s classic and long out-of-print study, Marx y América Latina, now finally reissued, we can unravel the possible reasons behind Marx’s inability to approach the realities of Latin America with even a modicum of sympathy. His infamous attack on Simón Bolívar (whom Marx in a letter to Engels labels “the most dastardly, most miserable and meanest of blackguards”7) or his and Engels’s notorious early support for the US invasion of Mexico (about whose inhabitants Marx, in another letter to his collaborator, wrote: “The Spanish are completely degenerate. But a degenerate Spaniard, a Mexican, is an ideal. All the Spanish vices, braggadocio, swagger and Don Quixotry, raised to the third power, but little or nothing of the steadiness which the Spaniards possess”8) are indeed compatible with three major prejudices that Aricó attributes to Marx: a belief in the linearity of history; a generalized anti-Bonapartism; and a theory of the nation-state inherited, albeit in inverted form, from Hegel, according to which there cannot exist a lasting form of the state without the prior presence of a strong sense of national unity at the level of bourgeois civil society—a sense of unity and identity whose absence or insufficiency, on the other hand, tends to provoke precisely the intervention of despotic or dictatorial figures à la Bonaparte and Bolívar. In this sense, the three prejudices are intimately related: it is only due to a supposedly linear conception of history that all countries must necessarily pass through the same process of political and economic development in the formation of a civil society sufficiently strong to support the apparatuses of the state.
One paradox alluded to in Aricó’s study, however, still deserves to be unpacked in greater detail. Especially in his final texts on Ireland, Poland, Russia, or India, after 1870, Marx indeed begins to catch a glimpse of the logic of the uneven development of capitalism, which could have served him as well to reinterpret the postcolonial condition of Latin America. “From the end of the decade of the 1870s onward, Marx never again abandons his thesis that the uneven development of capitalist accumulation displaces