Marx and Freud in Latin America. Bruno Bosteels
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
4
CAN THE NEW MAN SPEAK?
A Subject for an Object
To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man.
Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba”
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