Marx and Freud in Latin America. Bruno Bosteels
there is still a third perspective from which we might tackle our problem—namely, by taking the logic of the desencuentro itself as a key to understanding the emancipatory nature of the contributions made by Marxism and psychoanalysis and then using this key to approach the realities of Latin America. The founders of these discourses, to be sure, intended their work to be read as laying the foundation for new sciences, respectively, of history and of the unconscious. However, what these sciences at bottom encounter, despite their subsequent fixation and positivization, is something that does not belong to the realm of hard facts so much as it signals a symptomatic interruption of all factual normality:
Marx sets out, absolutely, not from the architecture of the social, deploying its assurance and its guarantee after the fact, but from the interpretation-interruption of a symptom of hysteria of the social: the uprisings and parties of the workers. Marx defines himself by listening to these symptoms according to a hypothesis of truth regarding politics, just as Freud listens to the hysteric according to a hypothesis regarding the truth of the subject.28
If Marxism and psychoanalysis can still be called scientific against all odds, it is not because of the objective delimitation of a specific and empirically verifiable instance or domain of the social order—political, psychic, or libidinal economies—but because they link a category of truth onto a delinking, an unbinding, or a coming-apart of the social bond in moments of acute crisis. Even if the new discourse he is commending does not amount to a philosophical worldview, Freud is quite explicit about the importance of the category of truth for psychoanalysis. “I have told you that psychoanalysis began as a method of treatment,” he tells his audience in his New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis, “but I did not want to commend it to your interest as a method of treatment but on account of the truths it contains, on account of the information it gives us about what concerns human beings most of all—their own nature—and on account of the connections it discloses between the most different of their activities.”29 Freud immediately goes on to tackle the question about the problematic status of psychoanalysis as a worldview and as a science, before concluding, as is only to be expected, by engaging in a brief polemical dialogue with Marxism.
This dialogue is indeed to be expected, insofar as the notion of truth that both Marx and Freud can be said to uphold does not refer to a stable reality to be uncovered with the objectivity of a positive or empirical science, nor is the discourse for which they lay the foundation the result of a purely philosophical self-reflection. Rather, truth here is tied to a certain experience of the real that interrupts and breaks with the normal course of things. More so than as positive sciences or as philosophical worldviews, therefore, the discourses of Marx and Freud are better seen as doctrines of the intervening subject. “Even though psychoanalysis and Marxism have nothing to do with one another—the totality they would form is inconsistent—it is beyond doubt that Freud’s unconscious and Marx’s proletariat have the same epistemological status with regard to the break they introduce in the dominant conception of the subject,” Alain Badiou writes in Theory of the Subject: “‘Where’ is the unconscious? ‘Where’ is the proletariat? These questions have no chance of being solved either by an empirical designation or by the transparency of a reflection. They require the dry and enlightened labour of analysis and of politics. Enlightened and also organized, into concepts as much as into institutions.”30
The commonality between Marx and Freud, in other words, lies in their willingness and ability to propose the hypothesis of a universal truth of the political or desiring subject in answer to the crises of their time—whether these are the uprisings of the 1840s to which Marx and Engels respond in The Communist Manifesto with the hypothesis of an unheard-of proletarian capacity for politics, or the hysteric fits and outbursts that spread like wildfire through fin-de-siècle Vienna to which Freud responds with his hypothesis regarding the universality of a certain pathological subject of desire—as in his “Fragment of an Analysis of a Case of Hysteria,” better known as Dora’s case. A certain logic of the missed encounter, as structural-historical antagonism or as constitutive discontent, would thus be the ultimate “truth” about politics and desire that is the conceptual core of the respective doctrines of Marx and Freud.
These two figures, however, did not merely follow vaguely comparable or parallel tracks in the direction of a radical kernel of antagonism. Rather, the true insight behind the various attempts at amalgamating a form of Freudo-Marxism derives from the hypothesis that the questions of political, economic, and libidinal causality that the work of these two thinkers poses also mutually, yet without any neat symmetry, presuppose each other. As the Argentine León Rozitchner writes in Freud y el problema del poder (Freud and the Problem of Power), a book whose title should not hide the extent to which it puts Freudian psychoanalysis in dialogue both with Marxism and with the theory of war of Carl von Clausewitz,
I think that the problem at issue is the following: on one hand we have the development of state power since the French revolution to this day—whether capitalist or socialist—and, at the same time, the emergence of a power of the masses which with ever more vehemence and activism has begun to demand participation in it. This access gained by those who are distanced from power all the while being its foundation presents us with a need linked to the search for the possible efficacy as well as the explication of the failure in which many attempts to reach it culminated: the need to return to the subjective sources of that objective power formed, even in its collective grandeur, by individuals. Trying to understand this place, which is also individual, where that collective power continues somehow to generate itself and at the same time—as is all too clear—to inhibit itself in its development. In short: What is the significance of the so-called “subjective” conditions in the development of collective processes that tend toward a radical transformation of social reality? Is the condition of radicality not determined precisely by deepening this repercussion of the so-called “objective” conditions in subjectivity, without which politics is bound to remain ineffective?31
Such would be, in the broadest possible terms, the long-term presuppositions that undergird the search for an articulation between psychoanalysis and Marxism.
After all, as Rozitchner also observes, Marx had already pointed out this unity of the subjective and the objective, as opposed to the usual opposition between the “merely” internal and the “merely” external. Especially in the notebooks from 1857–58 known as the Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, speaking of the objectification of labor, which turns individuals immediately into social beings, Marx writes: “The conditions which allow them to exist in this way in the reproduction of their life, in their life’s process, have been posited only by the historic economic process itself; both the objective and the subjective conditions, which are only the two distinct forms of the same conditions.”32 Conversely, in Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego, Freud famously starts out by insisting that to speak of a social psychology is perhaps more redundant than truly insightful, insofar as the unconscious is always already socialized through and through: “In the individual’s mental life someone else is invariably involved, as a model, as an object, as a helper, as an opponent; and so from the very first individual psychology, in this extended but entirely justifiable sense of the words, is at the same time social psychology as well.”33 This also means that power and repression are not simply external to the subject; instead, they feed on what we otherwise consider to be our innermost idiosyncrasy. For Rozitchner, this paradox of the subjective inscription of power is ultimately what psychoanalysis, as an intervening doctrine which is not restricted to the therapeutic space of the couch in the consultation room, strives to uncover: “It is the emergence, beyond censorship and repression, of significations, lived experiences, feelings, thoughts, relations, drives, etc., present in our subjectivity, very often without their having reached consciousness, but actualized in objective relations, which break with that stark opposition that the system has organized in ourselves as though it were—as in some way it is—our own.”34
Of course, this relation of mutual presupposition between the psychic-libidinal and the politico-economic should not serve to hide the profound asymmetries between the two. Marxism and psychoanalysis do not simply complement each other by filling the gap in their neighbor’s discourse. Nor should the invocation of what Freud calls overdetermination, as a feature supposed to be common to both fields, lead us to ignore the shifting priorities