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