The circle that remains self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its moments together, is an immediate relationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure “I.”15
Rather than opposing subject and substance as two self-enclosed circles without intersection, the real task of the dialectic must therefore consist in coming to grips with the articulation of the two through the internal division of their oneness.
For Revueltas, consciousness always follows a logic of uneven development and only on rare occasions reaches moments of identity, or near identity, with the real. There is always a lag, a gap, or an anachronism, leading to spectral or phantasmatic structures of social consciousness. In a text on “The Present Significance of the Russian October Revolution,” also published in Dialéctica de la conciencia, Revueltas repeatedly insists on this unevenness:
What is especially important is to notice that such relations (between rational consciousness and praxis) are uneven and they act in relations of identity only in determinate moments of historical development (moments which, in their most elevated expression, can be counted in years). But even such identity is never absolute, since in every case, in order to act upon praxis (and convert itself into praxis), rational consciousness is mediated by ideology or ideologies.16
More often than not, reason and ideology are intertwined; in order to become practical, all truths must pass through a moment of ideology. At the same time, there are also contradictions, not just between consciousness and social being or practice, but within consciousness as such, due to the persistence of forms of division, hierarchy, and alienation within reason. In several texts from México 68, this process is described in terms of a divide, or a dialectical contradiction, between consciousness, or conciencia, and knowledge, or conocimiento. “Consciousness knows itself in the act but it ignores the nature of the known. This fact carries with it the insertion of a contradiction between consciousness and knowledge,” Revueltas writes, to which he adds a long explanation:
The question turns out to be not so simple when we approach the knowledge of consciousness from the point of view of its internal nature, as constant mobility and transformation, and externally, as contradiction and alienation. As mobility and transformation, consciousness is always unhappy with what knowledge provides it with. This changes what it knows (it discovers new data and reveals what is hidden beneath its new objectivity) but it also transforms consciousness itself and submits it to the anxiety of absolute non-knowledge, to the extreme point where a given impotence could turn it into an unreal consciousness. As for the external, its externalization, consciousness is in itself and in its other, in the form of religion, civil society, the state, as consciousness alienated from itself that no longer knows itself, in this exteriorization, as individual and free consciousness in itself. The state, religion, civil society are the consciousness of itself of the others, accumulated throughout time by historical knowledge.17
Reason here has to come to grips with its intrinsic other. In fact, its concrete movement is nothing but the process of its own self-splitting. Far from singing the stately glories of spirit as self-consciousness fully coming into its own, the dialectic tells the story of this ongoing scission between consciousness and knowledge, as well as between cogito and the unconscious. Such a story, which makes for an almost impossible narrative, always involves the risk of absolute non-knowledge, irretrievable anxiety, or downright madness.
Finally, one important corollary of this internally divided nature of consciousness is that, just as there lies a rational kernel even within ideology, radical or revolutionary thought can also become alienated into mere ideology, which it always carries with it as a shadow. At this moment, the split nature of all elements of the dialectic is erased in favor of a false purity: ideology without reason, or revolutionary reason without the truth of practice. “Every ideology, without exception, reaches a point where, by virtue of its proper nature as ideology, it must renounce all criticism, that is, the ‘rational kernel’ of which it could avail itself in the periods of revolutionary ascent, given its conditions as consciousness alienated onto a concrete praxis.”18 For Revueltas, this last moment is precisely the one that defines the crisis of Marxism after the death of Lenin, and even more so after the watershed year of 1927, when the living ghost of Trotsky started to wander in exile through much of Europe, before meeting his untimely death in Mexico. It is also the moment, however, when ideology lost its rational kernel, and the road was opened for a maddening and suicidal exasperation of the conflict, which increasingly threatened to become nuclear, between the United States and the Soviet Union.
Marx in his Limits
Indeed, another way of addressing the complex question of how to situate this writer’s theoretical work would be to draw out all the consequences of the otherwise unsurprising fact that for Revueltas, by the early 1970s, Marxism was caught in a deep crisis. In this sense, too, Revueltas is much closer to Althusser than either one of them—or, for that matter, any of their critics—would be willing to admit. “Marx in his Limits,”19 the heading under which, in the 1970s, Althusser collected many of his thoughts that were to be published only after his death, could thus very well serve as a subtitle for the posthumous Dialéctica de la conciencia as well. Revueltas is certainly not proposing an uncritical return to some pristine orthodoxy or hidden doctrinal kernel of the early Marx. The aim is rather more contorted, as can be gleaned from the proposed plan of study that is included in the latter half of the book by way of framing its impressive range of notes, quotes, and interpretive glosses, most of them written between 1968 and 1971 in Mexico City’s Lecumberri prison. If Revueltas sought to come to terms with the fundamental concepts of alienation, consciousness, and the philosophy of praxis implied in the Manuscripts of the young Marx, this was primarily in order to provide himself with the means to understand the dogmatic and revisionist deformations of the dialectic in the latter half of the twentieth century, at the hands of so-called vulgar, uncritical, or non-reflective Marxism. Marx’s theory of alienation and ideology thus serves as a critical tool with which to analyze, and hopefully undo the effects of, the ideological alienation of Marxism itself.
Along this complex trajectory Revueltas found a symptomatic turning point precisely in the split between the early Marx and other Young Hegelians such as Bruno Bauer, Ludwig Feuerbach or Arnold Ruge. As he wrote in his “General Plan of Study”: “It is a question of leading this investigation toward a clarification of the current crisis of Marxism. The point of departure for this investigation is situated at the moment of transition when Marxism discerns itself as such, separating itself from critical philosophy by extending the latter to society and its economic foundations.”20 In the operations with which critical philosophy becomes first dialectical, and then materialist, a logic of the social is contained that, once it is cut off from the concrete understanding of society as a contradictory totality, might paradoxically serve to explain the principles of its very own deformation. Revueltas finds this process at work not only in the official doctrine