To be sure, not all ten chapters of this book combine, or even seek to combine, equal parts from both Marxism and psychoanalysis. None aim to refer the works under discussion either to some prior orthodoxy or to some longed-for univocity based on these two discourses. Some chapters even discuss texts such as a series of pulp-fiction detective novels that may appear at first sight to be only remotely related to the topic of Marx and Freud in Latin America. In each case, however, I attempt to tease out a theoretical framework from the texts themselves, to the point where an author who is the object of analysis in one chapter can become the methodological reference point with which to analyze the objects of study in another. In fact, if there exists a standard against which I would like this book to be measured, aside from a penchant to go against the grain of accepted readings, it would be the idea of breaking down the traditional lines of demarcation between object and subject, criticism and theory, or literature and philosophy. Marxism and psychoanalysis, in this sense, serve as jumping-off points toward a renewed understanding of what I would gladly call “critical theory”—an intellectual practice for which criticism is not simply an ancillary qualification of theory but instead refers back to the specific tasks of close reading, as in literary or film criticism.43 Finally, at key points in this book and again at the very end, politics and psychoanalysis enter into dialogue with religion not only by way of a historical critique of Christianity or of the role of liberation theology in Latin America, but also through a brief return to “On the Jewish Question”—that is, to Marx’s text, as well as to some of the broader issues surrounding the question of religion whereof echoes can still be heard in the many writings by and on Freud such as The Future of an Illusion.
There is yet a third reason why I sidestep all discussion of the orthodox traditions of Marxism and Freudianism in Latin America—namely that, chronologically speaking, all the works analyzed in this book (again with the exception of José Martí’s writings) belong to a period in the latter half of the twentieth century marked by the internal crisis and critique of orthodox Marxism, and a concomitant revision of, and critical return to, Freud. If Martí is part of this book, it is because his chronicle on the occasion of Karl Marx’s death on March 14, 1883, especially when read in conjunction with Martí’s only novel, his 1885 Lucía Jerez (also known as Amistad funesta), anticipates a number of principles—in particular the logic of uneven development and the melodramatic responses that this logic often seems to elicit—that will recur in subsequent articulations of culture, politics, and psychoanalysis in the second half of the twentieth century, when we gradually cross beyond a post-revolutionary horizon. The events of 1968 clearly mark a threshold along this trajectory, and their influence can therefore be felt throughout the book. Thus, José Revueltas, thrown in jail by the government of President Gustavo Díaz Ordaz for his alleged role as intellectual instigator behind the revolt of this watershed year in Mexico, constitutes one of the book’s central theoretical reference points, together with the work of the Argentine Freudo-Marxist León Rozitchner. More specifically, Revueltas’s 1964 novel Los errores (The Errors) and his posthumous Dialéctica de la conciencia (Dialectic of Consciousness), written in the 1970s in the Lecumberri prison, are analyzed in Chapters 2 and 3 in terms of a critique of Stalinism and the ethico-theoretical revision of Marxism. Together with a little book by Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Revueltas’s interpretation of the events of 1968 is also read in Chapter 6 as a counterpoint to Octavio Paz’s poem about the massacre that took place in Tlatelolco on October 2, 1968—a poem that Paz sent to the cultural supplement of the magazine Siempre! right after the massacre, while at the same time submitting his resignation as the ambassador for Mexico in India to President Díaz Ordaz. Rozitchner’s little-known book Moral burguesa y revolución (Bourgeois Morality and Revolution), on the other hand, provides an important subtext for the Cuban filmmaker Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 movie Memorias del subdesarrollo (Memories of Underdevelopment), which I study in Chapter 4 in conjunction with Gutiérrez Alea’s own Dialéctica del espectador (The Viewer’s Dialectic). Rozitchner’s work in Freudo-Marxism in general, and his critique of Christianity in particular through the reading of Augustine’s Confessions in his 1997 book La Cosa y la Cruz (The Thing and the Cross), constitutes the topic of Chapter 5.
Subsequent chapters, by contrast, inquire into the melancholy paths of the post-1968 Left. Chapter 7 provides an analysis of the Maoist legacy in the writings of the Argentine novelist and critic Ricardo Piglia, especially his 1975 novella “Homenaje a Roberto Arlt” (“Homage to Roberto Arlt”), included in Nombre falso (Assumed Name). This analysis leads to a critique of the political economy of traditional concepts of art and literature that persist even within the revolutionary Left, from Bakunin to Lenin to Trotsky. In Chapter 8, I read the play Feliz nuevo siglo Doktor Freud (Happy New Century, Dr Freud), which the Mexican playwright Sabina Berman in 2000 devoted to a reworking of Freud’s famous Dora case, in light of the question of cultural democratization and the emancipatory potential of psychoanalysis. In Chapter 9, the series of nine novels (ten if we include Muertos incómodos, or The Uncomfortable Dead, coauthored with Subcomandante Marcos from the EZLN or Ejército Zapatista de Liberación Nacional) that, between 1976 and 1993, Paco Ignacio Taibo II structured around his hardboiled detective Héctor Belascoarán Shayne, are interpreted as contributions to a narrative history of the Left in Mexico. In Chapter 10, through an analysis of the novels Plata quemada (Money to Burn) by Ricardo Piglia and Mano de obra (Labor Power or Manual Labor) by the Chilean Diamela Eltit, I discuss the recurrent temptation of seeking a radical anarchistic alternative, often figured as the gift of a giant potlatch, to the crisis of neoliberalism and the formation of that new world order which Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri famously describe as Empire in their book of the same title—a book which was widely circulated and debated in the Southern Cone, especially around the time of the economic crisis of December 2001 in Argentina. Finally, the Epilogue revisits a question that runs through each of the previous chapters as seen in particular through the twin matrices of melodrama and the crime story—namely, the shifting relationship of hierarchy between ethics and politics that resulted from the moralization of political militancy among the post-1968 Left.
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MARTÍ AND MARX
Martí on Marx
Neither Saint-Simon, nor Karl Marx, nor Marlo, nor Bakunin. Instead, the reforms that are best suited to our own bodies.
José Martí, La Nación, February 20, 1890
If Marx fails to see any revolutionary potential in the realities of Latin America, overshadowed as these would be by the constant temptation of despotism due to a lagging or insufficient development of civil society, we should hasten to add that the misunderstanding often turns out to be reciprocal. Think of “Honores a Karl Marx, que ha muerto” (“Tributes to Karl Marx, who has died”), a well-known but strangely under-studied chronicle by the Cuban writer and independence fighter José Martí, written when he resided in New York and worked as a foreign correspondent for, among others, the Argentine daily newspaper La Nación. This chronicle has been acknowledged as being “a first pillar in the reception of Marxism in the strict philosophical