Marx and Freud in Latin America. Bruno Bosteels

Freud. Indeed, the question of knowing which would be determining in the final instance is still open, and the chapters that follow certainly do not claim to answer this question definitively. The aim is rather to dwell on the tensions of the struggle between the subjective and the objective, between the psychic and the historical, precisely as struggle, as combat and as transaction. “Transaction: objective-subjective elaboration of an agreement, the result of a prior struggle, of a combat in which the one who will become subject, that is, the I or the ego, is not that sweet angelical being called child, such as the adult imagines it, which would come to be molded with impunity by the system without resistance,” Rozitchner insists. “If there is transaction, if the I is its locus, there was a struggle at the origin of individuality: there were winners and losers, and the formation of the subject is the description of this process.”35 Indeed, it is with an eye on studying the intricacies of such a struggle that I turn in the following pages to a small corpus of texts and artworks from Latin America.

      More so than as a work of commemoration, not to mention nostalgia, I envision the studies that follow as exercises in a kind of counter-memory, not unlike the installation The Wretched of the Earth from the Argentine photographer Marcelo Brodsky. This installation includes a series of books that its owner—like so many students and intellectuals in the mid-1970s when the military junta in Argentina considered all such books potential proof of subversive activity that could lead to imprisonment, torture, and death—decided to bury in her backyard, where almost twenty years later they were dug up by her two adult children. Although time and the elements have eaten away at the books to the point of making them nearly unrecognizable, most readers familiar with the literature from the period will be able to discern that among the books on display in Brodsky’s installation are Spanish translations of Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth (Los condenados de la tierra), Louis Althusser’s For Marx (La revolución teórica de Marx), a collection of essays by Erich Fromm, Herbert Marcuse, André Gorz, and Víctor Olea Franco (La sociedad industrial contemporánea), as well as a totally disheveled and nearly coverless copy of Materialismo histórico y materialismo dialéctico (Historical Materialism and Dialectical Materialism), with texts by Althusser and Badiou, published in the book series Pasado y Presente edited by José Aricó. In a handwritten letter accompanying the installation, the original owner explains that, since she no longer remembered where exactly she had buried the books, her two sons had to dig several holes over the course of four days before finding the “treasure.” She adds: “The screams of joy from our kids contrasted sharply with the image of the destroyed books and everything they represented.”36

      Much of what I hope to do with the studies included in the present book can be said to consist in an effort to dig similar holes and tell the story of what happened with those works and others like them that were censored, forgotten, buried, or destroyed since the mid-1970s, in sharp contrast to the time in the late 1960s and early 1970s when many of them still represented obligatory reading materials for students, writers, intellectuals, militants, and artists alike. This effort in constructing an archive of counter-memory concerns not only the books that were actually buried and, in some cases, disinterred: what happened, for example, between the coup of 1976 in Argentina, when the books listed above were abandoned to the criticism of worms, and the supposed return to democracy during which, in 1994, they were brought back into broad daylight and exhibited to the public? Counter-memory also concerns the ideas, dreams and projects that were otherwise forced to find a more figurative hiding place in the inner recesses of the psychic apparatus of their original readers and proponents.

      The questions that I have in mind are similar to the ones that León Rozitchner asks of Óscar del Barco, for instance, regarding the long period of silence that separates his recent epistolary confession in “Thou Shalt Not Kill” from the historical acts of violence for which—forty years later—he offers his loud mea culpa. “Are we sure that one can pass, just like that, from one theory to another, from one concept to another?” asks Rozitchner. “So then what happened to our body, to our imagination, to our affects?”37 Del Barco may well have found a way to abandon Che Guevara’s deadly model of guerrilla warfare in favor of a post-metaphysical ethics of respect for the other inspired by Emmanuel Levinas. Yet he does not touch upon the subjective roots—both psychical and corporeal—of this seemingly purely theoretical shift. Nor does he clarify the personal coherence, or lack thereof, behind the decisions of those who were militants then and are anti-militants now. “But beyond the act of personal contrition that allows them to put their lives back together, what really matters, for us, is that these facts, which they did not assume, remained congealed like hard cores, or black holes, in the collective consciousness. They determined the past which for us is this future—the future past—that we are living today.”38 What remains in the shadows thus involves the motives, illusions, dreams and misprisions by which the subject becomes part of a historical truth that is still in the making. Where did the guilt, the shame, the anxiety, the rage, the pain, or the fear of death go to hide during all those years—before erupting into a loud confession that revolves around a Judeo-Christian commandment? In part following Rozitchner’s approach, the point of the exercises of genealogical counter-memory that I am proposing here is not to retrieve such subjective elements by inserting them into a nostalgic re-objectification of the past, but rather to reactivate their silent and still untapped resources for the sake of a critique of the present. “If at the time one had assumed as a social responsibility that which later underwent a metamorphosis and became a purely individual guilt,” Rozitchner continues, “one might have permitted the creation of something which fashionable thinking today calls an event, and thus the creation of a new meaning that would vanquish the determinism that marked us all.”39 Along these lines, incidentally, what in European theory and philosophy is called an “event” or “act” will also receive a rather different—frequently polemical—interpretation thanks to the confrontation with the conceptual trajectories behind similar notions in Latin America.

      Given this critical and theoretical orientation, my project is only indirectly related to the many “left turns” in the recent political history of Latin America, where at he start of 2010 we had democratically elected center-left, left-populist, or self-proclaimed socialist governments in power in at least eleven countries. “Two centuries after the wars of independence, one century after the Mexican Revolution, half a century after the Cuban Revolution, the new mole has re-emerged spectacularly in the continent of José Martí, Bolívar, Sandino, Farabundo Martí, Mariátegui, Fidel, Che and Allende,” writes Emir Sader, borrowing the famous mole-metaphor from Hegel and Marx. “It has taken on new forms in order to continue the centuries-old struggle for emancipation of the peoples of Latin America and the Caribbean.”40 This circumstance, which constitutes the favorite topic for sociologists and political scientists writing about Latin America today, certainly contributes to the recent resurgence of interest in the intellectual and ideological debates of the 1960s and 1970s. Testimonies and anthologies thus proliferate, as do the often state-sponsored facsimile republication of books and even entire runs of left-wing journals. For the most part, though, the rich documentary and testimonial literature that has come out of the different left turns has yet to produce an equivalent intensification in the overall critical analysis and theoretical elaboration of Marxism and psychoanalysis in Latin America—a collective project to which I hope to make a small contribution in the case studies that follow.

      The present book thus seeks to reassess the untimely relevance of certain aspects of the work of Marx (but also of Lenin and Mao) and Freud (but also of Lacan) in and for Latin America, with select case studies drawn from Mexico, Argentina, Chile, and Cuba. Starting from the abovementioned premise that Marxism and Freudianism strictly speaking are neither philosophical worldviews nor positive sciences, but rather intervening doctrines of the subject respectively in political and clinical-affective situations, I argue in the chapters of the book that art and literature—the novel, poetry, theater, film—no less than the militant tract or the theoretical treatise, provide symptomatic sites for the investigation of such processes of subjectivization. I will discuss almost none of the major recognized figures behind the various Communist (Marxist-Leninist, Trotskyist, Guevarist, Maoist) parties in Latin America—such as Julio Antonio Mella in Cuba, José Carlos Mariátegui and Víctor Raúl Haya de la Torre in Peru, Farabundo Martí and Roque Dalton in El Salvador, Vicente Lombardo Toledano in Mexico, René Zavaleta Mercado and Guillermo Lora in Bolivia,