Marx and Freud in Latin America. Bruno Bosteels

themselves to be ruled by a destiny that is beyond their individual will. “Elena,” the ex-circus artist (whose nickname is a pun on el enano, “dwarf,” as a homonym for Elena-no, “not Elena”), for example, yearns to exercise his freedom and break completely with his boss and supposed friend “El Muñeco.” Locked up in a tiny suitcase, lying in wait for the right silence in order to jump out and rob the moneylender don Victorino’s shop, he momentarily suffers from delusions of grandeur and imagines himself capable of anything and everything: “But today he would not allow Mario Cobián to take advantage of him in any way. El Suavecito was not going to allow himself to be mocked. He decided to complete the first part of the theft. The moment to act had come: and it was up to him, to Elena. It was his moment.”20 Thus, the moment of absolute freedom arrives:

      The dwarf felt the full sensation of a happy, unlimited freedom, which he could express in whatever way he wanted, shouting out loud. So he did: a scratchy, ululating, savage scream, like a drunk Mexican. Absolute, aggressive, untainted freedom . . . Nothing less than that, absolute freedom . . . [all this] was his own determination, free and sovereign, the imposition of his own destiny over things, and not the other way around.21

      “Elena,” at the same time that he feels himself capable of being “the absolute author of his deeds and their irrefutable judge,” also experiences the uncannily painful and pleasant feeling of becoming an automaton under the yoke of some other—whether this other is fate or “El Muñeco”; but this sensation is actually indistinguishable from that other, “incomparably terrifying” one, which produces in him “a naked pleasure, without skin, without instruments: the sensation of infinity,” leading to the “paroxysm of a form of happiness both mad and atrocious.”22 What happens precisely is that the fascination with the act—with getting his moment—coincides with the desire for abandonment—for forming part of a plan larger than himself.

      Thus, the dwarf feels “an unspeakable contact” with the mandate emanating from the other, “to the point of emptying himself out completely in the void, without being aware of anything.”23 It is by purely and simply obeying orders that the desire of the subject reveals itself to be a desire of and for the other, a desire to which he submits himself as “an abandoned puppet.”24 Instead of being the agile acrobat of his own freedom, this ex-circus artist discovers that he is merely the docile automaton of a destiny that on all sides exceeds and controls him. And something similar happens not only to “La Magnífica”—“Why did she feel pushed liked an automaton to say exactly that which she had promised to keep quiet about?”25—but also, in anticipation of the second storyline, to the linotypist who, at the time of setting the manifesto of the Central Strike Committee (Comité Central de Huelga) “seemed like a somnambulant puppet that was being handled by someone from afar with the precision of a chess-player.”26 In all these cases, the act defines the linkage between an individual and the plane of the supra-individual, in a constitutive oscillation between freedom and automatism, between blind spontaneity and reflexive distance, between one’s own will and the impersonal chain of inevitability.

      Mario’s example once again offers the best summary of the paradoxes of the act:

      Mario felt that the earth was slipping away from under his feet. Why did things take this absurd and arbitrary turn, as in a grotesque nightmare? The plan did not unfold in conformity with what he had foreseen, it took paths of its own, invented resources, linked distant events, anticipated situations, even though it was not really different from the plan itself. To the contrary, materials and things that belonged to him, that were included in him in order to become realized, took on a destiny and chose an occasion on their own account, appearing in a new light, as in an enchanted mirror in which they looked at themselves as they had always wanted to see themselves and not in the way they were at the point defined by that personal human will. Mario could not have these thoughts or considerations for himself, but he guessed behind everything the existence of a deceitful and sly move, not devised by anyone in particular, but of which he made himself the victim—God knows why, or moved by whom?27

      Here Mario in effect appears to be “the Puppet” (El Muñeco) in a false setup, a nightmarish and absurd plan that is also at the same time secretly attractive. The plan that he seeks to accomplish is simultaneously an enchanting mirror in which he recognizes himself not as he is, but as he would like to appear. We might also say that the mirror returns to him an image—an imaginary identity—of his self in the analytical sense of the term, his ideal ego rather than his ego ideal. This is why abandoning himself to the plan, with all its incomprehensible whims included, turns out to be so delirious and painfully sweet. The most objective elements, a destiny woven from strange and alien forces, at the same time seem to communicate with the most intimate materials of the subjective realm, the innermost drives of one’s own being. Thus, we can feel ourselves to be free and authentic in the midst of the most complete alienation.

      Politics and Affectivity

      Here, incidentally, we come upon one of the most striking aspects of Los errores. The whole point is to unravel the affective and corporeal burden that constitutes the material base without which no power could inscribe itself in a lasting way at the heart of the subject. In my view, the most outstanding passages in Revueltas’s novel, stylistically speaking, are those devoted to tracing the ubiquitous circulation of rage, hatred, and resentment as the indispensable anchoring points that mark the subordination of a body to power, violence and exploitation—an exploitation which, in this way, turns out to be a kind of self-exploitation, or a servitude that is at least in part voluntary.

      “Where there is oppression, there is resistance,” people used to say at the time of Los errores, in an allusion to a famous dictum from Mao Zedong. In fact, what a novel like this one suggests is that, unless we capture where power—through affectivity and the subject’s psychic and libidinal economy—inscribes itself onto the body, we also will fail to activate the mainspring of effective resistance. This vast lesson, which Revueltas appears to distribute throughout the didactic parts of nearly all his narrative oeuvre, constitutes at the same time the premise of theoretical investigations on the part of contemporary figures. For instance, in “La izquierda sin sujeto” (“The Left Without a Subject”), a programmatic essay from 1966 published in the important Argentine journal La rosa blindada and reprinted in the Cuban journal Pensamiento crítico, the slightly younger Rozitchner laments precisely the inability of the orthodox Left to think through the subjective aspect of politics other than in terms of a purely negative or ideological supposition that we would be dealing with the “merely” subjective. “I hold that without subjective modification, without the elaboration of truth in the total situation in which the human subject participates, there exists no objective revolution,” writes Rozitchner. Later, he adds:

      If the transition from the bourgeoisie to the revolution appears as a necessity that emerges from within the capitalist regime itself, then this rational necessity must be read by grasping those sensible human elements therein that are also necessary and made it possible, and that both dogmatism and left-wing opportunism abstract as unnecessary: they read the rationality of the process all the while leaving out, as irrational, that which they are not capable of assuming or modifying: the subject itself, they themselves.28

      Revueltas, by contrast, submerges all his characters precisely in this sensible and affective zone that makes alienation possible as self-alienation.

      Los errores, in this sense, presents among other things a detailed physiology and psychic economy of power. The novel uncovers the affective life of resentment, rage, jubilation, and melancholy in whose web the human being remains trapped, quite literally, qua subject. “Affect,” in other words, is not here a mere synonym for emotion but rather the name for the residue in the body left behind by the inscription of an individual in an incorporeal, social, or political process, which articulates both power and resistance. Affect would be the mark of a subjectivization, the trace of the passage of a subject through a process of fidelity to a truth or its betrayal. Thus, to give but one example, the text reveals to us “the opaque drunkenness of a searching and artificial rage, similar to the little dosages of a narcotic that lightens the presence of things by making them innocent and faraway,” a rage which nonetheless can also and at the same time open up a place for a new sense of justice, beyond the misery that provokes so much rabid despair: “A