Marx and Freud in Latin America. Bruno Bosteels

Stalinist dogmatism should be revisited from the point of view of this historical outcome. The premise of the irreducibility of error, of the insuperable nature of alienation, and of the necessary inadequacy between concept and being, indeed runs through the entire finitist tradition of reading Hegel. Thus, central to Kojève’s claim that Hegel is the first to attempt a complete atheist and finitist philosophy, we already find the idea that, on the phenomenological and anthropological level, such an attempt requires a view of “man” as an essentially erroneous being for whom being and thinking are never quite adequate to one another, or at least not yet:

      Being which is (in the Present) can be “conceived of” or revealed by the Concept. Or, more exactly, Being is conceived of at “each instant” of its being. Or else, again: Being is not only Being, but also Truth—that is, the adequation of the Concept and Being. This is simple. The whole question is to know where error comes from. In order that error be possible, the Concept must be detached from Being and opposed to it. It is Man who does this; and more exactly, Man is the Concept detached from Being; or better yet, he is the act of detaching the Concept from Being. He does so by negating-Negativity—that is, by Action, and it is here that the Future (the Pro-ject) enters in. This detaching is equivalent to an inadequation (the profound meaning of errare humanum est), and it is necessary to negate or act again in order to achieve conformity between the Concept (=Project) and Being (made to conform to the Project by Action). For Man, therefore, the adequation of Being and the Concept is a process (Bewegung), and the truth (Wahrheit) is a result. And only this “result of the process” merits the name of (discursive) “truth,” for only this process is Logos or Discourse.52

      The ability of human errors to survive, in fact, is what distinguishes man or the human being from nature, according to Kojève:

      If Nature happens to commit an error (the malformation of an animal, for example), it eliminates it immediately (the animal dies, or at least does not propagate). Only the errors committed by man endure indefinitely and are propagated at a distance, thanks to language. And man could be defined as an error that is preserved in existence, an error that endures within reality. Now, since error means disagreement with the real; since what is other than what is, is false, one can also say that the man who errs is a Nothingness that nihilates in Being, or an “ideal” that is present in the real.53

      What is more, it is only thanks to, and not in spite of, our essentially human tendency to err that truth is possible. Otherwise, without the possibility of human error, being would be mute facticity. As Kojève adds: “Therefore, there is really a truth only where there has been an error. But error exists really only in the form of human discourse.”54 Or, to use Hegel’s own words from the Encyclopedia, in one of Adorno’s favorite formulations: “Only out of this error does the truth arise. In this fact lies the reconciliation with error and with finitude. Error or other-being, when superseded, is still a necessary dynamic element of truth: for truth can only be where it makes itself its own result.”55

      For Kojève, unlike what is the case for Adorno or Revueltas, true wisdom famously will bring about the perfect adequation of being and concept in the figure of the sage at the end of history. This also means that finitude, conscious of itself, passes over into the infinite; any additional act or action, then, is superfluous. By contrast, in the absence of any ultimate reconciliation, it would appear that philosophy or theory survives only in and through error, through the gap between the concept and its object or between representation and the real, a gap that is thus not merely temporary or accidental but constitutive of the possibility of knowing anything at all. And yet, if it is indeed the case that finitude today constitutes a new dogma that—rather than rendering the act superfluous—blocks all action so as to avoid the trappings of radical evil, should we not also invert this conclusion regarding the irreducibility of error by reaffirming the identity of being and thinking in the good old fashion of Parmenides? Perhaps as nowhere else, Revueltas will explore this possibility through his own notion of the profound act, or acto profundo, in “Hegel y yo” (“Hegel and I”). To understand the problem for which this story appears to provide a solution, however, we will first have to consider Revueltas’s most ambitious theoretical work, comparable to the “essay” being written by Jacobo Ponce in Los errores—that is, the unfinished manuscripts and notes for the posthumously published Dialéctica de la conciencia.

      3

      ON THE SUBJECT OF THE DIALECTIC

      Not All Theory Is Gray

      What the enormous effort put into Dialéctica de la conciencia suggests is first and foremost the author’s conviction that perhaps not all theoretical work is dull or superfluous, despite the fact that, from personal reflections and diary entries jotted down in the heat of the moment during and right after the events of 1968 in Mexico, Revueltas seems to have been rather fond of Goethe’s one-liner according to which, in comparison with the golden tree of life, all theory is but a gray and deadening undertaking. “Gris es toda teoría,” without the latter half of the original sentence, “verde es el árbol de oro de la vida,” in fact serves as the recurrent header for a number of these reflections, published posthumously under the title México 68: Juventud y revolución: “All theory is gray, the golden tree of life is green.”1 The quote, which also appears as an inscription on Revueltas’s tombstone, may remind some readers of Lenin’s famous witticism, written just one month after the events of October 1917 in the Postscript to The State and Revolution, that “it is more pleasant and useful to undertake the ‘experience of revolution’ than to write about it.”2 Nowadays, this downplaying of theoretical writing, whether in favor of direct experience or of life pure and simple, would no doubt sit well with many critics, especially those who would be all too happy to oppose in very similar terms the green pastures of literary and cultural studies to the drab landscape of so-called theory. And yet, in all cases we should perhaps be wary of drawing too quick a conclusion about the significance of theoretical work, or the lack thereof.

      Lenin, to begin with, is also the author of another one-liner that was constantly invoked during the worldwide sequence of events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, by anyone from Che Guevara to followers of Chairman Mao: “Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement.”3 Like Lenin, who considered the study of Hegel’s notoriously difficult Science of Logic no less vital a task than answering the question of What Is to Be Done?, most of Revueltas’s work during the final years of his life, many of which were spent in captivity in the Lecumberri prison for his alleged role as one of the intellectual instigators of the 1968 student-popular movement, was devoted to what can only be described as an ongoing effort of theoretical speculation. This is particularly evident in Dialéctica de la conciencia. The intense intellectual labor displayed in the pages of this often obscure volume should serve as a warning that, for a theoretician, it is not necessarily the case that the neighbor’s grass is always greener. Or, rather, if we are to follow in Hegel’s footsteps, the grayness of theory and philosophy may well have a function all of its own—not to celebrate the eternal fountain of life, of novelty, and of rejuvenation, but to come to know what is, just before it turns into the massive inertia of what was, at the hour of dusk. “When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy’s grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood,” Hegel writes in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right: “The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk.”4 As for linguistic obscurity, Revueltas had this to say in one of his last interviews:

      What happens is something that Ernst Bloch explains with regard to the “obscure’’ language of Hegel: it is obscurity imposed for reasons of precision, says Bloch. We should remember that the obscure, expressed as such with exactitude, is something completely different from the clear, expressed with obscurity . . . The first is adequate precision for what is said and sayable . . . The second, pretension and dilettantism.5

      On our end, finally, the newfound resistance to, or weariness with, theory, combined with a flourishing enthusiasm for cultural studies, can at least in part be explained by a failure to absorb exactly the kind of intellectual work found in writings such as these posthumous ones by Revueltas. Perhaps, then, by returning to these writings, we receive a chance not only to resurrect a colossal but largely neglected figure in the political and intellectual