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 rage which immediately becomes honest—after inflicting the first whiplash—and full of a muffled and passionate justice.”29 Revueltas possesses a relentless, painfully eloquent and lucid honesty in uncovering the most recondite and perverse hideouts where power latches onto affectivity.
The affects that most insidiously circulate through the universe of Revueltas’s narrative—rage, fear, and hatred, not to mention the desperate yearning for justice—all serve to link the individual to a supra-individual ideological cause. Don Victorino, the moneylender about to fall prey to an attempted robbery on behalf of the communists, considers that such a linkage offers a point of commonality that he shares not only with his accomplices in the Anticommunist Mexican League, such as Nazario Villegas, but also with his most feared class enemies, among whom we find one of his own employees, the communist infiltrator Olegario Chávez. The following sentence also offers us a good sample of Revueltas’s quite unique and inimitable style—for who else, aside from Martí, can sustain for over a dozen lines a single sentence without losing its dialectical cadence and fluency?
If he had felt capable of kneeling down before Nazario—don Victorino thought, precisely because of the secret generosity of his impulse, without fear that he would interpret it as abject behavior, it was so that a gesture of such desperate eloquence would make him understand, all of a sudden, the way in which he, don Victorino, appreciated the situation not only with respect to his own person but also, above all, insofar as in this person, in his concrete and individual destiny, there lay condensed the logic, the reason, the justice—and also the tribulations and impiety—of the cause for which both of them fought, a condensation whose discovery (barely ten minutes before, when don Victorino began to measure the magnitude of the threat represented by Olegario Chávez by his side as a communist spy) was a kind of common patrimony, an appalling common responsibility, that both had to grasp and share in everything new, radical, and unusual that it would require from their lives.30
Something in Olegario Chávez, for this same reason, ends up seeming curiously seductive to don Victorino. Despite the hatred each of them feels for the other, both men ultimately operate in identical ways, devoting their lives to a cause in which they simultaneously recognize their most profound and personal vocation. Thus, still according to don Victorino,
The communists had signaled him and nobody else, in the same way in which Judas had chosen Jesus; in the same way in which Judas had destined Jesus, inevitably, to bear witness. Both had ended up being entwined and sentenced from the beginning by the same destiny and the same fear, the fear that overcomes those who know themselves in a way to be in possession of the truth: of both sides of the truth. Above all, this is what Olegario was to don Victorino: the presence in which he contemplated himself, the inexorable and hoped-for justification of his life, of his history, of his form of being the way he was and of the reason for that vital, superhuman, and impious violence, out of spite for the mediocrity, pettiness and hatred in the midst of which he had always had to live, solitary, strong, and disdainful.31
The communist traitor, in this sense, plays a fundamental role in the psychic economy of his archenemy, the proto-fascist usurer don Victorino:
Olegario Chávez plays next to him, from the point of view of the communist plans, a very special role of transcendence . . . quite the opposite of a vulgar spy or provocateur. Neither his conduct, nor the fundamental traits of his character, displayed the slightest deceitfulness: he was frank, straightforward to the point of insolence and rudeness, if one wanted, but by no means deceitful, by no means was he a type who would play with marked cards. His tactic of open, frank, and frontal attack, for this very reason, revealed the truly singular perspective of his goals.32
Above all, what we begin to glimpse in this impeccable narrative exposition is the way in which a certain dogmatism, on the part of communists no less than of their class enemies, nurtures itself with the full spectrum of human affectivity. With this critique of the subjective logic of dogmatism and authoritarianism, however, we already find ourselves at the center of the second intrigue in Revueltas’s novel.
Rethinking the Twentieth Century
The nineteenth century announced, dreamed, and promised; the twentieth century declared it would make man, here and now.
Alain Badiou, The Century
The twentieth century did not exist. Humanity made a huge leap into the void from the theoretical presuppositions of the nineteenth century, through the failure of the twentieth century, to
