fragment above that seems to have given the novel its title, everything revolves around the status of errors: Is there or is there not sublation of the errors (mistakes, crimes, infamies) committed by history, in the sense of a dialectical Aufhebung? For those who reproach Revueltas for his blind confidence in the Hegelian dialectic, it would seem that the sheer idea of finding some sense or relevance in such errors only aggravates their criminal nature to the point of the abomination of justifying terror and totalitarianism. The problem with this indignant rejection of the possibility of sublating error, however, is that it leads to a position outside or beyond the history of communism. It interprets the errors as a definitive refutation of communism as such, in order henceforth to assert the cause of post-communism, or even anti-communism pure and simple. The Moscow trials, in this sense, play a role comparable to that of the Gulag, as described for the West by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, by leading to a defense of democratic liberalism as the only remedy against the repetition of radical Evil—that is, against the threat of so-called “totalitarianism,” with its twin faces of Nazism and communism: Hitler and Stalin.
For Revueltas, as for someone like Badiou, the task consists in thinking the crimes from within the politics of communism, and not the other way around—not so as to ratify the facts with the stamp of historical inevitability, but so as to formulate an immanent critique that at the same time would avoid the simple abandonment of communism as such. “I would not want you to take these somewhat bitter reflections as yet more grist to the mill of the feeble moralizing that typifies the contemporary critique of absolute politics or ‘totalitarianism,’” warns Badiou in his own Hegelian reading of the function of violence and semblance in the Moscow trials: “I am undertaking the exegesis of a singularity and of the greatness that belongs to it, even if the other side of this greatness, when grasped in terms of its conception of the real, encompasses acts of extraordinary violence.”40 What seems to be happening today, however, is a tendency to interrupt or, worse, to foreclose in anticipation any radical emancipatory project in the name of a new moral imperative—key to the “ethical turn” that globally defines the contemporary age from the 1980s onward, including within the so-called Left—which obliges us above all, if not exclusively, to avoid the repetition of the crime.
Beautiful Souls
Morality is impotence in action.
Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, The Holy Family
With Los errores, Revueltas may have become the unwitting accomplice of contemporary nihilism, which consists precisely in defining the Good only negatively by way of the need to avoid Evil. “Evil is that from which the Good is derived, not the other way round,” as Badiou writes in his diagnosis of the ethical turn. “Nietzsche demonstrated very neatly that humanity prefers to will nothingness rather than to will nothing at all. I will reserve the name nihilism for this will to nothingness, which is like a counterpart of blind necessity.”41 In particular, there are two aspects of the debate regarding dogmatism in Los errores that run the risk of contributing to this complicity: the theme of the ethical role attributed to the party and the metaphysical, or more properly post-metaphysical, speculation about “man” or “humanity” (el hombre) as an erroneous being. Both of these themes obviously are presented in the hope of serving as possible correctives to the reigning dogmatism of Stalinism, but they could easily bring the reader to the point of adopting an ideological position that lies at the opposite extreme of the one its author upheld until his death just over thirty years ago.
Revueltas, on one hand, lets Jacobo Ponce, the character nearest to his own heart as an intellectual, devote most of his energy to the task of an ethical reflection about the party’s authority. “The party as an ethical notion”—such is the topic of Jacobo’s classes, against the orthodoxy of the party as the vanguard of the proletariat: “The party as a superior moral notion, not only in its role as political instrument but also as human consciousness, as the reappropriation of consciousness.”42 Thus, beyond the desire for reappropriation, or perhaps thanks to this desire, the critique of dogmatic reason already entails the temptation of a curious sense of moral superiority.
At the end of the novel, in the “Blind Knot” that serves as its epilogue, Ismael reaches the same conclusion as Jacobo: “The conclusion to be derived from this, if we introduce into our study of the problem the concepts of a humanist ethics, the concepts that stem from an ethical development of Marxism, can only be the most overwhelming and terrible conclusion, especially considering the parties that come into power.”43 The conclusion in question holds that the exercise of dogmatism on behalf of the “leading brains” of the communist movement, in Mexico as much as elsewhere in the world, with its “consoling tautology” that “the party is the party,” in reality involves “the most absolute ethical nihilism, the negation of all ethics, ciphered in the concept: to us everything is permitted.”44
If, on the other hand, “thought and practice . . . are identified as twin brothers in metaphysics and in dogma,” then it is understandable that Jacobo, in addition to an ethical inflection of the party, would also propose a philosophico-anthropological reflection about “man as erroneous being.”45 This reflection is part of the “essay” in which Jacobo has invested “close to three months of conscientious and patient labor,” no doubt similar to the labor it would take Revueltas a few years later to write his own unfinished and posthumous essay, Dialéctica de la conciencia. Jacobo reads from this text, which again is worth quoting at length so as to get a taste of the sheer syntactical complexity of the dialectical sentence:
Man is an erroneous being—he began to read with his eyes, in silence; a being that never finishes by establishing itself anywhere; therein lies precisely his revolutionary and tragic, unpacifiable condition. He does not aspire to realize himself to another degree—and this is to say, in this he finds his supreme realization—to another degree—he repeated to himself—beyond what can have the thickness of a hair, that is, this space that for eternal eternity, and without their being a power capable of remedying this, will leave uncovered the maximum coincidence of the concept with the conceived, of the idea with its object: to reduce the error to a hair’s breadth thus constitutes, at the most, the highest victory that he can obtain; nothing and nobody will be able to grant him exactitude. However, the space occupied in space and in time, in the cosmos, by the thickness of a hair, is an abyss without measure, more profound, more extensive, more tangible, less reduced, though perhaps more solitary, than the galaxy to which belongs the planet where this strange and hallucinating consciousness lives that we human beings are.46
What Jacobo proposes in this “essay” can be read as a new metaphysics—or rather an anti-metaphysics—of error and equivocity, against dogma and exactitude. Indeed, if the identity of being and thinking defines the basic premise of all metaphysical dogmatism, then human conscience or consciousness (conciencia in Spanish meaning both) can avoid dogmatism only by accepting an infinitesimal distance, or minimal gap, between the concept and the thing conceived.
We could say that Revueltas in Los errores accepts the need for a revision of the Hegelian dialectic in ways that are similar to what Adorno, around the same time, proposed with his “negative dialectics,” according to which no concept ever completely covers its content without leaving behind some leftover, or remnant of nonidentity: “The name of dialectics says no more, to begin with, than that objects do not go into their concepts without leaving a remainder, that they come to contradict the traditional norm of adequacy.”47 Or, to use the almost perfectly comparable words of Badiou: “To begin with, a dialectical mode of thinking will be recognized by its conflict with representation. A thinking of this type pinpoints some unrepresentable point in its midst, which reveals that one touches upon the real.”48 Much of Revueltas’s intellectual work as a novelist and a theorist during the 1960s and 1970s is devoted to such a reformulation of the dialectic, as the conception of the non-conceptual or the representation of the unrepresentable.
In the case of Los errores, however, it is not difficult to guess where the ethics of the party and the metaphysics of error will end up. Both arguments could in fact be invoked—not without taking on airs
