which could reach reality itself by virtue of its own contradictions; in short, there can be no “phenomenology” in the Hegelian sense: for consciousness does not accede to the real through its own internal development, but by the radical discovery of what is other than itself.7
In short, any dialectic would have to come to terms with the radical discovery of a certain unconscious as the real or material other of consciousness. Instead of the transparency of man as self-present subject, this alternative version of the materialist dialectic would posit the primordial opacity and externality of certain symbolic structures, often under the influence of a new appreciation of psychoanalysis. Indeed, if we follow Lacan, this is precisely how we might define the unconscious: “This exteriority of the symbolic with regard to man is the very notion of the unconscious.”8
Cogito or the unconscious, the subject or the structure: in all their simplified glory, these now familiar alternatives sum up what remains perhaps the last really great politico-philosophical battle in the twentieth century—a true example, moreover, of the Althusserian notion that “philosophy represents the class struggle in theory.”9 In its most extreme and vitriolic form, this polemic quickly turned out to be a diálogo de sordos opposing the “bourgeois humanists” who followed the young Marx of the Manuscripts of 1844 to the “dogmatic neo-Stalinists” who stuck to the mature and scientific Marx of Capital. Hegel, in this context, is often little more than a codename to denounce the persistence of humanist and idealist elements in the early Marx. Both in France and abroad, as in much of Latin America, Sartre and Althusser gave this polemic the impetus of their lifelong work and the aura of their proper names. As Alain Badiou writes:
When the mediations of politics are clear, it is the philosopher’s imperative to subsume them in the direction of a foundation. The last debate in this matter opposed the tenants of liberty, as founding reflective transparency, to the tenants of the structure, as prescription of a regime of causality. Sartre against Althusser: this meant, at bottom, the Cause against the cause.10
There would seem to be little doubt as to where exactly in this debate, or on which side, we should place Revueltas, since he had nothing but scorn for Althusser while he constantly expressed his admiration for Sartre. In reality, however, things are not as straightforward or as clear-cut as they first appear.
In a lucid Preface to Dialéctica de la conciencia, Henri Lefebvre draws our attention to this very debate regarding the foundation or ground of the dialectic. He concludes by highlighting the originality of the answer given by Revueltas: “From Engels to Revueltas, there occurs not only a change in perspective and meaning but also a polar inversion. Instead of being encountered in the object (nature), the foundation of the dialectic is discovered in the subject.”11 This conclusion would seem to confirm the initial suspicion about the understanding of the dialectic in the traditional humanist terms of liberty, consciousness, and the transparency of the self. Lefebvre, however, continues his remarks by immediately insisting on the subject’s internal contradictions:
Revueltas shows that this is not an effect of language, a disorder of discourse, a residual absurdity but, on the contrary, a situation, or better yet, a concatenation of situations, inherent in the subject as such: by reason of the fact that it is not a substance (as is the case for Cartesians) nor a result (as is the case for vulgar materialists and naturalists) but a specific activity as well as a complex and contradictory knot of relations to “the other,” of initiatives, memory, adhesion to the present and projects for the time to come.12
Clearly much more is involved in this understanding of the dialectic than either a mere change in perspective, or even an inversion between substance and subject. In fact, the subject’s consciousness, reason, or self-presence is always situated in tense contradiction with its internal other: the unconscious, unreason, or negativity. This contradictory unity is precisely what defines the dialectic, as opposed to a merely logical understanding of polar opposites in an inert relation of mutual externality or antinomy. “Revueltas shows the contradictions ‘in the act’ according to how they operate in consciousness,” Lefebvre adds, before hinting at a surprising family resemblance in this regard between Revueltas and the work of certain members of the Frankfurt School: “At certain moments Revueltas’ quest comes close to Adorno’s ‘negative dialectics.’ Most often he distances himself from it, but along a path that leads in the same direction.”13 Following this useful lead, I want to examine in more detail where this path actually takes us. Rather than seeking an approximation with Adorno, however, I will in the end suggest that the posthumous writings of Revueltas in fact show more elective affinities with the thought of Walter Benjamin.
In any event, instead of accepting the familiar schemes with which intellectual historians try to pigeonhole what they often disparagingly call “the thought of ’68,”14 we should come to grasp how subject and structure, not unlike Marxism and psychoanalysis in general, stand to each other in a relation of antagonistic articulation through the scission or separation of each of the two terms. Thus, if among later Althusserians the systematic formalization of the structure under certain conditions, which they call events, pinpoints a symptomatic blindness, or incompleteness, the presence of which already presupposes the inscription of a subject, then conversely we can expect to find remnants of the opacity of the structure, or what Sartre would have called elements of the practico-inert, in the midst of the subject’s efforts at reaching consciousness. Hegel himself, in fact, had already hinted at this possibility of seeing the first role of the subject, of spirit, or of the I, not as a schoolbook example of synthesis and sublation, but as the power to split reality into the real and the unreal, the power to sunder the concrete according to the actual and the non-actual, which is but another way of expressing the force of the other of consciousness, of death even, within consciousness itself. “For it is only because the concrete does divide itself, and make itself into something non-actual, that it is self-moving. The activity of separation is the power and work of understanding, the most astonishing and mightiest of powers, or rather the absolute power,” Hegel famously wrote in his Preface to the Phenomenology of Spirit:
The circle that remains self-enclosed and, like substance, holds its moments together, is an immediate relationship, one therefore which has nothing astonishing about it. But that an accident as such, detached from what circumscribes it, what is bound and is actual only in its context with others, should attain an existence of its own and a separate freedom—this is the tremendous power of the negative; it is the energy of thought, of the pure “I.”15
Rather than opposing subject and substance as two self-enclosed circles without intersection, the real task of the dialectic must therefore consist in coming to grips with the articulation of the two through the internal division of their oneness.
For Revueltas, consciousness always follows a logic of uneven development and only on rare occasions reaches moments of identity, or near identity, with the real. There is always a lag, a gap, or an anachronism, leading to spectral or phantasmatic structures of social consciousness. In a text on “The Present Significance of the Russian October Revolution,” also published in Dialéctica de la conciencia, Revueltas repeatedly insists on this unevenness:
What is especially important is to notice that such relations (between rational consciousness and praxis) are uneven and they act in relations of identity only in determinate moments of historical development (moments which, in their most elevated expression, can be counted in years). But even such identity is never absolute, since in every case, in order to act upon praxis (and convert itself into praxis), rational consciousness is mediated by ideology or ideologies.16
More often than not, reason and ideology are intertwined; in order to become practical, all truths must pass through a moment of ideology. At the same time, there are also contradictions, not just between consciousness and social being or practice, but within consciousness as such, due to the persistence of forms of division, hierarchy, and alienation within reason. In several texts from México 68, this process is described in terms of a divide, or a dialectical contradiction, between consciousness, or conciencia, and knowledge, or conocimiento.
