in Mexico.23
We can thus observe how it is through a dialectical theory of the inherent contradictions between consciousness and its other, as well as of their transformation into their opposites, that Revueltas seeks to reconstruct the crisis of Marxism based on his own readings of Marx from the time of the latter’s split with the Young Hegelians.
The Dialectic Revisited
Everything in this context ultimately depends on our understanding of what is meant by dialectical thinking. “The point is to be clear about the subject of the dialectic,” Badiou also writes: “The dialecticity of the dialectic consists precisely in having a conceptual history and in dividing the Hegelian matrix to the point where it turns out to be essentially a doctrine of the event, and not the guided adventure of the spirit. A politics, rather than a history.”24 Thus, when Revueltas wrote to his daughter Andrea, “We must return to Hegel’s Phenomenology, whether we want to or not,”25 or when he wrote to her in another letter, “We have to go back openly to Hegel, to the young Marx and to political economy ‘beyond’ Capital, that is to say, to the ‘ignored’ Marxism, the Marxism that was bracketed for over fifty years and not only by Stalinism,” his aim was still to come to a concrete understanding of the notion of the dialectic: “All the contradictions of Marxism in Mexico can be summed up as resistance to, and ignorance of, the dialectic.”26 How, then, does Revueltas define the dialectic?
Right from the beginning of Dialéctica de la conciencia, Revueltas may very well have seemed to echo Sartre’s position, in the latter’s polemic with Heidegger, that it is above all a question of man—that is, a question not of being but of the human being. In his case, however, the affirmation “Ante todo se trata de la cuestión hombre” is immediately followed by the question “Pero, en fin, ¿qué es el hombre?”—to which the author of the Critique of Hegel’s Philosophy of Right is allowed to reply: “Karl Marx proposes to us an illuminating answer. ‘Man is the world of men,’ he says. The world of human beings—in other words, society, its modes of production, religion, the state: a changing world which has never been the same throughout its history.”27 It is at this point that the otherwise traditional, humanist, or idealist image of Hegel’s method is displaced by the search for a materialist dialectic of society as a concrete and contradictory totality. How, then, can we come to know this apparently unknowable totality that constitutes the proper object of dialectical reason? Revueltas does not answer this last question in any straightforward manner. Instead, in the remaining pages of the full draft of his essay, he weaves the discussion in and out of three examples, which he prefers to call “cognitive anecdotes,” derived respectively from the postal system, from archaeology, and from architecture.
The essential determination of society as an object of thought cannot be discerned in the immediate knowledge of the senses: “You should not look for it in the direct and immediate report of the senses but in a vast and complex set of internal relations and correlations.”28 This much larger horizon, however, remains as invisible or unknowable to our everyday thoughts and habits as the complete functioning of the postal system is for the individual who absentmindedly drops off a letter in the mail:
Our individual has written a letter, he has “worked” on it, but he ignores the fact that this whole vast set of activities (writing, sealing the letter, buying stamps and attaching them, depositing the letter into a postbox) is inserted within a mass of human work that is common, general, total, constant, active, past, present, and historical in the most plastic sense of the word, this invisible matter in which the lines of communication are drawn and draw themselves, from the time when one of them discovered himself in “the others” and succeeded in inventing and emitting the first “signs of identity,” a first scream, a first smoke signal, a first letter. The postal system reveals nothing to our individual, even though it allows him at least to be this human being in whom he does not yet perceive himself, but in whom he no doubt will one day come to perceive himself as soon as he assumes consciousness of it.29
What Revueltas is after in this, as well as in the other two passages, is not so much an orthodox, Lukácsian or Kosikian, totality as the identical subject-object of history, but rather something more along the lines of a cognitive map, or a situational understanding of the system, as defined in more recent years by Fredric Jameson.
If we turn now to the second case, in which an archaeologist decides to employ a group of local bricklayers to help him with the task of digging up the objects on his site, a split immediately sets apart the manual labor of the diggers from the larger cultural and intellectual knowledge regarding the objects of their labor. The diggers are thus deprived of the consciousness involved in their very own labor. Revueltas insists, however, in this case even more so than in the brief example of the letter-writer, that these bricklayers now turned into anthropological laborers, too, are perhaps on the verge of a special kind of consciousness:
Nevertheless, what happened to them in the passage from one job to the other has an extraordinary meaning. The “world of men” placed them socially as “anthropological laborers,” in a situation where they were “on the verge of” realizing a true human form of labor, “on the verge of” converting themselves into real human beings and not only because of the fact—which they will have commented upon with mocking joy—of having served for some days for this “crazy guy” who contracted them for a strange and incomprehensible activity, and paid them, to boot, with an unusual generosity. They were “on the verge,” yes, but this “on the verge” stayed there, suspended, without resolving itself, like a phantasmatic emanation above the anthropological work that disappeared, in the same way that the vagrant flames of fuegos fatuos float over the graves of a cemetery. However, such being “on the verge” repeats itself and remains in the labor of bricklaying to which they returned, because in a certain sense and in a new but essential form, they continue to be “anthropologists” on their job as house-builders.30
Nothing ever seems to be lost for good when it comes to the consciousness of human work. For the most part, however, even while being perhaps indestructible, the common mass of generic human labor vanishes or evaporates into the depths of a spectral or phantasmatic type of memory, a collective yet transhistorical memory that is closer to the unconscious than to consciousness, and in which experiences are accumulated, preserved, and repeated from time immemorial, until those rare moments when, as in a sudden act of awakening, they re-enter the field of vision.
Freud and Lacan had already insisted on the indestructible nature of the unconscious. The memory of desire is unlike any other form or kind of memory, precisely because of the fact that nothing is ever forgotten by desire. Lacan thus recalls that Freud’s discovery is very much bound up with the discovery of “the inextinguishable duration of desire, a feature of the unconscious which is hardly the least paradoxical, even though Freud never gives it up.”31 For Lacan, of course, the locus of this peculiar kind of memory is none other than a certain automatism of language itself. It is inscribed in traces, archives, bodies, and traditions as in a machine-like structure, or on a magical writing pad similar to the one famously invoked by Freud:
There is no other way to conceive of the indestructibility of unconscious desire—given that there is no need which, when its satiation is forbidden, does not wither, in extreme cases through the very wasting away of the organism itself. It is in a kind of memory, comparable to what goes by that name in our modern thinking-machines (which are based on an electronic realization of signifying composition), that the chain is found which insists by reproducing itself in the transference, and which is the chain of a dead desire.32
Freud himself had suggested in Totem and Taboo—and again, even more clearly, in Moses and Monotheism—that the latency and partial return of repressed materials be seen as phenomena characteristic not only of the life of the individual, but of the history of the human species as well. Speaking of the difference, or gap, between the official history of Moses and the oral tradition, Freud suggests that what is forgotten nonetheless survives elsewhere: “What has been deleted or altered in the written version might quite well have
