is suddenly “on the verge” of forming itself, “on the verge” of bursting into our field of visibility, according to Revueltas?
What Revueltas is seeking in his “cognitive anecdotes” would thus be an experience akin to the formation of “dialectical images” for Benjamin:
In the dialectical image, what has been within a particular epoch is always, simultaneously, “what has been from time immemorial.” As such, however, it is manifest, on each occasion, only to a quite specific epoch—namely, the one in which humanity, rubbing its eyes, recognizes just this particular dream image as such. It is at this moment that the historian takes up, with regard to that image, the task of dream interpretation.44
As for the imminence of this act, which is never fully present to the mind but rather lurks behind the scenes as something that is always on the verge of, or on the point of, occurring, this too is seen as a decisive aspect of the dialectical method:
Still to be established is the connection between presence of mind and the “method” of dialectical materialism. It’s not just that one will always be able to detect a dialectical process in presence of mind, regarded as one of the highest forms of appropriate behavior. What is even more decisive is that the dialectician cannot look on history as anything other than a constellation of dangers which he is always, as he follows its development in his thought, on the point of averting.45
The task of critical reason, then, is much closer to the interpretation of a dream than to a simple exercise of the cogito’s presence of mind and nearly divine self-consciousness. Revueltas, like Benjamin, finally proposes to see the activity of thought as a secular, or profane illumination: “Consciousness, freed and bared of all divinity—in virtue as much as in vice—puts things on their feet that were standing on their head, it illuminates them, and it profanes them.”46
Acts of Theory
In a remarkably enigmatic short story, “Hegel y yo”, published in 1973 as the opening of a planned future novel or series of narratives on the same subject that would never see the light, Revueltas returned once more to this notion of the profane illumination that takes place whenever an emergent consciousness is on the verge of breaking through the monumental obliteration of generic human memory and work. On this occasion, he describes such moments in terms of “acts”—that is, truly “profound acts,” which completely change the seemingly eternal paradigms of existing knowledge in light of a truth that is both historical and yet part of an immemorial past that runs through, and sometimes interrupts, the continuum of human history.
Despite its unfinished nature, “Hegel and I” represents a culminating moment in the long trajectory of Revueltas as a narrator and a thinker. These two activities, narration and thought, are inseparable here perhaps more so than in any of his other stories, or in most of his already quite intellectualized novels. The story, in fact, seems to take up and try to solve some of the deadlocks present in Revueltas’s strictly theoretical writings from the same period, the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of which have been published posthumously by Andrea Revueltas and Philippe Cheron in volumes such as Dialéctica de la conciencia and México 68: Juventud y revolución.
“Hegel,” in the story, is the nickname of a prisoner, a paraplegic who from his wheelchair exchanges anecdotes and philosophical musings with his cellmate, a thinly disguised alter ego of Revueltas himself. “It is a questioning of Hegelian philosophy, referred to the prison,” the author explained in an interview: “A character who arrives in prison is a bank-robber called ‘Hegel’ because he robbed a bank on Hegel Street. Everyone calls him ‘Hegel.’ From there the narrator takes up the positions of Hegel in order to demonstrate that the prison is the state.”47 From this character, in fact, we obtain not only a theory of the state as a prison-like panopticon, but also the outline for a provocative theory of the act; or, to be more precise, a theory of the theoretical act—of what it means to reach consciousness in the act of theory.
True acts have no witnesses in history; in other words, there are no testimonies of the truly profound acts of consciousness. Rather, they belong to the silent reserve of an unconscious and immemorial recollection, the counter-memory of that which has not taken place. “The profound act lies within you, lurking and prepared to jump up from the bottom of your memory: from that memory of the non-event [esa memoria de lo no-ocurrido],” says “Hegel,” and the anonymous narrator approves: “He’s right: our acts, our profound acts as he says, constitute that part of memory that does not accept remembering, for which it does not matter whether there are witnesses or not. Nobody is witness to nobody and nothing, each one carries his or her own recollection of the unseen, or the unheard-of, without testimonies.”48 Without memory, without testimony, unwitnessed yet recorded in the blank pages of a collective unconscious, profound acts are those acts that define not only a subject’s emergent consciousness but this very subject as well. Subjects are local instances of such acts.
“You,” or “I,” according to “Hegel and I,” are but the result of the profound acts of history, whether in 1968 or 1917, in 1905 or 1871—acts that forever will have changed the conditions of politics in history. This is not a blind voluntaristic account of the subject’s capacity for action and intervention, since it is not the subject but the act that is first. The act is not our own doing so much as it is we who are the result, or the local instance, of the act. In the words of “Hegel”:
Thus, insofar as you are here (I mean, here in prison or wherever you are, it doesn’t matter), insofar as you stand in and are a certain site, you have something to do with this act. It is inscribed in your ancient memory, in the strangest part of your memory, in your estranged memory, unsaid and unwritten, unthought, never felt, which is that which moves you in the direction of such an act. So strange that it is a memory without language, lacking all proper signs, a memory that has to find its own way by means of the most unexpected of all means. Thus, this memory repeats, without our being aware of it, all the frustrations prior to its occurrence, until it succeeds in chancing again upon the original profound act which, for this reason alone, is yours. But only for this reason, because it is yours without belonging to you. The opposite is the case: you are the one who belongs to the act, by which, in the end, you cease to belong to yourself.49
The act not only constitutes the brief occurrence of an identity of thinking and being, but it also would seem retroactively to redeem past errors and failures of history. I would even suggest that, through the notion of a repetition of the memory of lo no-ocurrido—that is, literally “the unhappened” or “the non-occurred”—Revueltas is inverting the logic of Hegel’s sublation which, as Žižek frequently reminds us, amounts to a kind of Ungeschehenmachen, incidentally the same German term that Freud uses in his own understanding of denegation. While Hegel famously located this capacity to unmake history in the notion of Christian forgiveness, Žižek extends its field of application to include the core of Hegel’s logic as a whole:
One is thus able to conceive of Ungeschehenmachen, the highest manifestation of negativity, as the Hegelian version of “death drive”: it is not an accidental or marginal element in the Hegelian edifice, but rather designates the crucial moment of the dialectical process, the so-called moment of the “negation of negation,” the inversion of the “antithesis” into the “synthesis”: the “reconciliation” proper to synthesis is not a surpassing or suspension (whether it be “dialectical”) of scission on some higher plane, but a retroactive reversal which means that there never was any scission to begin with—“synthesis” retroactively annuls this scission.50
For Revueltas, however, the aim of the profound acts of history is not symbolically, or at the level of the spirit, to unmake what did happen, but rather to allow that what did not happen be made to happen. Therein lies not the retroactive annihilation of scission so much as the redemptive introduction of a scission where previously none existed.
Insofar as it relates not to the actual events of the
