only afterwards that historians—and perhaps philosophers of history such as Hegel—can name, date, and interpret the events that are repeated but not registered or witnessed in such an immemorial act:
It is an act that accepts all forms: committing it, perpetrating it, consummating it, realizing it. It simply is beyond all moral qualification. Qualifying it is left to those who annotate it and date it—that is, to the journalists and the historians, who must then necessarily adjust it to a determinate critical norm that is in force, whereby they only erase its traces and falsify it, erecting it into a Myth that is more or less valid and acceptable during a certain period of time: Landru, Ghengis Khan, Galileo, Napoleon, the Marquis de Sade, Jesus Christ, or Lenin, it’s all the same.52
Revueltas himself thus responds to the acts and events of 1968 with the demand for a theory of the act that would be able to account for the process by which the frustrated acts of past revolutions and uprisings—acts of rebellion such as the railworkers’ strike of 1958–59 in Mexico—are awoken from their slumber and, from being unconscious recollections of the non-event, break out of the shell of available knowledge in order to produce the categories for an unheard-of truth.
As prolonged theoretical acts, though, events cannot be seized without sacrificing their nature, unless the interpretive framework itself is attuned to reflect this very event-like nature itself. To his friends and fellow militants of May 1968 in France, for example, Revueltas sent a public letter with the following message: “Your massive action, which immediately turns into historical praxis, from the first moment on possesses the peculiar nature of being at the same time a great theoretical leap, a radical subversion of the theory mediated, deformed, fetishized by the epigones of Stalin.”53 This radical subversion in turn must be theorized without losing its subversiveness in the no-man’s-land of a theory without practice. Writing from his cell in Lecumberri, Revueltas asked nothing less from his fellow Mexicans. “I believe,” he wrote against all odds in 1976, in a collection of essays about the massacre in Tlatelolco, “that the experience of 1968 is a highly positive one, and one that will bring enormous benefits, provided that we know how to theorize the phenomenon.”54
4
CAN THE NEW MAN SPEAK?
A Subject for an Object
To build communism it is necessary, simultaneous with the new material foundations, to build the new man.
Ernesto “Che” Guevara, “Socialism and Man in Cuba”
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