Marxism and Melodrama by Bruno Bosteels

This is where I stand-how I would love to be: an ethical monster without empathy, doing what is to be done in a weird coincidence of blind spontaneity and reflexive distance. - Slavoj Žižek, The Monstrosity of Christ

The desire to "succeed" or "make it big" (dar un golpe) in life can also be read as a pathetic, well-nigh existentialist search for an authentic "act" of freedom. This theme of the act, as we will see in detail below, is actually a constant concern of the later Revueltas.16 In Los errores, though, we can already begin to perceive to what extent the logic of the act encloses an insuperable paradox. On one hand, it is certainly true that a genuine act, if accomplished, would be proof of the human capacity for autonomy. Thus, Mario discovers with an "abyssal and sweet delirium" that he can be somebody, do something, become the "only true but invisible protagonist" of his own history, "in the same way that a magician brings incredible and marvelous things out of nowhere"-something which would seem to constitute a true moment of existential revelation: "A nebulous discovery of his own person: I have done something, me, the one who finds himself here, between the old boxes of the attic. "17 On the other hand, each genuine act seems to bring the individual to a point where it is not he or she but the objective course of things that decides in his or her stead. In this way, the human being, far from giving evidence of autonomy by acting independently, rather becomes a kind of automaton at the mercy of a plan or an order beyond its will.