Read "Marxism and Melodrama" by Bruno Bosteels online for free on Textopian. Full text with search, annotations, highlights, and AI-powered reading aids.
Here, incidentally, we come upon one of the most striking aspects of Los errores. The whole point is to unravel the affective and corporeal burden that constitutes the material base without which no power could inscribe itself in a lasting way at the heart of the subject. In my view, the most outstanding passages in Revueltas's novel, stylistically speaking, are those devoted to tracing the ubiquitous circulation of rage, hatred, and resentment as the indispensable anchoring points that mark the subordination of a body to power, violence and exploitation-an exploitation which, in this way, turns out to be a kind of self-exploitation, or a servitude that is at least in part voluntary.
"Where there is oppression, there is resistance," people used to say at the time of Los errores, in an allusion to a famous dictum from Mao Zedong. In fact, what a novel like this one suggests is that, unless we capture where power-through affectivity and the subject's psychic and libidinal economy-inscribes itself onto the body, we also will fail to activate the mainspring of effective resistance. This vast lesson, which Revueltas appears to distribute throughout the didactic parts of nearly all his narrative oeuvre, constitutes at the same time the premise of theoretical investigations on the part of contemporary figures. For instance, in "La izquierda sin sujeto" ("The Left Without a Subject"), a programmatic essay from 1966 published in the important Argentine journal La rosa blindada and reprinted in the Cuban journal Pensamiento crítico, the slightly younger Rozitchner laments precisely the inability of the orthodox Left to think through the subjective aspect of politics other than in terms of a purely negative or ideological supposition that we would be dealing with the "merely" subjective. "I hold that without subjective modification, without the elaboration of truth in the total situation in which the human subject participates, there exists no objective revolution," writes Rozitchner. Later, he adds: