On the Subject of the Dialectic by Bruno Bosteels

What the enormous effort put into Dialéctica de la conciencia suggests is first and foremost the author's conviction that perhaps not all theoretical work is dull or superfluous, despite the fact that, from personal reflections and diary entries jotted down in the heat of the moment during and right after the events of 1968 in Mexico, Revueltas seems to have been rather fond of Goethe's one-liner according to which, in comparison with the golden tree of life, all theory is but a gray and deadening undertaking. "Gris es toda teoría," without the latter half of the original sentence, "verde es el árbol de oro de la vida," in fact serves as the recurrent header for a number of these reflections, published posthumously under the title México 68: Juventud y revolución: "All theory is gray, the golden tree of life is green. "1 The quote, which also appears as an inscription on Revueltas's tombstone, may remind some readers of Lenin's famous witticism, written just one month after the events of October 1917 in the Postscript to The State and Revolution, that "it is more pleasant and useful to undertake the 'experience of revolution' than to write about it. "2 Nowadays, this downplaying of theoretical writing, whether in favor of direct experience or of life pure and simple, would no doubt sit well with many critics, especially those who would be all too happy to oppose in very similar terms the green pastures of literary and cultural studies to the drab landscape of so-called theory. And yet, in all cases we should perhaps be wary of drawing too quick a conclusion about the significance of theoretical work, or the lack thereof.

Lenin, to begin with, is also the author of another one-liner that was constantly invoked during the worldwide sequence of events of the late 1960s and early 1970s, by anyone from Che Guevara to followers of Chairman Mao: "Without revolutionary theory there can be no revolutionary movement. "3 Like Lenin, who considered the study of Hegel's notoriously difficult Science of Logic no less vital a task than answering the question of What Is to Be Done? , most of Revueltas's work during the final years of his life, many of which were spent in captivity in the Lecumberri prison for his alleged role as one of the intellectual instigators of the 1968 student-popular movement, was devoted to what can only be described as an ongoing effort of theoretical speculation. This is particularly evident in Dialéctica de la conciencia. The intense intellectual labor displayed in the pages of this often obscure volume should serve as a warning that, for a theoretician, it is not necessarily the case that the neighbor's grass is always greener. Or, rather, if we are to follow in Hegel's footsteps, the grayness of theory and philosophy may well have a function all of its own-not to celebrate the eternal fountain of life, of novelty, and of rejuvenation, but to come to know what is, just before it turns into the massive inertia of what was, at the hour of dusk. "When philosophy paints its grey in grey, then has a shape of life grown old. By philosophy's grey on grey it cannot be rejuvenated but only understood," Hegel writes in the Preface to his Philosophy of Right: "The owl of Minerva spreads its wings only with the falling of the dusk. "4 As for linguistic obscurity, Revueltas had this to say in one of his last interviews: