On the Subject of the Dialectic by Bruno Bosteels

Everything in this context ultimately depends on our understanding of what is meant by dialectical thinking. "The point is to be clear about the subject of the dialectic," Badiou also writes: "The dialecticity of the dialectic consists precisely in having a conceptual history and in dividing the Hegelian matrix to the point where it turns out to be essentially a doctrine of the event, and not the guided adventure of the spirit. A politics, rather than a history. "24 Thus, when Revueltas wrote to his daughter Andrea, "We must return to Hegel's Phenomenology, whether we want to or not,"25 or when he wrote to her in another letter, "We have to go back openly to Hegel, to the young Marx and to political economy 'beyond' Capital, that is to say, to the 'ignored' Marxism, the Marxism that was bracketed for over fifty years and not only by Stalinism," his aim was still to come to a concrete understanding of the notion of the dialectic: "All the contradictions of Marxism in Mexico can be summed up as resistance to, and ignorance of, the dialectic. "26 How, then, does Revueltas define the dialectic?

Right from the beginning of Dialéctica de la conciencia, Revueltas may very well have seemed to echo Sartre's position, in the latter's polemic with Heidegger, that it is above all a question of man-that is, a question not of being but of the human being. In his case, however, the affirmation "Ante todo se trata de la cuestión hombre" is immediately followed by the question "Pero, en fin, ¿qué es el hombre? "-to which the author of the Critique of Hegel's Philosophy of Right is allowed to reply: "Karl Marx proposes to us an illuminating answer. 'Man is the world of men,' he says. The world of human beings-in other words, society, its modes of production, religion, the state: a changing world which has never been the same throughout its history. "27 It is at this point that the otherwise traditional, humanist, or idealist image of Hegel's method is displaced by the search for a materialist dialectic of society as a concrete and contradictory totality. How, then, can we come to know this apparently unknowable totality that constitutes the proper object of dialectical reason? Revueltas does not answer this last question in any straightforward manner. Instead, in the remaining pages of the full draft of his essay, he weaves the discussion in and out of three examples, which he prefers to call "cognitive anecdotes," derived respectively from the postal system, from archaeology, and from architecture.