On the Subject of the Dialectic by Bruno Bosteels

In a remarkably enigmatic short story, "Hegel y yo", published in 1973 as the opening of a planned future novel or series of narratives on the same subject that would never see the light, Revueltas returned once more to this notion of the profane illumination that takes place whenever an emergent consciousness is on the verge of breaking through the monumental obliteration of generic human memory and work. On this occasion, he describes such moments in terms of "acts"-that is, truly "profound acts," which completely change the seemingly eternal paradigms of existing knowledge in light of a truth that is both historical and yet part of an immemorial past that runs through, and sometimes interrupts, the continuum of human history.

Despite its unfinished nature, "Hegel and I" represents a culminating moment in the long trajectory of Revueltas as a narrator and a thinker. These two activities, narration and thought, are inseparable here perhaps more so than in any of his other stories, or in most of his already quite intellectualized novels. The story, in fact, seems to take up and try to solve some of the deadlocks present in Revueltas's strictly theoretical writings from the same period, the late 1960s and early 1970s, most of which have been published posthumously by Andrea Revueltas and Philippe Cheron in volumes such as Dialéctica de la conciencia and México 68: Juventud y revolución.