Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religiont in the Age of Terror by Bruno Bosteels

If there is a beyond of Marx, it passes through Marx, just as, if there is a beyond of Freud, it passes through Freud: we do not deny our old loves in the new ones. - León Rozitchner, "La crisis de los intelectuales y el marxismo"

As a unique and loyal Freudo-Marxist who remained almost entirely unknown outside of his home country, and who until his recent death was frequently ostracized even in Argentina, Rozitchner worked for over fifty years in the domain where questions of politics and subjectivity come head to head, particularly in the historical contexts of left-wing populism and guerrilla struggles, right-wing authoritarianism, military dictatorship, and the so-called transition to democracy under global neoliberalism. A thinker of untiring energy, he had also formed many generations of younger scholars, intellectuals, and activists-including militants involved in the uprisings and mobilizations in Argentina after the crisis of December 2001. And yet, a strange half-silence surrounded Rozitchner's writings during much of his lifetime. Thus, when I would ask older friends of mine about their familiarity with the work and thought of this prolific philosopher, many of them would recall for me how they learned their Freud from "the old León," whether at the university or in clandestine seminars during the Argentinean military dictatorship which forced Rozitchner into exile in Venezuela; but, until the recent effusion of posthumous homages, there was almost no public discussion of his many books. Rozitchner himself did not seem affected by this academic silencing of his work. Nor did he seek out recognition abroad by appealing to the latest fashions of theory from across the Atlantic. Even if he went to study at the Sorbonne with Lucien Goldmann and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, whose Adventures of the Dialectic and Humanism and Terror he translated into Spanish, by contrast he was always scornful of the structuralism of Louis Althusser and Jacques Lacan. To their theoretical anti-humanism and linguistic idealism, he preferred his own form of sensual, embodied, and historical materialism, summed up in the crucial book Freud y los límites del individualismo burgués (Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism), based on a detailed reading of Freud's New Introductory Lectures on Psychoanalysis and his "social" works Civilization and Its Discontents and Group Psychology and Analysis of the Ego.