The Post-Leninist Detective by Bruno Bosteels

He felt like a member of an esoteric sect dedicated to the preservation of ghosts. Maybe that was the problem: he was going at the whole thing more like a historian or a journalist than as a detective. - Paco Ignacio Taibo II, Cosa fácil

In this chapter-as a modest contribution to the work of counter-memory that requires not just an effort at historico-empirical reconstruction but also a vast amount of secondary theoretico-conceptual elaboration starting precisely from those blind spots where history fails to be subsumed into logic-I would like to propose a series of hypotheses about the new regime of power that emerged out of the conflict between political militancy and neoliberal capitalism in the wake of the legacy that the 1970s bequeathed to subsequent generations. To do so, I will begin by turning to a small segment of intellectual work, a sequence limited in both time and space-namely, to the fifty-nine issues of La cultura en México, the supplement to the magazine Siempre! , edited for just a little over a year, between March 1987 and April 1988, by the Mexican polymath Paco Ignacio Taibo II-after which I will discuss the series of nine novels that Taibo devoted between 1976 and 1993 to his noir or hard-boiled independent detective by the name of Héctor Belascoarán Shayne. In one of these novels, Regreso a la misma ciudad y bajo la lluvia (translated as Return to the Same City), the detective comes back from the dead in order to live through a slightly telescoped version of those very same years in which Taibo edited La cultura en México: "It would have to be added that, for narrative reasons, real times have been slightly rearranged," the author warns in an explanatory note at the start of his novel, "uniting the student protests of early '87 with the ascent of the Cuauhtémoc Cárdenas campaign of the spring of '88, in a fictional time that could be situated around the end of 1987. "5 Both projects, in this sense, should be read in conjunction-with the investigative journalist and the private investigator joining hands, so to speak, in a single and unique form of militant writing.