The Post-Leninist Detective by Bruno Bosteels

The distortion of a text is not unlike a murder. The difficulty lies not in the execution of the deed but in the doing away with the traces. - Sigmumd Freud, Moses and Monotheism

Before turning to Taibo's peculiar use of the detective story, I want to recall the genre's structural underpinnings. By this I mean not only the social history of the classical detective story-a history which Walter Benjamin, in some of his most famous pages, devoted to Baudelaire, relates to the rise of anonymous urban masses during the second half of the nineteenth century, creating an explanatory scheme that would be even more coherent if it took account of the multitudes of latter-day Mexico. "The original social content of the detective story was the obliteration of the individual's traces in the big-city crowd," Benjamin writes. "The detective story came into being when this most decisive of all conquests of a person's incognito had been accomplished. "14 In the midst of a nameless crowd, what matters is not that people can hide but that everyone becomes a potential suspect. However, more so than in the history of a person's incognito, whether as a permanent threat or as a rare alibi, I am interested in the well-nigh metaphysical principles that underpin the structural possibility of the detective story, both in its classical form and its revised, hardboiled, or noir version. For the purpose of this discussion, I will limit myself to two such principles-one recalling the alleged origins of the social contract and the other pointing to its hoped-for ends, by which, as various thinkers have pointed out, the detective genre has often come to rival the high discourse of philosophy in general and political theory in particular.15