Marx and Freud in Latin America: Politics, Psychoanalysis, and Religion in Times of Terror by Bruno Bosteels (review)

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Abstract
Marx and Freud in Latin America challenges the generic conventions of the scholarly book review, not to mention the reviewer’s habits. Strikingly erudite, fiercely combative, Bruno Bosteels’s book is not quite a scholarly monograph, nor is it quite a collection of essays. The volume might best be located among recent field proposals, in particular, Jon Beasley-Murray’s Posthegemony and John Beverley’s Latinamericanism After 9/11, the latter of which it shares a number of concerns with, in particular, its engagement with the question of the 1960s. At the same time, its purpose would seem to be rather more archival, “case studies”—as Bosteels puts it in the preface—in retrieval, perhaps as glimpsed on the book’s front cover: an image of Marcelo Brodsky’s installation The Wretched of the Earth, in which the artist displays the exhumed tomes of a violently repressed cultural-political radicalism. And perhaps fittingly for a book that advances by way of sometimes overlapping, sometimes discrete case studies, Bosteels offers a series of prefatory remarks, rather than an overarching theoretical design, before moving on to ten chapters that draw largely on previously published material on topics as diverse as José Martí, José Revueltas, Memorias del subdesarrollo, León Rozitchner, Mexico 1968, Ricardo Piglia, Sabina Berman, Paco Ignacio Taibo II, and early 2000s Latin American literature, all followed by an epilogue against the “ethical turn.” In this sense too, the book serves as archive (or compilation), and reunites a disperse body of work under the purview of Bosteels’s suggestion of an exercise in “counter-memory” toward a “reassessment” of “the untimely relevance of certain aspects of the work of Marx (but also of Lenin and Mao) and Freud (but also of Lacan) in and for Latin America …” (23). “Starting from the abovementioned premise,” writes Bosteels, “that Marxism and Freudianism strictly speaking are neither philosophical worldviews nor positive sciences, but rather intervening doctrines of the subject respectively in political and clinical-affective situations, I argue in the chapters of the book that art and literature—the novel, poetry, theater, film—no less than the militant tract or the theoretical treatise, provide symptomatic sites for the investigation of such [End Page 179] processes of subjectivization” (23). Thus literature and the arts become case studies in a rather more specific sense, serving as the grounds upon which Bosteels can investigate the claims and hypotheses of Marx and Freud and their readers. Recalling Pierre Macherey’s development of “symptomatic reading,” art and literature serve as the evidentiary visible symptom left by “such processes of subjectivization.”

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