On the Mexican Exhumation of Freud: Psychoanalysis and Infrapolitics

• In Event: Mind and Spirit: Psychoanalysis and Spirituality in History, Literature, Photography

Abstract

Psychoanalysis’ universality has encountered much resistance in the historicized realm of Latin American literary/cultural theory. This paper considers several recent and notable interventions: Rubén Gallo’s Freud’s Mexico (2010) and Bruno Bosteels’ Marx and Freud in Latin America (2012), both of which step, at least in part, outside of the psychoanalytic bastion of Argentina and into Mexican studies. If Gallo accidentally unearths the “terra incognita” of Freud’s personal relation to Mexico, he also stages a rereading of the thinker’s role in 20th century Mexican thought. Bosteels’ reading of Sabina Berman’s play Feliz nuevo siglo Doktor Freud (2000) seeks to uncover the “emancipatory radicalism” of psychoanalysis in its relation to politics. Berman’s theatrical representation of the Dora case oscillates between the radically subversive core of Freudian thought (its universalization of perversion) and acceptance of generalized “unhappiness” that would abandon any revolutionary potential.

My analysis of these Mexican returns to Freud deploys the metaphor of exhumation operative in psychoanalytic technique: the disclosure of buried secrets. The final gesture of this paper is thus to link psychoanalysis to the emergence of infrapolitical theory. Originating in the thought of Alberto Moreiras, infrapolitics sets as its task re-thinking the political in terms of something other than the sovereign that defines politics. From the analytic retrospectives staged by Gallo, Bosteels, and Berman herself, I end with a consideration of the potential future of Latin American critical theory on the common ground found between psychoanalysis and infrapolitics, each of which thinks—from below—the ruins of the political.

Author

• Michael Martinez-Raguso, Colby College