Introduction to Rozitchner

León Rozitchner is one of the generation of Argentine intellectuals who emerged in the 1950s around the journal Contorno. As a psychoanalyst and Marxist – and massively influenced, as were all his confrères, by Sartre and the phenomenological tradition – he undertook a lengthy theoretical project that attempted to engage psychoanalytical categories in the understanding of politics, most notably in explaining and countering that most protean and influential phenomenon of Argentine politics, Peronism – the baleful legacy of Juan Domingo Perón himself, and its links to the catastrophic dictatorship of 1976–83. From the seminal Freud and the Limits of Bourgeois Individualism (first edition 1972), in which he developed an account of the relation of psyche and capital, and the revolutionary implications of Freud’s supposedly ‘conservative’ social works, to the recent The Thing and the Cross (1997), in which he explores the archaeology of capitalism in Augustinian Christianity, Rozitchner has laboured to provide a categorial apparatus that links libido, leadership and economic form. But he has also been a prolific writer on the conjuncture, intervening for fifty years in debates on the Left across the continent. As a committed supporter of the Cuban Revolution, he lived in Havana during the early years, where, on the basis of interviews with captured Bay of Pigs invaders, he produced his important analysis of bourgeois morality, Bourgeois Morality and Revolution (1963) – the basis of the dilemmas addressed in Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s film Memories of Underdevelopment (1968). During the Argentine Junta’s period of power, the so-called Proceso or Process of National Reorganization, he lived in Venezuela. Never a popular intellectual, always prepared fiercely to oppose leftist pieties, he remains – now in his eighties – an imposing but strangely ignored figure of the Latin American Left, almost completely unknown in the English-speaking world, to the latter’s detriment.

‘Exile, War and Democracy’ was originally presented at a conference in 1984 on the reconstruction of Argentine political culture after the dictatorship had allowed the return of democracy (‘the Pact’) with the election of Raúl Alfonsín in 1983. As well as giving a flavour of the textual quality of his work and his attentive but cutting style of commentary, it develops some of the themes he discussed in his 1979 book on Perón, Perón – Between Blood and Time, in which Marx, Freud and Clausewitz are combined to form a framework of articulation. But perhaps what is most striking is his passionate denunciation of left-Peronist and leftist fantasies that were in some ways complicit with or tributary to the political debacles of the Process. This is the context for his harsh criticisms of Rodolfo Puiggrós, a well-known sociologist (one of the first to criticize the work of Andre Gunder Frank from a Marxist perspective) and member of the Argentine Communist Party, who had migrated to Peronism to become part of its ideological apparatus. Almost alone in the Argentine Left, Rozitchner opposed the Gadarene rush to support the Malvinas/Falklands adventure, seeing this capture of the oppositional energy of the Left by the Junta’s irredentist nationalism as a stunning defeat. Some of the key intellectuals involved in such support, like José Aricó and Juan Carlos Portantiero, who had been exiled in Mexico, were present at the conference Rozitchner addresses here. Rozitchner’s book Las Malvinas: de la guerra sucia a la guerra limpia (1985) also raises interesting questions for those of us who opposed the Thatcherite ‘recovery’ of the Falklands.

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