The Psychic Life of the Power of Rebellion: Introducing León Rozitchner’s “Philosophy and Terror”

Although he would not have liked the expression much, linked as it is to the latest intellectual fashions of French thought, the publication of the complete works of León Rozitchner (1924–2011) by the National Library of Argentina marks a true “event” in the panorama of contemporary theory and philosophy. At least in Spanish, the reader is now able at long last to appreciate the secret force and originality of this philosopher’s thought as a unified whole that spans more than half a century. And if I say at long last, this is because even in his home country Rozitchner has not always been rightly appreciated as one of the most important Argentine philosophers of his time, an intellectual whose thought transcends and exceeds from all sides the scope of professional academic philosophy. Rozitchner often complained about the scant reaction—whether positive or negative—that his works provoked. And yet, this is precisely what these works were always meant to be: provocations. More than fake Platonic dialogues or insipid democratic debates, this thinker was always looking for polemics and controversy, sometimes going straight for the ad hominem attack. So now, with the recent editorial project, there are no more excuses to continue ignoring the theoretical force of these provocations, except that English-language readers of course could still invoke the fact that almost none of Rozitchner’s works have been translated. In this sense, Don Deere and Ricardo Ortiz Vázquez, the two translators of the piece “Philosophy and Terror” included in this issue of Theory & Event, ought to be applauded for making available one more of Rozitchner’s texts in English.¹

More than treatises in academic philosophy, Rozitchner’s books are like bricks thrown into the window of a well-meaning neighbor, or like Molotov cocktails whose long wick we have not yet been able to ignite.

The image of the brick is apt to evoke the mischievous child that León in a certain way continued to be until the end, with his loud sardonic laughter and his inexhaustible vital energy. A boy not unlike the young Augustine, who was still a pagan and, long before he was to become a saint, with a group of friends stole a few pears from a neighbor’s garden. In Rozitchner’s analysis of this episode, narrated at the beginning of the Confessions by the adult and christened Augustine, it is indeed a small act of rebellion, a collective petty crime whose fond recollection of companionship and law-breaking—in this case the infraction of the law of private property—is quickly erased under the repressive effects of guilt and shame, but not without leaving unconscious traces in the memory of its author, as rumors of an ancient drama that would never be completely forgotten. St. Augustine thus writes, opening his still joyful heart before the Lord: “Let my heart now tell you what caused me to do wrong for no purpose, and why it was only my own love of mischief that made me do it. The evil in me was foul, but I loved it. I loved my own perdition and my own faults, not the things for which I committed wrong, but the wrong itself. My soul was vicious and broke away from your safe keeping to seek its own destruction, looking for no profit in disgrace but only for disgrace itself.”² This cause (causa), or this thing (cosa), which forms the real object of the theft of pears, for Rozitchner recalls the maternal thing, that is, the sensual and affective primordial matrix for that which Freud calls das Ding.

In the process of conversion to Christianity that constitutes the key moment of the Confessions, however, this maternal “thing” will be painfully supplanted by the new law of the Father-God, representative of an abstract and purely quantitative basis of infinity without which— according to Rozitchner’s provocative thesis—capitalism would not have been possible: “Triumphant capitalism, the quantitative and infinite accumulation of wealth in the abstract monetary form, would not have...