Hegel in Mexico: Memory and Alienation in the Posthumous Writings by Jose Revueltas

José Revueltas devoted much of his time spent in the Lecumberri prison of Mexico City, where he was incarcerated for is alleged role as an intellectual instigator behind the student-popular movement of 1968, reflecting on the role of the dialectic in the wake of Hegel and Marx. Especially in the two collections of essays, diar entreries and personal reading notes published posthumously as Dialéctica de la conciencia (Dialectic of the Consciousness) and México 68: Juventud y Revolución (Mexico 68: Youth and Revolution), Revueltas develops an original framework for the understanding of social consciousness in a tense struggle with its intrinsic outside—the unconscious, negativity, or madness pure and simple. Key to this renewal of the materialist dialectic is the notion of a collective and nearly ontological reserve of popular uprisings, the memory of which can be awakened in those rare and profound theoretical "acts," such as the 1968 movements, that mark the political history of the Left in Mexico.