León Rozitchner’s “Philosophy and Terror”

Translators’ Note

According to its original publication, this text was first delivered as a talk at the 1980 Latin American Congress of Philosophy in Tallahassee, Florida. It was written while Rozitchner was in exile in Venezuela during the military dictatorship in Argentina, first published in 1982 and released in multiple editions of Freud y el problema del poder (Buenos Aires: Editorial Losada, 2003, 4th ed.), 239–250, and later republished in León Rozitchner, Las desventuras del sujeto político: Ensayos y errores (Buenos Aires: El Cielo por Asalto, 1996), 115– 123. All notes have been added by the translators.

1. 1. The “specter” of social transformation haunting¹ Latin America, which many feared, was apparently contained. A reality of terror and death ominously occupies its place in most of Latin America. What does it mean, amidst so many other things to do, “to do” philosophy for those of us with the privilege of having life when so many others lost it? Under these conditions, what does it mean to think?

2. 2. Philosophical thought operates at the level of representation, trying to symbolically express the conditions of the real. It tries to elaborate and reduce a distance, the distance that separates us from reality. But at the same time, it claims to dispense the method with which to bridge this gap: it should, such is its destiny, promote effective action between human beings and confront the contradictions which conventional representation—what we would call ideology—attempts to hide. Philosophy, thus defined, aspires to discover the fundamental articulations of the real.

3. 3. The technical problem: in philosophy, it would appear that everything consists in passing from representation to the concept. Representation, by definition, operates at the level of appearance. The concept, on the other hand, operates at the level of the essence of the real. It is a matter, some will say, of moving from ideology to science—that is to say, from the false, allusive, opaque, naive statement to the unmasked transparency of truth.² This problem of transit, innocent in its appearance, would seem easy to confront. It is no more than an act of thought, theoretical praxis: the movement from representation to concept is a “leap,” the only leap needed—an epistemological leap, from the void to the fullness of science—that permits us to situate ourselves in conditions to finally express the truth, through the ideality of the word (la palabra).

   The propaedeutic also entails a precise pedagogy: thus, the one who thinks passes from one text to the other, from one author to one further along, and reads in the one the superseded representation of the others. In this way we pass, for example, from Kant to Hegel, and from Hegel to Marx. The philosophical concept, the concrete real in thought—according to these thinkers—was finally achieved. We are almost its eminent presence as it speaks on our behalf: the one who “does” philosophy thus believes that they state the truth, in its repetition. However, there is a deception, not always shared by all: the truth insomuch as it is an effective path open towards reality is still absent from this domain, and we continue to maintain ourselves, despite everything, in the “representation” of the concept, representation of a representation, distance redoubled in the new covering over. For a distance remains, that which no theoretical leap can cover: the distance which binds the flesh of the human subject who thinks to the historical conditions of their reality, these conditions which mark with all precision the limits of one’s thought, and whose content is absent from formal reflection. It is these precise limits that—in the transit, as the covering over of the distance that the leap did not overcome—remain concealed and obscured at the very same moment when, by the decision of radicality, we confessed to confront it.

4. 4. This separation between representation and concept, between appearance and reality—I appear, by way of thought, to go beyond where I effectively am—, if it is situated in the field of philosophy as...