I. On Genesis and Functions of the Intellectuals
These reflections could begin by referring to the words with which the Latin American Marxist thinker José Carlos Mariátegui defines his particular thought and writing style at the beginning of his most famous work: “None [of these essays] is finished; they never will be as long as I live and think and have something to add to what I have written, lived and thought. […] I am not an impartial, objective critic. […] I am far removed from the academic techniques of the university”.1 He commends the heuristic and aesthetic value of what is provisional against that systematic philosophy which attempts to conceal every trace of the bond with the living experience, under the pretention of conclusion and closure. Georges Sorel, one of Mariátegui’s most celebrated models, shows a similar disposition in his methodological considerations. In the letter to Daniel Halévy which precedes Reflections on violence, the French thinker writes back to those who have objected to him for abiding by writing style conventions and making readers uncomfortable due to the untidiness of his expositions. Sorel smugly introduces himself not as a professor or as a science reporter, but as an autodidact who publicly exhibits the notebooks that have fuelled his own learning. He is not as interested in registering knowledge as he is in deleting the ideas imposed on him; hence his method: “I put before my readers the product of a mental effort which is endeavoring to break through the constraints of what has previously been constructed for common use and which seeks to discover what is personal. […] I readily skip the points of transition because they nearly always fall into the category of commonplaces”.2 You can say that ideas such as Mariátegui’s and Sorel’s take us back to a particular historical and philosophical context—the irrationalism of the beginning of the twentieth century, whose most negative features we do not have to (nor can we) mention. But we do not intend to pinpoint the conditions in which these ideas are born; what we mean to point out today is the absence of positions such as the aforementioned and, because of that, their validity.
What the foregoing authors highlight is the exploratory dimension of Marxism, that which has been its method since the hour of its birth and for each of its leading representatives. What is involved here is to promote, in revolutionary thinking, an openness and a ductility which are not the product of intellectual laziness; instead, they result from the proximity to experience, from the attention to each of its realities and latencies and, at the same time, from the rejection of dogmas and received ideas. This position evinces the elective affinity between dialectical materialism and the tradition of essayism, not only as a genre but also, and more importantly, as a method of enquiry and even as an ethical and political stance towards the world. The word used by Montaigne to refer to the tradition that he himself starts, points at the direction we are discussing. The term suggests that this type of writing is characterized by experimentation in a double sense: on the one hand, it aims to be just a test, an experiment, an exploration; on the other hand, its proximity to the concrete experience distinguishes it from the dogmatic abstraction of the treatise. The essayist, from the beginnings of the genre, is someone who only considers true those judgements which he has formed out of his own experience or, at any rate, those which match such experience. The scepticism towards received ideas accounts for the development of a writing which, as Friedrich explains in relation to Montaigne, “is not a subsequent addition to a finished result, rather, it is an accompanying process of capturing his own process of change”.3 The interest in the path, rather than the goal, is the expression of a thought that escapes what is definitive and that appears to manifest itself in the same moment in which it is wrought, as we have commented in relation to Mariátegui.
The topic is relevant for us today because it helps, above all, to define the possibilities and the limits of Marxism in Latin America. The revolutionary thought in “Nuestra América” (Our America) was not directed mainly towards the composition of systematic and comprehensive works, due to the material conditions and the dominant traditions of thought, as well as the institutional precariousness and the unstable conditions in which Latin American intellectuals had to live. It managed, though, to turn necessity into virtue, which explains the broad and fruitful production of essays by Latin American Marxism. This corpus gathers, amongst its outstanding representatives, not only “classic” writers such as Mariátegui, Aníbal Ponce, Ernesto Guevara and Caio Prado Júnior, but also more contemporary figures such as Carlos Nelson Coutinho, Antônio Candido, David Viñas, León Rozitchner and Roberto Schwarz, to mention just a few important names, some arbitrariness notwithstanding. A second reason for the relevance of essay writing in Latin America is related to a central question of our times: the problem of the genesis, the history, the functions and the vanishing of the figure of the critic-Intellectual. In the third place, the previously mentioned affinity between essayism and Marxism is a fundamental feature in Marx’s work and the tradition of thought and praxis he has started. Forsaking this essayist perspective has had devastating effects on historical materialism.
Let’s start with the second point. A question that has remained unexplored is to what extent the genesis of the modern critic-Intellectual developed in the Paris of the Restoration period. One of the first outlines of that model—if not the first one—emerges in the context of the dispute between Ludwig Börne and Heinrich Heine, about what Enzensberger wrote: “[It] is possibly the controversy with the greatest consequences for German literature. Their debate lasts one hundred and fifty years and no ending in sight”.4 The essay “Ludwig Börne: A Memorial” (1840) is one of the first and most challenging attempts to define the peculiarities and the function of the modern intellectual. This figure is defined in contrast with the model embodied by the author of Dramaturgical Pages. The book about Börne was thought of as a livre maudit when it appeared. Heine’s hostility towards the essayist from Frankfurt earned him much scathing criticism from those who only perceived the argumentum ad hominem but failed to reach the core of the book, which partly focused on the confrontation between two intellectual models and two kinds of political praxis. In the German-speaking intellectual stage, there was a noteworthy exception: Marx. At the beginning of April 1846, he wrote to Heine about the “Börne debate” as follows:
The revision of the Heine/Börne controversy is one of Marx’s invaluable yet unfulfilled projects. Part of what we will hereby say aims at clarifying where the affinity between the revolutionary philosopher and the radical poet may lie. The first aspect worth mentioning may be Heine’s inflamed essayism. In the context of the debates with the untimely Jacobin Börne, Heine expressed his conviction that the only reasonable option for the modern intellectual could not mean embracing a doctrinaire Weltanschauung wh...A few days ago a short lampoon against you happened to fall into my hands—posthumous letters of Börne’s. I should never have held him to be so dull, petty and inept as it is possible to read here in black and white. […] I shall be writing a detailed review of your book on Börne for a German periodical. A more clumsy treatment than that suffered by this book at the hands of these Christian-Teutonic jackasses would be hard to find in any period of literature, and yet there’s no lack of clumsiness in period of Germany.5