León Rozitchner is a figure with a remarkable reputation in Argentina, both in psychoanalytic circles and amongst the wider public. Analyst, theorist, polemicist, now in his early eighties, he continues to challenge the assumptions and doctrinaire postures both of conservative Kleinians and would-be avant-garde Lacanian theorists, who together divide the field of Argentine psychoanalysis, and receives equal disdain and condescension from both camps for his pains. Maverick and thorn in the flesh, he continues to explore the social and historical dimensions of Freud's thought, and is now working on the all pervasive philosophical unconscious that Christianity contributes to the formation of the Western subject. His book La coas y la cruz (The Thing and the Cross) (1997) is an archaeology of this production, constituted by a reading of the Confessions of Saint Augustine, which attempts to show how the transformation of the mother in Christianity provides the essential desideratum for the degraded materialism that underlies and makes possible the development of capitalism and its docile subjects.
Yet despite an oeuvre going back to the early fifties, his work is hardly known in English. This says something about the vicissitudes of translation and publishing: texts from French find an easier passage into English than ones from Spanish (unless they bear the name of Bolaño, the latest global literary commodity); texts by Lacanians are more easily published than those by unpredictable marxisant Freudians (witness the relative availability of Roberto Harari); texts by clinicians have a surer market than those engaged with philosophically rich, if psychoanalytically heterodox, reflections on the articulation of subject and history (hence Etchegoyen, courtesy of object and authority). This is doubly unfortunate: it skews the representation of Argentine pyschoanalysis and deprives monolingual English readers of a provocative and creative engagement with Freud that looks at the revolutionary implications of his thought. In Freud y los límites del individuo burgués (Freud and the Limits of the Bourgeois Individual) (1972/78), Rozitchner reads Freud
as a prophet of political revolution (a startlingly counterintuitive account that brings to mind the work of Marcuse); in Perón: Ebtre la sangre y el tiempo (Perón: Between Blood and Time) (1985) he reads Perón, the central figure of modern Argentine politics with the optic of a Freud refracted through the military writings of Clausewitz; and, as I indicated, his current research programme investigates the deep affective structures of Christianity. In this late work, the role of religion as founding myth has come to the fore, and Rozitchner examines the affective implications of the passage from Judaism to Christianity and its rewriting of the mother and the maternal. Always attentive to the centrality of the actual struggles involved in the Oedipal moment and the confrontation with the father of power, Rozitchner has begun to focus more and more on the child's forced abandonment of the maternal as a central mechanism in the production of the modern subject—and the modern world as object of domination.
It is this theme that is explored in the paper below. Originally given at a conference in Buenos Aires in 2006, organised by the Lacanian grouping the Escuela de orientación lacaniana, Edipos (Versions of Oedipus) too addresses head on the ways in which the mother constitutes a determinant difference between the thought of Freud and Lacan respectively. Through an account of the function of myth in their respective theories, Rozitchner examines how questions of epistemological limits and the consequences of mythic contents sharply distinguish the two central figures of the analytic tradition. In an argument that brings to mind the work of Adorno and Horkheimer in The Dialectic of Enlightenment, Rozitchner reveals how the denial of myth in Lacan leads to his capture by it, whilst Freud's constant awareness of the mythic in his own thought opens a space for a dynamic dialectic of myth and science that fills out a theory of the subject. This leads to an examination of the consequences for the subject of different articulations of the myth of Oedipus, including some perspicuous observations on the omission of elements of the narrative within the Lacanian tradition. This critical engagement with myth and religion does not lead Rozitchner to a position of belief (he might be described, as Isaac Deutscher once said of himself, as a non-Jewish Jew, and has been intensely critical of the claims to singular truth and right within the Jewish and Zionist traditions, since his book Ser judío (Being a Jew) (1967)
marked his repudiation of the triumphalism of the Six Day War). Rather, following Freud, he is concerned with the productivity of myth and the ways in which differences in myth as organising form have massive social and existential consequences. If his earlier work emphasised an anti-imperialist dimension within psychoanalysis—Freud's own position as a marginal subject of empire facilitating an anti-colonial reading of his work—these new lines of thought look to a re-engagement with other cultural forms in the Americas, as the brief allusions to La Malinche (the traitorous translator in Cortés's conquest) and Pachamama (Mother Earth in Andean myth) suggest. The profundity and extent of the Christian/capitalist version of dematernalised material finds limits and alternatives in pre-Christian forms—in the Levant and in the Andes. Here, perhaps, there is space for an encounter between that archetypal non-Jewish Jew, Spinoza, whose materialism may have something to do with his marrano (Jews in exile from Iberia) roots, the cultures of pre-Conquest America, and a psychoanalysis renewed by a re-engagement with its own founding myths. Rozitchner's work is exciting just because he is prepared to pose these possibilities.