These days I have been rereading “Roberto Arlt, myself” by Oscar Masotta. An exemplary text, without a doubt, from the time when one thought with the body and the soul, in implication. And I have been trying to follow his example without imitating him, as Lacan would say. In short, to take it as an exercise in subjectivation, as Foucault would say. It so happens that it is also eight years since the publication of my first book (Badiou and Lacan: the knotting of the subject) and there is already a sufficient distance, not only temporary, that perhaps allows me to return to it from another place -and get some profit, as Masotta says in his presentation.
A number of things have happened along the way. One not minor was, also, the death of my father. But it also happened the same year my daughter was born, as soon as the book had hit the streets. Only, instead of going insane like Masotta did, I almost got shot to death in a street robbery. I didn’t have much time to process anything: the death, the birth, the book, the violence, etc. You do what you can; In my case: continue writing books, accompanying my daughter’s growth, honoring my dead in the ritual of lighting the fire, etc.
Only that, in addition, a major event happened (that is: one that includes humanity as a whole): a pandemic that kept us confined for almost two years. Which led me to sharpen the writing gesture; especially the ethical and critical reflexivity that accompanies it. I want to say: I no longer believe anything of the great (n) men. It is written as it is lived, period: it is embodied in the series of readings chosen, meditated, exercised without ideals (aesthetic, normative or formative). I have taken this practice to the root. So, mimicking the Masottian gesture, I now think: Who was I at the time of writing that book? Like him, I can recognize a series of social contradictions embodied in my body, in my soul, in the way of writing and in the intellectual (affective?) relationships that were plotted around it. I did not, of course, have the same imitative pretensions (Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, in the case of Masotta) or the taste for sophisticated clothing (double-breasted suits, etc.), but I did have a certain urgency to get my doctorate and let me know that It came from parental pressure and the need for work.
Today I wonder, for example, why almost all the friendships that were linked to that book have dissolved, they have not been sustained over time. Is it perhaps a cursed book, poorly conceived or poorly written? Although I have had my moments of very strong affective ambivalence, the truth is that -temperedly considered- the book is not bad: it contributes some things to the field of Badiouan and Lacanian studies that have not yet been considered; for example, the question of the knot or knotting of the subject. I wouldn’t go that far then with superstition, but perhaps there is something of the “hyperstition” (deployed better later, but anticipated there) that is not easily tolerated, something of the performative invention that generates a certain discomfort. The truth, ultimately, is how much of reality a subject can bear. Having lent myself to this game early with the publication of the book, following the example of logical time, may not have been without consequences.
Desire comes too early or too late. Lacan lamented the latter in his Escritos de el, I do not lament so much about the former because I have had the opportunity to make use of those gaps promoted by the masters, to make my own writing pass. The only thing I regret now, and that is why I take care of the dead again, is not having brought the book to my father on time. By some carelessness or laziness or because he thought he didn’t care. And yet, before he died he had told his friends, without even having read it, that the book was great and they had to read it. This was our relationship: he never told me directly if he was happy or proud of what I had done, he sent it to me through third parties. This apology for the delay now wants to give an account of this writing, in intimate dialogue with my father, but also through third parties. If it is true, as we maintain with my friend Helga Fernández, that the function of the father is played in the third party. Cordoba, March 14, 2022.
*Writer, researcher, philosopher. He published “The reason for affections: populisms, feminisms and psychoanalysis. Publisher Prometheus. In the margin, Journal of Psychoanalysis.