Presentation at the Symposium ‘Psychoanalysis and Revolution in Ireland’, Dublin, Ireland, July 6th, 2023
David Pavón-Cuéllar
Somewhere in our manifesto Psychoanalysis and revolution: critical psychology for liberation movements, Ian Parker and I consider how our ego dominates us, how it betrays us by dominating us, and how we can free ourselves from it through liberation movements. Liberating ourselves is here freeing ourselves from our ego that appears as our master who betrays us and through which we betray ourselves. As always with our masters, we must choose between them and us: either they betray us or we betray them; either we betray ourselves by submitting to them, or we free ourselves from them by betraying them.
We must betray our masters to free ourselves from them. One of the reasons why our liberation is so difficult is because it implies a betrayal, a treason to the master and what is of the master within us, precisely in the form of the ego. Betraying and betraying yourself is not easy, no matter how liberating it is.
I will give betrayal a positive meaning, when the usual thing is that we give it only a negative meaning, such as when we feel that we have been betrayed by someone. I guess this feeling is known to all of us. I felt it, for example, when I was about twenty years old and I read Marx and especially Engels celebrating the United States when it invaded my country, Mexico, between 1846 and 1848, stealing half of our territory. This first US imperialist intervention in Latin America was being supported by the referents of our Latin American anti-imperialism.
How could someone like me, a young Latin American Marxist, not feel betrayed in his anti-imperialism, betrayed in his desire that he imagined shared with Marx and Engels? I remember that I accused Marx and Engels of the only thing for which one can be guilty for Jacques Lacan. Marx and Engels had been guilty of giving in to their desire, our desire, and thus they would have betrayed us, Latin American Marxists.
Lacan observes that there is always some kind of betrayal in giving in to our desire. This was the betrayal I accused Marx and Engels of when I was a young 20-year-old Marxist.
I’m sure the Irish Marxists would understand me. It is as if Marx and Engels had supported British colonialism in Ireland. However, as we know, you had better luck than us. Marx and Engels strongly supported Irish independence from the 1850s.
Why weren’t you betrayed like us by Marx and Engels? I think that one of the reasons was the moment in which Marx and Engels spoke about each case. As Pedro Scaron has shown, there is a development in the opinions of Marx and Engels on colonialism, from the insensitivity to the Mexican case to openly anti-colonial positions since the Irish case. It is almost as if Ireland has taught Marx and Engels their anti-colonialism that will later be so important to our Global South.
What is certain is that the Irish were ahead of Marx and Engels in the awareness of what was at stake in colonialism. This can be verified in the United States intervention in Mexico in 1846, when hundreds of Irish soldiers deserted the United States Army and enlisted in the Saint Patrick’s Battalion to defend the Mexicans with whom they identified, just as they associated the American invaders with the English oppressors in Ireland. Many Irish lost their lives fighting for Mexico in the Saint Patrick’s Battalion, which also included German, Scottish and English soldiers in a spirit that we would describe today as “internationalist”. Of the few survivors, fifty Irishmen will be hanged by the United States Army. The gallows were their punishment as guilty of treason, yes, treason, but a treason that has nothing to do with the treason that I imputed to Marx and Engels when I was young.
Thirty years ago, I felt that Marx and Engels betrayed because they betrayed our desire. On the contrary, the Irish were considered traitors because they had followed their desire, which led them to betray the United States, the United States Army, the United States Army generals. The Irish in Mexico betrayed their masters to follow their desire, not to give in to it, not to betray themselves.
It was to fight for their desire for freedom that the Irish had to betray their oppressor in 1846. It is not the first time they have done so in Mexico. Twenty-five years earlier, Mexico had gained its independence from Spain in part thanks to the last Spanish viceroy, Juan O’Donojú, son of Irish noblemen Richard O’Donnohue, from County Limerick, and Alicia O’Ryan, from county Kerry, who had to take refuge in Spain to flee from the persecution against the Catholics by Kings George I and George II of Great Britain.
Perhaps the legacy of persecution was what made Juan O’Donojú fight for freedom first against the French invaders in Spain and then against the absolutism of the Spanish crown. This caused him to be imprisoned and tortured twice. Then, as the highest Spanish authority in Mexico, he knew how to listen to ten years of Mexican struggles against Spain and signed the Mexican independence act just before he died. He was also considered a traitor in Spain.
Betrayal against Spain was the only way O’Donojú could be on the good side of history. This side is always that of desire, but also that of freedom. It is the side of those who want to be free, of the oppressed people, whether they are the colonized by Spain, the Jews in the Nazi regime, the Palestinians in Israel or the African immigrants in France or in any other European country. The side of these oppressed people can only be a trench against their oppressors. Defeating the Spanish oppressors required betraying them.
The betrayal by O’Donojú against the Crown of Spain was the same liberating betrayal that another Irishman committed in Mexico, William Lamport, born in Wexford at the beginning of the 17th century, in the bosom of a noble Catholic family. openly hostile to the English occupation of Ireland. First William, as a student in London, was sentenced to death for writing a text against England, but he managed to flee to Spain. Then he arrived in Mexico and planned to pose as the son of the King of Spain in order to rule the Spanish colony and thus be able to free indigenous, black and mestizos. His plan was discovered and he was burned to death at the stake.
Like the 50 Irish soldiers hanged in 1847, the Irish nobleman William Lamport was burned to death in Mexico in 1659. Thus he lost his ego for remaining faithful to us. By not betraying us, he betrayed his master, Spain.
Lamport’s crime was also betraying the oppressor, allying himself with the oppressed, fighting for his desire for freedom. His fault was paradoxically not being guilty of giving in to his desire. It was for not being guilty in the eyes of psychoanalysis that Lamport was guilty in the eyes of power.
Lamport’s political program is evident in his writings in which he presents himself as an forerunner of our anti-racist, anti-colonial and anti-imperialist struggles. The desire for freedom and equality is eloquently manifested in his psalm number 632. There he recalls that Africans “were born free” like other human beings, that “it was not lawful” to reduce them to “cruel servitude” just as it would not be lawful for them to made us “captives”, and he asks the Spaniards why they buy Ethiopians when they don’t want to be “bought by them”.
Defending an equal freedom for all, a freedom in equality, William Lamport addresses the Spaniards, the subjects who identify with the master, and puts them in their place, in the place of subjects. What he does is not simply tell them not to do to others what they don’t want done to them. It is not just asking them to put themselves in the place of others either. It is something more radical: it is telling them that their place is that of the others, that of the subjects, and not that of the masters. It is as if we told Nazis that their place is that of the Jews, or Israeli soldiers that their place is that of the Palestinian they murder, or French policemen that their place is that of the immigrant they shoot.
Our true place is always the one of the subject and not that of the master, that of the oppressed and not that of the oppressors. This place of our truth is the one from which Lamport spoke. It was a place that he knew very well, perhaps because he was an Irishman persecuted by the English crown, or perhaps because he was mad. It must be said that Lamport was what we would describe today as a psychotic. He had what we call delusions and hallucinations.
Sometimes we must be mad to be in the truth. Sometimes the truth is what drives us mad. We don’t know exactly if this was what happened to Lamport. What we do know is that his madness made him speak truthfully –with the truth of his desire for equality and freedom– by translating and betraying the discourse of the master, the discourse of power and knowledge, the discourse of the monarchy and Catholicism. His fervent religiousness and his aspiration to be king were the theatrical staging in which he could articulate his desire. They were the knowledge that he could subvert by expressing his truth. They were the discourse in which he could speak. They were what was to be translated and could be betrayed by being translated.
Lamport’s translation and betrayal was carefully scrutinized by the Inquisition. The inquisitors listened to Lamport, they heard the truth of his desire, and for that they sentenced him to the stake. Today his delusions would have been listened to by a psychologist or a psychiatrist who would have sentenced him to psychiatric hospitalization. The truth always has to be silenced. It is something typical of modernity, since classical times, especially since the 17th century, as Foucault shows us precisely in that century of Lamport.
In the same 17th century, in a scene underlined by Lacan, the Spanish Jesuit Baltasar Gracián tells how the truth terrifies and makes us escape from it. We can’t stand the truth and now we persecute it with psychology or psychiatry as before with the Inquisition. This was also understood very well by Foucault, who also understood that psychoanalysis should be something different. Psychoanalysis should allow us to listen to the truth, the truth of desire, of the symptom, of the word of the subjects who betray the master’s discourse by trying to translate it.
By betraying the discourse of the master, we are in what Lacan called the discourse of the hysteric. This discourse of subversion is at the origin of any revolutionary movement. The revolution begins by expressing and listening to a desire. Then this desire is what allows the revolution to remain open, to describe a spiral movement, to become a permanent revolution instead of returning to its starting point and reconstituting the master’s discourse. All this is what Lacan tells us when explaining what he himself describes as the interest of psychoanalysis for the revolution: an interest consisting in allowing the expression and listening of the desire that keeps the revolutionary circle open.
What psychoanalysis does is hysterize us and sustain the discourse of the hysteric. In this discourse, it is we, subjects, who speak instead of the master, instead of the ego, by usurping his position as master, just as Lamport tried to usurp the place of the king. Only in this way can we express ourselves as subjects when expressing our desire, expressing ourselves as desiring subjects, but also as divided subjects, traversed by power.
The division is flagrant in the case of Lamport. It is as the son of the king of Spain that Lamport wants to free the Mexicans from Spain. His belief in freedom is as solid as his belief in monarchy. His Catholicism is that of a heretic.
Lamport is a divided subject because he can only speak of liberty and equality in the discourse of the master, the discourse of the politics of his time, the discourse of the monarchy, of Catholicism and colonialism. It is the same thing that happened with Marx and Engels when referring to the US invasion of Mexico in 1846. Marx and Engels also required the discourse of the master, that of colonialism and imperialism, in order to express their desire that would end up becoming anti-colonialist and anti-imperialist.
We can say that Marx and Engels, like Lamport, gave in to their desire in order not to give in to their desire. They betrayed themselves in order not to betray themselves. They made concessions in order not to make concessions. This paradoxical ethics will be conceived by Lacan, in his eighth seminar, as the paradigmatic modern ethics, in contrast to the ancient ethics of the inflexible Antigone who does not give up anything on her desire. The new ethical figure is no longer Antigone, but a Claudel character, Sygne de Coufontaine, who agrees to marry her family’s worst enemy in order to preserve the family patrimony.
Sygne must give in to her desire in order not to give in to her desire to preserve the family heritage. Don’t we have here the realistic ethic, the ethic of real politics, of revolutionaries who must make concessions in order to advance the revolution, revolutionaries who must betray themselves in order not to betray themselves, who must deviate from the path towards the communist horizon in terrain as mountainous and rugged as reality? I am paraphrasing Lenin because he understood this new ethic very well. He understood it in his revolutionary strategy and made it explicit in his critique of leftist infantilism.
Lenin understood that Marx’s text itself had to be betrayed when translated into real politics. He glimpsed that there was oppression on the road to any liberation. For this and for more, Lenin spoke from the division of the subject. He accepted this division and assumed it as a contradiction in his materialist dialectic. It is the same thing that Marx and Engels did. It is for this and for more that today we should listen to them and take them seriously in psychoanalysis. This listening is at the base of our manifesto Psychoanalysis and revolution: critical psychology for liberation movements.