Notes Towards a Theory of the Ideological/Libidinal Unconscious: Juan Carlos Rodríguez on Freud

Psychoanalytic Marxists have traditionally accepted the opposition between an introspective psychoanalysis and a historicizing Marxism and simply tried, with varying degrees of success, to bring these two disciplines into alignment. From the ensuing interdisciplinary encounter, Marxism has habitually emerged as the loser insofar as forced to concede ownership of the concept of the unconscious to its antagonist. In a recent, posthumously published work, Freud: la escritura, la literatura (2023), the Spanish Althusserian, Juan Carlos Rodríguez, takes as his point of departure an opposition between ideological and libidinal versions of the unconscious, further to which he proceeds to argue, from the standpoint of a radical historicity, that it is the former that effectively entraps the latter. The present article assesses the strengths and weaknesses of Rodríguez’s position, in the light of Hispanic texts selected from the transition from feudalism to capitalism.