You are not going to find much in English concerning the Argentine philosopher and theologian Rubén Dri. The only thing that I found, and the way I found out about him in the first place, is an English translation of the introduction he wrote to the Spanish edition of the compilation of Raya Dunayevskaya’s writings on the dialectic, The Power of Negativity. Otherwise, everything you will find about him on-line or otherwise is in Spanish. That really is a pity, since I think he has something very important to say to contemporary struggles for liberation. The following will be a brief summary of my now months-long search to find out all that I can about this philosopher of action. I also hope to give an intellectual glimpse at a point of view that Anglophone readers in the First World rarely see.
Rubén Dri’s resume is extensive and he seems to have several intellectual projects going on at once. He started out in religion, and more specifically, as one of the founding members of the Priests of the Third World Movement, one of the primary formations that sprung up as a result of the growth of liberation theology in Latin America. As a priest, he was a militant in the workers’ movements in Argentina in the 1960’s and 1970’s, only to be exiled in Mexico for around ten years when the military dictatorship took power. Intellectually, he has contributed to discussions of liberation theology, and more notably, to the study of G.W.F. Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and its relevance to contemporary Latin America. On this latter endeavor, he has written a seven book-long close reading of the Phenomenology of Spirit that totals over 1,200 pages, as well as writing books on Hegel’s Science of Logic and political philosophy. He has also contributed to discussions of popular religiosity in the Latin American context, and has written a book most recently analyzing the fascist Catholic ideology behind the military dictatorship in Argentina. He is also a regular commentator on Argentine public television on a variety of contemporary issues. Though no longer a priest, he still considers himself a Christian of some sort, but his relationship with Catholicism itself seems rather ambiguous in my opinion.
From all that I have read of him and about him, the key to Dri’s intellectual and political project is the Hegelian Subject, that is, the human being in the continuous unfolding of freedom and self-development. One could not call simply Dri a Left Hegelian or even a Hegelian, anymore than one could call him a Marxist. He is well-versed in both schools of thought, but he is very clear that a person should never “buy the whole package” of any thinker. He is committed to the cause of the oppressed, and that is perhaps where his Christianity gets involved. One could summarize it, perhaps a little confusedly, by saying that, for Dri, his Marx, Hegel, and Jesus are all saying the same thing, only in different times and different contexts. For example, he sees the Gospel of St. Mark as the anti-imperialist gospel, or he sees Hegel as a profound theologian who gets to the real heart of the Christian message, or he sees Marx as being more “utopian” than orthodox Marxists admit, in a good sense. In all of his writings, Dri can easily move between Marxist theory, Biblical exegesis, the Kantian categorical imperative, and the Argentine folk-saint/bandit Gauchito Gil, without making it seem like a sloppy pastiche. Indeed, I have read some of his writings where he applies Kant and Hegel to very contemporary happenings in Argentine electoral politics.
Dri’s emphasis on Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit has everything to do what he thinks it can say to Latin Americans in particular in their fight to reassert control over their countries after the period of neoliberal reaction in the 1980’s and 1990’s. For one thing, he sees parallels between the young Hegel writing in Jena at the beginning of the 19th century when Napoleon was spreading the bourgeois revolution throughout Europe by French bayonet and Latin America after the period of brutal dictatorships in the last decades of the 20th century. In the Phenemenology, Hegel penned the first thoughts regarding the dialectic as the algebra of history, or rather, how history is the continuous interplay between consciousness and self-consciousness in a never-ending quest for freedom. The human Subject constitutes herself in a continuous exit and return (exitus-reditus) in which she realizes that all that is “out there” is really “in here”, and vice versa. To create oneself is to know oneself, to know oneself is to create oneself, and so on. All of Hegel’s major works concern this theme at different stages, and the dialectic as compelled by negation is just as present at the first stage as it is in the latest.
In the Latin American context, Dri only sees this process unfolding through the direct negation of neoliberal capital and the negation of a negation of a new society. Capitalism, particularly in its brutal imperialist form that has victimized Latin America for centuries now, can only use the Latin American masses as substance, as fodder to extract the resources of these nations for its own benefit. Because the human Subject must create herself through thought and action, the goal of imperialism is always to keep the masses from acting as free Subjects, which can mean everything from massive unemployment that deprives people of the means of life to reproduce themselves, to rigged and bought elections that take away the self-determination of the people in favor of unelected bankers and technocrats. In recent years, Dri has seen the negation of this neoliberal order in such phenomena as the Argentine uprising in 2001 of picketers (piqueteros) and the middle class rising up against the powers-that-be under the slogan, “Que se vayan todos” (“They all must go”). That, however, is only the Hegelian negation that can lead nowhere very quickly. The negation of the negation, the struggle for a new society, is now the task, and Dri is optimistic concerning the rise of such figures as Nestor Kirchner and Evo Morales in terms of reconstituting the project of national sovereignty and self-determination in the face of imperialism.
As far as I can tell, Dri is no orthodox Marxist or leftist who thinks that a certain formula is the solution to all of our woes. Dri cites the sectarian orthodox Marxist as being an example of Hegel’s “beautiful soul” who refuses to enter the nitty-gritty of the historical dialectical process in order to “stay clean” in ideological purity. On the other hand, Dri has echoed Raya Dunayevskaya in saying that human beings have been fighting for socialism for thousands of years, if only in the sense that they have been fighting for freedom for that long. For Dri, the human Subject needs a utopia, that goal of complete freedom for all that will never be obtained but must always be fought for. In the end, Dri polemicizes against all attempts to rob the modern Subject of her utopia, either from the right, as in the case of Francis Fukuyama’s end of history, or the left, as in Antonio Negri’s or John Holloway’s postmodern polemics about changing the world without taking power. For Dri, the idea that a better world is possible is the sine qua non of freedom.
A note about style in Dri is necessary as a contrast to most authors writing about similar subjects. Dri makes no apologies about being a scholar, and has authored other texts on the political philosophy of Aristotle, Thomas Aquinas, and Machiavelli. Thus, his writing can seem very academic at times, with references that one would not normally find in authors talking about similar topics. Nevertheless, he is passionate about the need for theory and philosophy in activism in general, and the need for philosophy to be engaged in the struggle of humanity for freedom. In that sense, unlike someone like Slavoj Zizek, he is not merely writing to spark intellectual titillation in his readers, and he always puts first the ethical obligation of theoreticians to think with the masses. On the other hand, he is far more optimistic than any leftist intellectual I have read recently concerning the need for progressives to take transcendent symbols, especially religious symbols, seriously. Here he has stated that the true genius of Hegel was that he sought to apply reason not just to the quantifiable, as in the thinking of the Enlightenment, but also to the symbolic realm of human thought. For Dri, the hyper-rationalism of contemporary thought is a regression from the intellectual achievement of Hegel, and Marxists have been the worst culprits in spreading this objectifying ideology.
What can the writings of Rubén Dri teach the Anglophone reader living in the First World (considering that none of his writings have been translated into English)? First of all, that the process by which capital is trying to take away our status as Subjects and turn us into substances for its own use is the same everywhere. For example, this is going on in education, where the needs of capital, which are falsely equated with the needs of the good of society in general, are dictating how children and young people are to be educated, what subjects are useful and what are not, etc. What worse way to turn a person into an object than to divide learning into “useful” and “not useful”, according to some technocratic formula? On the other hand, from Dri the First World Left could learn a deeper appreciation of religiosity and cultural symbolism, and not just from a spiritual “consumerist” perspective. Not only are religious symbolism and themes there to give comfort to weary masses, but they in themselves are an expression of struggle especially amongst the poor. Here of course Dri makes the necessary (if not too fine) distinction between such symbols as they are used by ordinary people and how they are used by institutions of power.
Most of all, from Dri we should hear again the echo of the cry for freedom that began modernity in the first place, defined so rigorously in Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit and other writings. Gone is the time when we could pretend that ethnic, racial, religious, or imperial hierarchies give some license to lord over others. The only path towards peace, love, and order is through the absolute equality of all. As long as this equality is not realized, as long as capital’s dictatorship dictates the fate of humanity in its arbitrary quest to expand itself, even the poorest and most oppressed will continue to fight, with sticks and their own teeth if these are all they have. And reason, or Spirit, or God, will always be on their side.
Interesting comment by Zizek to Occupy Wallstreet recently:
Communism failed absolutely, but the problems of the commons are here. They are telling you we are not American here. But the conservatives fundamentalists who claim they really are American have to be reminded of something: What is Christianity? It’s the holy spirit. What is the holy spirit? It’s an egalitarian community of believers who are linked by love for each other, and who only have their own freedom and responsibility to do it. In this sense, the holy spirit is here now. And down there on Wall Street, there are pagans who are worshipping blasphemous idols. So all we need is patience. The only thing I’m afraid of is that we will someday just go home and then we will meet once a year, drinking beer, and nostaligically remembering “What a nice time we had here.” Promise yourselves that this will not be the case. We know that people often desire something but do not really want it. Don’t be afraid to really want what you desire. Thank you very much.
Zizek is an interesting figure to compare and contrast with Rubén Dri. On the one hand, Zizek swears that Hegel is everything for him. In fact, I believe his next long anticipated book is on Hegel (called, “Less than zero” or something like that). Dri makes no such claim, but the proof is in the pudding, so to speak, since it’s hard to write ten books on Hegel and turn around and claim that you are not a Hegelian. But I take him at his word that he doesn’t buy the whole package, but who can? Compared to Dri, Zizek is the drunk uncle at family reunions who people humor by pretending to take what he has to say seriously, but everyone really knows that he has no idea what he is talking about. Take the issue of Christianity, for example: someone who claims to be a lifelong atheist flattering Christian theologians with a bunch of stuff that Hegel said almost two hundred years ago has some entertainment value for people who have short intellectual memories. Dri’s credentials as a former priest and theologian by comparison make what he has to say about Christianity far more insightful, and he has a command of at least Koine Greek, if not Hebrew, without mentioning the Latin that was probably beat into him in seminary back when everything was in Latin. But the entertainment value of all that is minimal, especially since Dri probably does not have the fluency in English that Zizek has, and refuses to write in any language other than Spanish. As a leftist, he remains profoundly unconcerned that he is a big fish in the small pond of the Argentine political scene, which is a far cry from Zizek, who is a professional attention whore. Personally, Dri’s subject matters are far less titillating than Zizek’s, but that stuff gets old very quickly; there’s only so much Hitchcock, Lacan, and Eastern European dirty jokes that one can stand before boredom sets in.