Materiality, Time and Desire: the Criticism of Christian Mythology in León Rozitchner's Work

Abstract

This text focuses on the last part of the theoretical production of León Rozitchner, in which he assesses the structuring myth of our culture: Christianism. By means of a Freudian interpretation of Saint Augustin’s “Confessions”, Rozitchner retakes in an original way the Marxist idea of criticism of religion as the presumption of every criticism. The religious core hidden by modern secularization, hindered by capitalism, is revealed, and the notion of a corpus emerges, which allows critical revision of ancient dichotomies beset by religion, in order to open paths towards new ways of telling History. From the perspective of historical materialism, we try to put forward the passage from criticism of ideology to criticism of mythology. The latter promotes a reflection on the symbolic foundations that may give way to emancipatory processes. Finally, we show that in Rozitchner´s work, the will to construct a theory of the subject and the criticism of culture is the result of a perennial reflection on identity in itself.