MAD MARGINAL Cahier #5 Edited by Dora García With texts by Anna Akhmatova, Paloma Contreras Lomas, Ruth Estévez, Dora García, Alexandra Kollontai, Carla Lamoyi, Maria Lind, Rina Ortiz, Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert & Álvaro Ruiz Rodilla With translations byJoan Brooks and Christopher Winks Design by Alex Gifreu AMOR ROJO1 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX MAD MARGINAL is a series of publications (Cahiers) initiated by Dora García in 2010 that were conceived as “readers”: that is, as reading companions to her artistic research and work. Since 2010 there have been four MAD MARGINAL Cahiers: From Basaglia to Brazil (#1, 2010), on the legacy of Italian psychiatrist Franco Basaglia; The Inadequate (#2, 2011), on marginality as an artistic position; Klau Mich (#3, 2012), on recent German history, radicalism, and TV experimentation; I see words, I hear voices (#4, 2015), on extra-sensory perception and deviant literature. Love with Obstacles (Amor Rojo) is Cahier #5. MAD MARGINAL / CAHIER #5 / LOVE WITH OBSTACLES (AMOR ROJO) 2 3 XXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXXX CONTENTS 6 118 Ruth Estévez Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert Introduction & Álvaro Ruiz Rodilla The Liberation of Women: Kollontai 16 Dora García in Mexico (Part 2) Amor revolucionario 146 Dora García 32 Alexandra Kollontai Love with Obstacles On the “Dragon” and the “White Bird” 184 Maria Lind 50 Radical Imagination Anna Akhmatova in Motion: Researching Selected Poems with Dora García (1911–21) & Alexandra Kollontai 68 194 Rina Ortiz Paloma Contreras Lomas Traces and Glimmers: The Mexican Beyond The Writings of Alexandra Kollontai 210 Carla Lamoyi 82 Si tocan a una, Ana Sofía Rodríguez Everaert respondemos todas & Álvaro Ruiz Rodilla Intellectual & Artistic Encounters: Kollontai 240 in Mexico (Part 1) Rina Ortiz Alexandra Kollontai: 98 A Complete Bibliography Rina Ortiz Women: A Life’s 272 Commitment Contributors INTRODUCTION Ruth Estévez MAD MARGINAL / CAHIER #5 / LOVE WITH OBSTACLES (AMOR ROJO) 6 It’s time to recognize openly that love is not only a powerful natural factor, a biological force, but also a social factor. Essentially, love is a profoundly social emotion. At all stages of human development love has (in different forms, it is true) been an integral part of culture. — Alexandra Kollontai, “Make Way for Winged Eros” (1923)1 The different meanings of love, its strategies and forms of manifestation, intimacies, and forms of public production, as well as the codes present in conventions and personal and collective relationships, form the backdrop of Dora García’s works. Debate, continual dialogue, collective reading aloud, scripted performances that dissolve the gap between performer and audience, are the methodologies of interaction that start from the collision or deflection of gazes, desire safeguarded in a correspondence from the distant past, or in the nervous closeness of a group-therapy session. Her concern for micro-histories—parasites on and protagonists of the great human themes—enable life’s domestic and ominous aspects alike to blend with the social and political arguments of the public sphere, forming the bases for an analysis, from the perspective of art, literature, history, and philosophy, that is, the emotional capital that shapes us. Love with Obstacles (Amor Rojo) is a publication that accompanies—and at the same time functions independently of—the exhibition of the same name in Boston’s Rose Museum. It is a new chapter in what is anticipated to be a serendipitous succession of projects and subsequent publications around the radical writings, letters, and literature of some of the twentieth century’s most eminent revolutionary intellectual women. Accordingly, this book gives us a detailed introduction to the biography and writings of the Russian feminist and activist Alexandra Kollontai (1872–1952), a diplomat and, as the People’s Commissar for Social Welfare, the only woman in the first Bolshevik government. She was a key figure in the gestation of the October Revolution and the author of much of the early social legislation passed by the Soviet republic. Love with Obstacles analyzes, through different perspectives, her political and social ideas on women’s emancipation, in particular her invention and definition of the concept 7 INTRODUCTION of “love-comradeship,” a collective impulse firmly rooted in the equality of classes and the strength of the workers’ collectivity, in contrast to the traditionalist and individualist morality of couple relations and the sexual roles of the existing bourgeoisie. Love with Obstacles brings together a series of essays by contemporary female authors who address Kollontai’s legacy in a dialectical manner, building bridges while at the same time creating a critical distance between the current historical situation and the one in which she lived and wrote. “Love,” Kollontai said, “is a profoundly social emotion. Love is not in the least a ‘private’ matter concerning only the two loving persons: love possesses a uniting element which is valuable to the collective”2—in short, an exponentially liberatory conception of love with an important function of social cohesion, opposed to normative and dependent love, which according to Kollontai is essentially anti-political. Her ideas on the foundations of egalitarian labor and women’s access to education conjoin with her thoughts on sexuality, marriage, divorce, the right to abortion, and in general, women’s roles in the family and in public life; in this respect, her thought resonates with some of her contemporaries, such as the Marxist thinkers Rosa Luxemburg and Clara Zetkin. Marxist thought itself, at its foundations, was critical of the sexual relationships and protocols of bourgeois society, where marriage was considered as a kind of contract based on “private property.”3 Bourgeois men used women with the same harshness as their workers, namely, as mere instruments of production, whether as unpaid domestic laborers or as reproductive machines to sustain the closed family nucleus. Kollontai expanded Marx and Engels’s concepts, problematizing the idea of monogamy in traditional marriage in contrast to a free and solidary love that would strengthen the ties between equals and permit other types of relationships and “ways of loving.” These ideas were often misinterpreted, and she was branded as promiscuous and uninterested in emotional politics. “The ideal of love in marriage only begins to appear when, with the emergence of the bourgeoisie, the family loses its productive functions and remains a consumer unit also serving as a vehicle for the preservation of accumulated capital.”4 In her controversial article “Make Way for Winged Eros” (1923), written in the form of a letter to proletarian youth, Kollontai called for imagining a love-comradeship rooted in the shared emotional enthusiasm of revolution: MAD MARGINAL / CAHIER #5 / LOVE WITH OBSTACLES (AMOR ROJO) 8 “The more such threads connecting soul to soul, heart to heart, and mind to mind, the more strongly will the spirit of solidarity be inculcated and the easier it will be to attain the ideals of the working class—comradeship and unity,”5 a love linking to and with others, as opposed to the sentiment of “competition and self-love found in the bourgeois system.”6 In her declarations, Kollontai maintained as a backdrop the intersubjective functioning of the economy and the nation-state in harmony with affective and personal relationships. Because of this, it is relevant to interiorize her legacy at the present moment, where theories of sexuality have been sharply separated from the question of class, and “love” has been converted into an exclusive panacea of the emotional and psychological realms, relegated to the paradigms of the individual desire of the capitalist machine. Having said this, reading Kollontai today means recognizing how sexuality has been codified in every moment and space, and in this way to be able to find the forms that will help us shake up the contemporary sexual order. At the beginning of the twentieth century, Kollontai attacked a normativized society, constructing an imaginary for a possible post- patriarchal structure. While it is true that in her writings, she spoke of a sexual revolution of a binary nature, her concept of a free love capable of bringing together diverse forms of union and cohabitation, present an a priori model for a future post-heterosexual society, prepared to dispense with the notion of gender. * * * Following her death in Moscow in 1952, Alexandra Kollontai’s texts have been taken up again more recently with definite force, although, like many women authors of her generation, she continues to be marginalized not only from the historical position within the Bolshevik party that she deserves, but also as an author and a universal Marxist thinker. Beginning with the emergence of the feminism of the 1960s and 1970s and subsequently with the so-called feminist “third way,” in which concepts of race, religion, nationality, culture, and sexual preference were incorporated and legitimized, Kollontai’s writings retain their complete validity. 9 INTRODUCTION It’s Kollontai’s personal letters—many of them love letters, which interfere with, shed light on, and sometimes contradict her own way of understanding this “love-comradeship” latent in her writings—that bring us closer to the author’s intimate thoughts, a voice that comes through somewhat distantly in her writings and public speeches.7 Love with Obstacles, however, includes one intimate essay by Kollontai, translated into English especially for this publication by Joan Brooks; the text, “On the ‘Dragon’ and the ‘White Bird’” belongs to the “Letters to Working Youth” (1923). Its reproduction here is accompanied by a series of poems by one of Russia’s greatest poets, Anna Akhmatova (1889–1966). In the text, Kollontai explains why Akhmatova’s poems were so popular among the proletarian youth, despite Akhmatova never embracing the Russian Revolution. Kollontai argues that while revolutionary women were prepared for a real change in matters of love relationships, their male companions were still embedded in patriarchal family traditions inherited from the bourgeois society.