This book is only about a nightmare: the nightmare of the 'I'.

[...] The relationship between I-I am is the key to our entire individual and collective history at an ideological, personal level, from slavery to today. Since we can only say I through the I am, it is clear that I am not talking about a history of the soul, since the I-am is always constructed, produced by social relations (that is, economic, political and ideological). I speak only of an attempt to history what we usually call subjectivity without knowing very well what we are saying.

And I'm talking about historicalizing that supposed subjectivity through its discursive manifestations: literature, philosophy, writing in general.

Juan Carlos Rodriguez

Juan Carlos Rodríguez sought to write, in his work as a whole, The Capital of Bourgeois Subjectivity, of its different historical phases, and how a very particular product came to life in it: literature. Along this path, he ended up building an original theory of ideology as exploitation, which stands out for its methodical ability to explain discourses.

Within this great project, and halfway between the two millennia, Rodríguez devoted a book to elucidating the relationship between the ideological unconscious and the libidinal unconscious that – due to various circumstances – had remained unpublished. Our author needed to point out what brought him closer and what distanced him from Freud, one of his constant interlocutors. The work is now published in a detailed edition by Juan Antonio Hernández García and preceded by a study where the basic parameters of his thought are elucidated by José Luis Moreno Pestaña.