ABSTRACT
Cabrera Alvarez’s biography of Che Guevara describes a local dance at which the future revolutionary is required to attend with a friend, Alberto Granados. In a social and, indeed, libidinal setting, this inability is a handicap and Guevara seeks to overcome it through a practiced reduction of music and dance to its mathematical principles. The rhythm of dance here is a subtle form of immobilising, fatal violence. The unconscious that thus emerges also tells us something about the form of repression. Perhaps, since he cannot experience the pleasure and satisfaction of rhythm, this is what dancing is to Che Guevara. Rhythm is conventionally predicated upon naturalness. Some people have “natural” rhythm they say, while others, most notably white men, cannot dance. Indeed, language, as an assemblage of sounds and symbols, is nothing but a chain of signifiers in which meaning, the signified, is never really anything other than a semblance, an apparition.
