The Ethic of Terror in Radical Democracy

Jacques Lezra is Professor of ere’s a joke with a trick to it. English and Spanish at the spoke with a magisterial “we” University of Wisconsin at that some found pleasantly archaic, others Madison, and Director of H rather sinister. Taken with the syncopating hand-move- Graduate Programs in En- ments that punctuated his speeches, the collective pro- glish. In addition to numer- noun irresistibly wed the notional corporate body of ous articles on literary theory and criticism, he is the au- the Spanish state to Franco’s own. In the early 1970s thor of Unspeakable Sub- Franco is reputed to have announced the beginning of jects: The Genealogy of the a new economic movement intended to catalyze the Event in Early Modern Eu- Spanish economy, threatening to stagnate after the brief rope (1997), the editor of boom of the 1960s. News of the announcement took Depositions: Althusser, Bali- the shape of this chiste, to be told with the Caudillo’s bar, Macherey and the Labor ponderous diction and mimicking the up-and-down of Reading (1995), and co- movements of his hand: “After 30 years of a post-war editor of Suplemento al ‘Te- state, we have decided to change our movement [or soro de la lengua castellana o ‘the direction of our movement,’ or ‘our political pro- española’ de Covarrubias (2001). gram,’ or ‘our political allegiance’]”—a phrase to be accompanied, mid-way, by a change in the direction of the hand, interrupted in its vertical flight and now made to move horizontally, with an equally stolid side- to-side rhythm. This was neither the first nor the best joke told about Franco, but it may be among the most subver- sive, since it requires the person telling it to envision what for many was the moment’s most pressing politi- cal fantasy, the promise of a change of political move- ment or of the political direction given the country upon the dictator’s death, by assuming the character of the Caudillo in word as well as gesture.1 To the cultural

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critic, the chiste furnishes a royal road into very body—that this notional movement the remarkable association between the might seek to abandon. Falangist imaginary and the figure of the Or one might put the matter like hand (see di Febo). A political historian this. For Spanish society since 1989, eco- turns to it for an example of the migra- nomic and social integration in the EU is tion of the term Movimiento during the shaped by a troubled recollection of the Spanish post-war, from its more or less “transition,” the movement from forty proper historical use in the expression years of authoritarian rule to a constitu- Movimiento Falangista, to the Movimiento tional democracy federating weakly-au- Nacional after the nationalist victory in tonomous regions under a nominal mon- 1939, then to the entirely abstract movi- archy. The shapes that this recollection miento found in the Dictator’s speeches takes are tricky to describe, because for after the Matesa scandal, in 19692: the the that lived that transition, think- semantic movements of movimiento ing “beyond” the “movement” so as to marked Franco’s effort to distance himself “change movements” decisively—thinking from the Falange, and in the early 1970s through a transition still to be recol- from its heirs, Fraga, Solís and Castiella lected—meant assuming the figure and (Preston 270, 694-95; Tusell and García gestures of the Caudillo so as to work the Queipo de Llano 344-64). Those keen to violence of a gesture upon his body, or, understand the shapes taken by Spanish less allegorically, assuming the burden of cultural anxieties today, on the country’s political terror so as to escape or profit joining the European Union and renego- from it, so as to work it through reflex- tiating matters long cherished as the pre- ively, introject it, consume it. To attach rogative of national sovereignty, must to the hand of the Caudillo the form that puzzle out the emergence of popular-cul- our retrospective thought about political tural treatments of the years of transition change can take is to stress the ghostly alongside institutional efforts to rescue the influence that Franco’s body has after its material traces of events long repressed: own passing, furnishing a recent history the opening of mass graves, consolidation preserved under the entailing shadow of and democratization of access to Civil War the Movimiento’s mort-main, or ley de manos archives, the surprising success of televi- muertas, as the legislation is called in sion serials like “Cuéntame cómo pasó,” Spain.3 etc. And of course the resuscitation of old The task for radical democratic, tran- jokes, which now circulate with a nostal- sitional thought today may well be to find gic surplus-value hard at times to square whether defining representations of po- with their sharply satiric beginnings. Fi- litical change ever become detached from nally, the notional cultural anthropolo- such sublime bodies, or whether these gist might note that the moving hand bodies can suffer dematerializations or speaks to the way in which political change resemanticizations that effectively change is imagined at a moment when the con- their “movements” (direction, value—a cept of political movement and the signi- whole micro-physics is entailed here), and fier movimiento remain tied to the corpo- if so how. Let us, as a preliminary to this ratist model of association—indeed to the task, first agree on this: “brokering” the Jacques Lezra 177 emergence of a socio-politico-economic newly available to them, and as the fear formation means not just describing the that the emergent political establishments transition from one movimiento to another, would experience toward the masses they but also reflecting on the shapes and func- would nominally represent (293). On one tions that these descriptions assume today: side we might range the social anxieties on the historical and cultural materials that classically said to follow on the develop- determine those shapes, and on their so- ment of modern forms of identification: cial and conceptual uses, fantasmatic and anxiety over the first definitions and al- practical, for us here and now no less than most correlative subsumption of a notional for those societies whose movements we private sphere in a public one or vice-versa; address. And let’s say that the accepted more generally, anxiety over the subsump- story of the establishment of European tion (facilitated by changes in communi- nationalisms and of their apparent, immi- cations and technology, the increased ease nent subsumption in meta-national organ- of movement of persons and of capital, isms shadows closely the story of the etc.) of local modalities of identification— desacralization, politicization and depoli- ethnic, geographical, economic, reli- ticization of the notion of “terror.” gious—in larger or differently organized One might gloss this story in this national ones: in brief, social anxiety ex- way. In accounts of the phenomenology pressed as terror of the political, and inci- of national or proto-national conscious- dentally, apotropaically, as terror of and ness, the experience of terror, an affect tra- resistance to the political classes. Consider ditionally restricted to private, aesthetic on the other side how, called to adminis- or physiological domains, moves sud- ter these larger or differently organized denly, and to some extent on account of forms of identification, required to repre- the Enlightenment’s normativization of sent a volonté générale in the face of a those domains, into the public sphere. The volonté particulière forever both subsumed aesthetic vehicle for this movement is the in the public sphere and irreducible to it, language of the sublime, tied as early as the modern political classes encountered Burke to a reflection on the circumstance in the masses and in the “citizen subject” of political revolution (33); its cultural- an extimate knot of familiar and unfamil- journalistic vehicle can be found in the iar interests, interests reducible to (politi- eponymous characterization of the cal or other) representation and interests Robespierrian revolution as “the Terror,” exceeding these reductions. The terror of an over-concretization that apotropaically the intimately alien mass and of the citi- restricts to a particular moment and to a zen-subject (in this case the genitives are particularly egregious set of behaviors subjective) comes to be expressed practi- what is in fact a general condition of rep- cally as greater or lesser degrees of repres- resentative government (compare Laqueur sion practiced by the political classes—as 26). The early-national crainte des masses, political terror, in brief—and in the lan- as Balibar calls it, is experienced in both guage of political economics in the com- the subjective and the objective forms, modification of terms intended to nego- both as the fear that the masses experi- tiate between particular and collective in- ence towards the forms of identification terests, or between representable and 178 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies unrepresentable interests: the “spirit” of tive disagreement, or indeed the contested laws or of nations, the voluntary surren- ground of semantic battles as terrible as der of the will, the inevitable globaliza- the literal ones that they support. In this tion of capital. instance the experience of “terror,” because A successful republicanism, it turns it evokes what Kintzler calls “the scenario out, does not minimize, but seeks instead of an abolition or suspension of the [po- to understand, guard and administer these litical] machine, a scenario equivalent to intimate, asymmetrical terrors, and their that of its foundation,” becomes not the practical and politico-philosophical ex- exceptional but the normative cause for pressions: resistance and repression, Schu- critical reflection on the principles of re- macherite reterritorialization and eco- publican government, and in particular nomic globalization. We might put it on the sublime asymmetry between the polemically: radical-democratic republi- principles and means of government.4 canism nurtures and depends upon the Deplorable as it may seem, the breaks in experience of social terror. This is not a the fabric of social experience revealed by claim that anyone living and writing after the experience of terror become defining the events of September 11, 2001 can attributes of genuinely open, radically make lightly. Social terrors, which appear democratic states whose institutions seek as the critical-epistemological devices on to negotiate the constitutive antagonism which republican ethics are to be founded, between interest-governed doctrines of must in the first instance be distinguished right and law (compare Laclau and Mouffe from the phenomenon of “terrorism.” This 93-105, and Piñuel 13). turns out to be a particularly delicate task; On this description, social terror it is not on that account any less pressing. becomes the privileged cause of the reflec- Consider Saint-Just’s famous proposition, tion on the status of political principles, “A republican government has virtue as and the disruptive and disrupted phe- its principle; otherwise, it has terror” (cited nomenology of terror becomes the privi- in Kintzler 17). Here the relation between leged trope for post-national principles of governance and principle is not political association. But can social terror also serve but foundational, the sort of mythic posit as a model for this reflection? Not, seem- that Kintzler calls a metaphysical “mov- ingly, without assuming the form of a ter- ing force located beyond the political, un- rorist act. Consider now these pseudo-syl- derstood as a machine” (17). In Saint-Just, logistic lines from a communiqué that ETA- the principles of republican government V published in Hautsi in 1973: reveal themselves as mythic posits, that is, as precisely not republican, when the What tactics can the Vietnamese, the mechanicity of political institutions is Irish, the Basques, etc. rely upon in laid bare: when the formal devices of their fight, when they have been de- republican representation fail to map the nied every legal and democratic av- enue of combating for legitimate rights, field of political interests, when an impasse under a legal system that is foreign to or a differend arises between the claims of them? [...] Our objectives are to favor right and the formality of law, when vir- [...] the organization of the working tue is not a perspicuous, given term but class and of the people, so that the itself the opaque occasion of administra- latter, directed by the former, can carry Jacques Lezra 179

out the revolutionary fight for the the target’s membership in the “repres- national and social liberation of our sive apparatus,” the more the act’s didac- people. At the same time, revolution- tic function, which is to make manifest ary activities will be directed at divid- retrospectively the rationale for choosing ing and isolating the oppressors, in an the target, itself appears as an arbitrary effort to radicalize the contradictions re-semanticization, a form of “terrorism” that exist in the breast of the exploit- ing classes [...]. This is not terrorism. conducted at the level of the sign. We are not attacking indiscriminately, This impasse at the heart of ETA’s but rather attacking selected people, communiqué allows me to return to my well-defined inasmuch as they are lead- question: can the experience of social “ter- ing members of an oppressor class, or ror” serve non-instrumentally as a model of the repressive apparatus. (cited in for reflecting on political principles ob- Bruni 154-55) scured by the mechanics of government? If the post-national models of radical de- ETA’s effort to distinguish between the mocracy that emerge in the shadow of “indiscriminate” attack—terrorism—and state and/or revolutionary terror nurture the representative act of violence—a jus- and guard an explicit and historical rela- tifiable military tactic undertaken in the tion to the experience and cultural affect- context of a foreign legal system that sac- value of terror (as a cause of reflection, as a rifices rights to law—rests on an unstable trope for an unsutured and open social principle closely related to Saint-Just’s field, perhaps as a model for reflection upon wobbly distinction between “terror” and the political more broadly), then “broker- “virtue.” The impasse here is both strate- ing” post-national forms of association gic and analytic. To the extent that the means opening to scrutiny the double “oppressor class” or the “repressive appa- bind of terror disclosed by its instrument- ratus” are taken to be given, perspicuous alized form, that is, by what we call ter- terms, then the “terrorist” organization rorism. A double bind: for the “terrorist,” relinquishes the vanguardist function of the opacity of the relation between indi- “laying bare” the mechanicity of a repres- viduals and the class-interests they repre- sive State or conceptual apparatus—pur- sent or can be made to represent must be chasing thereby a rationale for every act both maintained (the didactic function at the cost of the epistemologically and of the act of terror being to construct it politically critical function of revealing the après coup, to generate after a first, inex- mythic foundations of the contradictions plicable blow a second one in the form of in the “oppressors’ breasts.” But say, on what could be called a political “Aha!”— the other hand, that an organization like phenomenon, the (re)construction of the ETA seeks to lay bare and exacerbate these “representativeness” or collusion of the contradictions by taking as its target civil- target of the first blow in a repressive ap- ians selected precisely because their “repre- paratus) and undermined (in the form of sentativeness” is not self-evident, but must the assertion of the self-evident transpar- be made manifest. In this case, the organi- ency of the relation between the individual zation purchases a critical function at the and the class or conceptual interests s/he expense of any immediate political repre- represents). The logic of “terrorism” oscil- sentativeness of its own. The less evident lates between the poles of this antinomy, 180 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies as its tactics move between what Mari- The Fatherland is a total unity, in ghella called the precision of the guerrilla’s which individuals and classes are inte- “shot” and the “irreparable damage” grated; the Fatherland cannot be in caused by the terrorist’s less discriminat- the hands of the strongest class, nor of ing bomb (Marighella 49, 84; see also the best-organized Party. The Father- land is a transcendent synthesis, an Crenshaw 18). Radical-democratic “ter- indivisible synthesis, with its own ends ror”—the affirmative “terror” of (again, to accomplish. And what we would both forms of the genitive govern) post- like is for the movement of today, and national, non-conceptual, unevenly de- the State that it creates, to be the ef- territorialized and unevenly re-territori- fective, authoritative and authoritar- alizing forms of association—takes shape ian instrument, in the service of an when this oscillation no longer obtains indisputable unity, of that permanent between the poles of a conceptual anti- unity, that irrevocable unity, called Fatherland. (66-67) nomy describing “the political” but con- stitutes the substance of “the political” Note two things. In the first place, the itself. paradox that haunts populist authoritar- What might it mean, then, to sub- ianism: the Fatherland is not in the hands mit the logic of terrorism—as “terrorism” of the strongest, or of the best organized— of State, or acts of “terrorism” against the not because it is in everyone’s hands, as it state, or, as in Al-Qaeda’s case, attacks is putatively in a democratic society; but against civilians weakly representative of because being in hands, being concretely broad cultural and economic formations— used as a form of concrete power, cannot to a critique rooted in the thought of “ter- be an attribute of the transcendent. “Move- ror”? And vice-versa: what might it mean ment” and “state” relate to this transcen- to submit republican “terror” to the strong dent synthesis entirely contingently (con- solvent of “terrorism”? To turn to the lega- crete institutions cannot be said to act for cies of terrorism so as to make evident the the Fatherland, in the sense of having it conceptual instability which, nurtured at in their hands), but also as parts of its the heart of the philosophy of terror, re- irrevocable unity. But on the other hand, mains necessary to a radical-democratic the “movement of today” imagines the post-nationalism? Say that one associates State as the “end” of the Fatherland, and the cultural experience of political terror seeks to fashion the State in that model: with the somaticization of the corporate the movement, in other words, is conflated nation-State (an embodied concept is heir with the transcendent, as what accom- to all the outrages that afflict the flesh: plishes fines propios. The movement serves hence the two bodies Kantorowicz fa- the fatherland by making its “own ends” mously imagined for the King, or the bod- available to it, by making certain that the ies that Franco sports in my opening state is the end of the fatherland. The bind chiste). Here again the case of Spain proves is a difficult one: either the movement is instructive. In the Catholic-mystical form unnecessary, because the transcendent it took for the Falange, the organicism of synthesis of the fatherland exists already, the State is best summarized in the words and will produce from itself a material of José Antonio Primo de Rivera: match to its ideality; or else the party is Jacques Lezra 181 the instrument by means of which the fa- Here is an example of an act of “ter- therland builds the state in its image, in rorism” that attaches to that homology. which case the preexistence of the father- I’m turning to it in some measure for its land is not an a priori but an accidental spectacular shape, in part because it fur- aspect of the fatherland, one requiring nishes an example of an act of violence technique, handling, an instrument, a the target of which seems so “well se- Slave. Note in the second place that the lected,” so “distinct,” as to obscure rather distinction between State and Fatherland than facilitate reflection on the State’s [Estado, Patria] is a temporal as well as an contradictions, and in part because of the ontological one (the Falangist state re- privileged place granted this event in the mains to come, but the fatherland is per- histories of Spain’s transition from au- manent, irrevocable, a concept rather than thoritarian rule to democracy. But what a materialization; the “movement” is an principally governs my choice of examples instrument both for the creation of the is this: as Spain seeks to devise for itself a State, for the reconciliation of the matter post-national, “European” identity, the to the concept, State to Fatherland; and, interests at war in the death of with the resulting State, for the service of still define the rela- the Fatherland). In other words, the tran- tion between local nationalism and State scendental synthesis attributed to the interest. That event, and the specific con- party (with its own goals) both exists in- flict it represents, mark in ways as yet dependently of the concretization of the unacknowledged the limit of the capa- party, and requires the party as its instru- cious, liberal-democratic, “European” so- ment. cial imaginary.5 Imagine, then, that this unstable In 1973, in the waning days of relation between party and State becomes Franco’s regime, Carrero, the president of a strategic element in an ideology that the Spanish government and the anointed both identifies movimiento with Patria, successor to the Generalísimo, stepped out and makes the first the means to achiev- of the church of San Francisco de Borja in ing the true spirit of the latter. Imagine, , where he regularly attended too, that the fantasy of a rupture in the Mass, and into his official car. Minutes organicist nation-State model locates that later there was a huge explosion. The first rupture precisely at the point of the great- news reports that day stated that a gas est mystification of that strategic element: main had exploded, causing no injuries where the “transcendent synthesis” of the but digging up a huge trench on the street, Party’s political apparatus with the State’s Claudio Coello. And in fact the President’s conceptual extension takes concrete form, car had not been found immediately. i.e., in the homology between the con- Blown over the façade of the church by a crete shape of the Party leadership and the bomb that commandos had planted, the conceptual extension of the Fatherland. limousine was discovered some moments In Franco’s hand, in short—executive, hor- later by a priest who was reading, and tatory, indexical, monitory, and above all, made his way to the balcony of an inner uncannily, both a concrete and an entirely courtyard where he discovered the car, allegorical organ. deformed into a V-shape, resting so that 182 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

he was able to see only the hands of the hard-line Falangist faction that had been occupants. To these hands he administered replaced after the Matesa scandal; the the last rites. “And with this event,” writes event’s epistemological and one might say Josep Carles Clemente, “the transition to psycho-social consequences were in their democracy begins” (qtd. in Vilarós 125.) way quite a bit more important. Here are Both the timing and the target of two moments in Vilarós’s description of the attempt were in a way entirely fore- the assassination’s outcome: seeable. The bombing took place on the day in which the elaborately prepared The complicated inweaving and un- proceso 1001, the trial of ten imprisoned raveling that [...] the political and the leaders of the underground Communist affective responses [to Carrero’s assas- union Comisiones Obreras, was to begin. sination] underwent in the palace of Carrero, Franco’s longest-standing deputy, El Pardo partially reflect what the Spanish social body also suffered at was known to be in charge of the political the time, equally and conflictedly en- relevo envisioned for the time of Franco’s tangled between affect and politics, death, and had recently—in June of feeling in part a surge of hope at what 1973—been appointed President by the magnicide might imply, and in Franco and charged with forming a Cabi- part horrified at the violence that po- net. ETA made the argument in this way: litical change demands [...]. But in ad- dition to marking the end and the be- From 1951 on Carrero was for all prac- ginning of an era, the assassination also tical purposes the Chief of Govern- marks the beginning of the process of ment of the regime. Carrero more than historical encryption with which the any one else symbolized the figure of fabric of Spanish society reacts to the ‘pure Franquismo.’ His police force magnicide. (120, 125) managed to insert itself in all the appa- ratus of Franco’s government. He thus Remark, in the spirit of decryption to became the key element of the system, which the event invites us, the mediations and the most basic piece in the political (temporal, institutional, symbolic) be- game of the oligarchy [...]. Everybody tween the bombing and its social (re)con- knows that the Spanish oligarchy was counting on Carrero to insure a smooth struction. In the hours and days immedi- transition to a ‘franquismo’ without ately after the assassination, the re-seman- Franco. (Forest 46) ticization of Carrero’s body proceeded fran- tically and unevenly, following official and The assassination provoked an immedi- unofficial channels, according to volun- ate—or almost immediate—crisis, both tary and involuntary mechanisms. The political and social. A number of theories “news-bomb delivered in small doses,” as explaining who really killed Carrero sur- Campo Vidal calls it (28), was doled out faced, and remain the subject of some (at to and by the media in an atmosphere times absurdly heated) discussion; a sub- that El País’s investigation some years later class of jokes about the assassination and would call “hermetismo informativo” a cotillion of rather morbid parlor games (Fuente, García and Prieto 167-79); a made the rounds. The political result of smattering of alternative accounts filtered the attack was the return to power of the into Spain from . Operación , Jacques Lezra 183

Eva Forest’s 1974 interviews with the ETA The stress in these lines falls largely in commando responsible for the attack, gave the multiplying analogy between the the event a narrative shape it has not yet terrorist’s (bowel, or at any rate excretory) shed, and a heroic cast confirmed in Ponte- movements, the pulling of the chain, the corvo’s version of Forest’s account, the film stench; and the expulsion, from the Ogro. And even today it seems difficult to analized body of the street of Claudio tell the story without importing oddly dis- Coello, of the president’s car.7 The mecha- crepant elements. In a recent history of nism of the analogy is again all too evi- the period, a merely evocative animism dent: nothing could seem more repugnant employed to naturalize Carrero’s vehicle than the stench from a toilet; nothing oddly flows into terminology drawn from more routine, more natural than the vari- the field of competitive diving: ous digestive and muscular processes that lead to “pulling the toilet chain in the The street pavement disintegrated water-closet” (the Spanish makes the anal- under the wheels of the official ve- ogy even bolder: “cada vez que daban la hicle, which suddenly interrupted its bomba del piso de arriba salía por allí un slow horizontal movement [...] to tufo que no se podía aguantar,” [Forest 170- rocket up over thirty-five meters [...]. 71]). Once established, the cloacal anal- It was a clean jump. On its descent— ogy forms the basis of the pseudo-syllo- which was too vertical—the car scratched the border of the overhang- gism for the “natural” necessity of elimi- ing roof. (Herrero 13-14) nating or expelling Carrero, la bomba del piso de arriba and the toilet chain operat- What socio-cultural work do these ing much as the bomba planted below the accounts carry out? Here is Forest’s tran- piso de abajo would do, the President a scription of a conversation in which two stand-in for the fecal material that forms members of the group recall how they dug the panorama of Madrid’s cloacas, and vice- the tunnel in which the explosives were versa. The argument’s rhetorical bridge- placed: work carries an additional conceptual value: the expulsion of Carrero reverses the We could just manage to get one arm anti-federalism of the Falange, which re- through the hole and start digging dirt fused to acknowledge the “foreignness” of out with the other hand [...]. The stink the Basque country to the Spanish state, was atrocious! As soon as we hit earth, by showing explosively that the Castilian- it began to reek of escaping gas—[...] izing ideology of the Franco regime can the earth was impregnated with gas. itself be symbolically and quite literally It was soft, greasy, humid earth [...]. detached from the body of the city, of the And every time we pulled the toilet State, of Spain. chain in the water-closet—hombre!— What Forest’s analogy deliberately there was a stench that just about loses is precisely what Herrero’s descrip- knocked us out. When we dug through the sewage, we must have tion provides, in the shape of his droll opened one of the conduits to the toi- characterization of a car “interrupting its let disposal. It was impossible to with- movement,” “jumping or diving” [salto] stand that stink. (89; I have slightly and finally “scratching” the roof: the ele- modified the translation) ment of the will that the body or mind 184 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

exercises in pulling the chain, deciding to ing a thick, unsuspected and threatening interrupt its movement (its movimiento or material panorama) as well as external (the its desplazamiento), to dive, to scratch— border between the Basque country and an act of will animistically supplied when France being at this time hardly subject it comes to the President’s car. Displaced, to Spanish control). of course, as if to compensate for the vio- This, at any rate, is how Franco him- lence with which Carrero’s own will, what- self would construe ETA’s attack on Carre- ever it might have been, was shown to be ro. In the complex, much-debated “Men- beside the point. And it is the loss of this saje de fin de año” that Franco delivered element that these lines from Operation some two weeks after the assassination the Ogro envision most powerfully: the bomb inside-outside logic that would be appro- blocks the passage from decisión to priated in ETA’s account in Operation movimiento. By means of ETA’s “operation” Ogro is significantly recast. Characteriz- or “execution” the corporate body of the ing the attack, opaquely but fascinatingly, state loses the immediacy of its limbs to with the words “there is no evil that does its will, or, to put it differently, the “ter- not result from good,” Franco proposed rorist” shows that the exercise of a corpo- that: rate will is never direct but always medi- ate and interruptible, that an element of The violence of a minority, supported the in-voluntary or of the merely reflexive and encouraged from outside the inhabits the “transcendent union” between country, a minority that represents no- the “symbol” and the concept of franquis- one and nothing, drowns itself in the mo, as between the “movement” and the maturity of the Spanish people [...]. The institutions have worked from State, or indeed between “Spain” and the within our people [...]. We have not intimately alien province of the Basque even had to turn to the exceptional country. One set of explanations for the measures that the law provides for, overdetermination of the Ogro story now since the confidence and hopes of the becomes patent: the issue is not only the Spanish people insured that order and fecalization of Carrero, the analization of peace would prevail. Peoples cannot the city, the eroticizing of the “terrorist’s” be judged by the external appearances strategy of introjection and expulsion. of consumer society, or by the frivol- Forrest’s interviews show explicitly what ity of a part of their social classes. There popular historiography also suggests: that exists in them [ellas] what cannot be seen, what the ideals of our Movement the construction of Carrero’s assassination have engraved [or “infused” or “mined”: represents the denial of a form of closure calar] in the good Spanish people, that to the conceptual body that the state as- which makes itself manifest on all great cribes to itself, and locates that resistance occasions. (Franco, qtd. in Vizcaíno to closure in the body’s lack of control, in Casas 298) its absence of will, in the recourse to re- flexive action cut from reflection that the The relation that Franco’s words establish State suffers in managing the economy of between the open frontier and the effect the body’s surfaces and borders, internal of the bomb is double. On the one hand (the surface of Madrid suddenly reveal- the attack on Carrero reveals the existence Jacques Lezra 185 of a porous border, a way in which the self the witting or unwitting agent of the external can influence the state from out- Falangist State’s self-recognition, the agent side. But on the other hand, and corre- of the dialectical reassertion of a mediate spondingly, the effect of the bomb is to but decisive—read: willed—relation be- close the state in upon itself, to reassert tween the people and the party, as the party the fundamental laws and to provoke the reveals itself deeply marked—calado— closed defense of those ideals. On one hand within the substance of the people. the attack, and social reaction to the at- Or say this: in Franco’s words the tack, reveal the external frivolity of the concepts of “terrorism” and of “the for- commercial classes, the classes of consumer eign” arise before the act that they char- society; on the other they suggest the ex- acterize, as the place to which the act is istence of what is not seen, the soul or the destined in the field of the social and as ideals or the character of the people. The the outside of that field. This pre-desti- argument is complex, and in one sense at nation of the act of resistance to the State’s least quite troubling. “Revealing” what the outside means, naturally, that the State Movimiento has inscribed within the “buen generates the names and the categories of pueblo español” (as madurez, serenidad, “terrorism” and “the foreign” for the pur- confianza and respect for “los órganos del poses of imposing its will, of holding and estado”) is clearly desirable here—on the making use of the chain that will expel more or less Hegelian grounds that rec- what the social body cannot consume. A ognizing that aspect of “el buen pueblo” familiar, coercive pattern ensues, the im- that on occasion “makes itself manifest” mediate effect of which is to preempt for “el buen pueblo” to see is the condi- genuine dissent by associating it with an tion for el pueblo’s twin awareness, of itself arbitrary “foreignness,” but whose more as pueblo and of itself as the object of the interesting and far-reaching consequence Movimiento’s work of inscription and for- is to generate (nominally as well as prac- mation: its cala. But if this is so then the tically) excessive acts of “terror” to which assassination of Carrero, precisely one such a strong State, and a nation unified inter- “gran ocasión,” cannot be entirely con- nally by a patterned “outside,” can respond demned. Instead, the bombing and its as one. Because this patterned outside sequel must be as it were introjected or then stands also as a product of the strong consumed (to use Franco’s word), turned State and of the national character, as the to advantage, must reveal themselves a case, concretization of what most intimately to reverse the “movement” of Franco’s defines the State’s interior, the topology aphorism, of “no hay bien que por mal no of Franco’s mensaje and of ETA’s account venga,” the emergence of a “good”—the assume in relation to each other the externalization of the Movimiento’s mark ghostly, mirroring shape that Aretxaga upon the people, the concretization of a sketched, in discussing “narrative excess” border that had become all too porous, in accounts of state terror in the Basque the reassertion of a Falangist hard line country: endangered by the technocratic govern- ment that Carrero had sought to install— [T]he [...] feeling body of the state be- out of an “evil.” ETA, in brief, reveals it- comes real, not so much through the 186 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

confluence of reason and violence that in the good Spanish people” suggests the is the hallmark of the modern state, as bore, the core-sample that the Movimiento through the performance of mimetic draws from the depths of the Spanish violence against a fantasized enemy people and then introjects, a movimiento [...]. The state is constituted through whose ideology thus comes to reflect these the narrative proliferation of excess, core values of the people it governs; it sug- [and] as nothing but excess. Nation- gests the infusing of the Movimiento’s ide- alist activists are constituted as politi- ology within the matter of the Spanish cal subjects in an imaginary relation to people, the insertion into or “impregna- the state, just as the state is constituted tion” of that interiority by volatile ideals in an imaginary relation to the phan- from without (inherited, for instance, tom Basque terrorist. (Aretxaga, “Play- from Italian , or from the ing” 53) vanguardist cadre of the Falange itself); and it suggests the superficial pattern- In Franco’s argument the State’s “feeling ing that guides the needle’s incision, a body” becomes real in his key verb calar, map upon the skin of the “buen pueblo in its own slim way the bearer of deeply español.” Poised within, without, and excessive narratives. Meaning to saturate upon the very skin of this “good people,” some matter completely, to mark or enter Franco’s words define the counter-erotic deeply into something, calar here de- economy of a corporate State body at scribes the work of ideology in the forma- whose well-policed borders allopaths of tion of the people’s self-recognition. In its every description—immigrants, subver- substantive form, the verb calar becomes sive ideas, commercial products that a cala, the hole, cut, or incision made in a threaten the competitivity of local mer- surface—a wall or the pavement of a street, chandise, etc.—can be turned back. say—to determine its thickness, its com- Or let in at will, of course. Aretxaga’s position, and to find what lies beneath. careful analysis of the narratives of state But calar also means “to embroider” or terror closes on a note of qualification that “to stitch together according to a pat- turns out to be particularly apt here. In tern”—in its antithetical condensation a the mirroring constitution of facing sub- wonderfully compact description of the jectivities “as fetishes of each other” “nei- de-suturing and re-suturing movement by ther the state nor radical nationalists con- means of which, in Franco’s account, the stitute a homogenous or coherent subject” movement of mal and bien, of external- (“Playing terrorist” 53). And if this is so, ization and internalization, of “terrorism” then we can expect to find in cultural and reason of state in the social fabric are narratives that link social terror and state reducible to a closed and regulated econ- or separatist terrorism in a correspondingly omy. Franco’s phrase carefully designs and mimetic relation what we could call an follows a syntactical and conceptual bor- excess of excess in the project of mutual der defined by these three senses, and by fetishization—an enigmatic double to the the distinct topologies they envision: part that narrative excess plays in consti- “What the ideals of our Movement have tuting “terror” as the “inside” of the ter- engraved [or ‘infused’ or ‘mined’: calar] rorist act and vice-versa, or in constitut- Jacques Lezra 187 ing “terrorism” as the intimate “outside” “process of historical encryption” that of the strong state (and vice-versa). Vilarós has described. If Franco’s cala and Strong as it turns out to be, Franco’s ETA’s bomba (either one) prove inad- account leaves untouched an aspect of equate to the event of Carrero’s assassina- ETA’s version of the assassination that can- tion, it may be because the moment of not be traded in the counter-erotic econ- social terror cannot itself be fashioned— omy that his remarks set in place. With though its immediate consequences can the occlusion of the corporate will, the to some extent be managed (to this or that immediate exhaustion of “Carrero” in his end). The resistance that the social expe- symbolic function and the critical remate- rience of terror opposes to the borders that rialization of Carrero’s symbolic body, the one or another organization may draw for story of Carrero Blanco’s assassination re- it (whether as a form of de-suturing or as veals itself to do too much and too little a means of re-suturing the social field) it- work for the process of inscription and self becomes the source of a sort of ter- reinscription, undertaken by both ETA, tiary terror, the affect-form in which the by Franco and by Campo Vidal’s govern- critical unveiling of the mechanical prin- ment-informed circuitos informativos, to ciples of State and party fascism—their succeed: the grim story “tiene chiste.” This chiste, if you will—is at length undertaken. unstable an-economy of semiotic and con- What to make, for instance, of the ceptual lack and excess opens the logic of extraordinary literality of the assassination terrorism to a different construction of itself? Everything about Carrero’s assassi- lived terror. It lodges “en el seno” of the nation seems to take place between in- vocabularies of “transition” and “move- stances of reading and of writing, or be- ment” since Carrero’s assassination, and tween tropically substituted symbols— is the proper object for our reflection to- parts (the parts of bodies) taken for day. wholes, bodies (those of Carrero and his Think about what might be doubly entourage; those of the ETA commando) excessive or doubly lacking in accounts of emblematically or mistakenly taken for the assassination of Carrero Blanco. By this others (for the body of Franco, the con- I don’t mean to ask whether the act itself ceptual body of the central State; and of is to be condemned or not, or on what course the terrorists were taken for sculp- grounds—those are crucial questions, but tors), events substituted counterphobically of a different order from the ones I have for others (the explosion of a gas main for in mind. Nor do I mean, exactly, the the assassination). Recall that the ETA strangely unclosed aspect of the assassi- brigade that planted the bomb marked nation itself—the complex repetitions of the spot with a red spot of paint; that the which it became susceptible, under one priest who turned from reading on hear- sign or another.8 I mean instead to draw ing the blast said he saw a car deformed attention to those aspects of the story of by the explosion into the shape of a let- the assassination that exceed its fashion- ter—the letter “U” or “V”—flying out- ings by Franco, by ETA and by others, or side the window; that the tunnel in which that fall short of the story’s ideological the explosives were hidden below the street reconstruction and of the Oedipalized was described as having the shape of the 188 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

letter “T.” Note the perverse multiplica- launched after the assassination. “The ve- tion of body parts throughout descrip- hicle has certainly demonstrated [...] its tions of the event: remember how it was solidity and strength,” ran the advertise- the victims’ hands alone that father ment, “since it bore rather well the tre- Jiménez Berzal saw when he first ran to mendous explosion that took place right the crushed car, and to which he admin- under it, which launched the car to the istered the last rites; that the name of the height of some twenty-five meters.” street on which the assassination occurred bears a cryptic, entirely accidental rela- The president’s car not only did not tion to this sparagmos—the pronunciation disintegrate (as we are sure would of the word “Coello” in “Claudio Coello” have happened to many other cars of opens from the closed “O” towards the different national or international ori- sound of the “U”—the shape of the blasted gins, including some more expensive than the Dodge 3700): its doors did car—and towards cuello, the neck. Recall not open in its jump to the terrace, the odd animism still at work in descrip- thus avoiding that the occupants’ tions of the event: the car’s “jump,” its bodies should have flown out, which animalization (still clearer in the Span- would have increased the drama of ish: arañar, or “to scratch,” refers us to the events [...]. What is more, we have another figure of aesthetic metamorpho- heard that when the car had landed on sis, Arachne, arañada in an even more the terrace, one of its turning lights was primitive sense), its personification. Carre- still blinking. (64, qtd. in El Econo- ro’s assassination was not only foreseeable; mista) neither was it destined to be the mere object of intense written and visual polemic. The The grim device of this advertisement is attack was always already “written,” and the link it forges between the integrity of took place as it were within the space of a the car’s body, the solidity of the fabrica- certain aesthetic construction (of the state, ción española (the Dodge, although a for- of the city, of the relation between con- eign car, is made in Spain—fabricado en crete bodies and what they represent). Or Villaverde), and the inviolability of the say rather: the radical re-materialization state and the market: the strength of the of the State that ETA’s bomb provoked President’s car embodies and libidinizes and revealed opened contiguous figures, the solid value of the State he heads, and names, spaces, and geographies to this to buy (or acquiesce to the political le- process of rematerialization. The bomb gitimacy of) the one is to acquiesce to the that killed Carrero scattered and animated political legitimacy of (or to consume) the the city-scape with a flurry of broken other. The underscored, climactic detail— names, bodies, and senses, partial ghosts that the car’s turning signal is still on af- whose hauntings no cala or corte could ter the explosion—becomes thus a pecu- hope to describe or contain. liarly uncanny sign, no longer indicating Take now one of these ghosts: Carre- a (spatial or political) cambio de movimien- ro’s car. Campo Vidal excerpts, with signs to, but instead signaling the opposite: the of shock (“chocante, inconcebible incluso signal’s little light makes manifest insis- [...] rayana en la irreverencia”), the pub- tently the internal solidity of the car, its licity campaign that Chrysler España internal and the external spaces at one Jacques Lezra 189 under its driver’s still hand, still safe from undefines the corporate State body whose the drama that might have opened an- outline it draws and capitalizes upon. other car to lurid interest or critical scru- Here in conclusion is another ghost— tiny. Marked by this turning sign and by this time, the re-awakened ghost for which the gesturing hand of the Caudillo, inside Carrero substituted, Franco’s gesturing and outside, movimiento and cambio de body itself. I have suggested that the at- movimiento are sutured together and held tack on the President emblematized in the apart even and especially when an inci- cultural and political imaginary of the sion—corte or cala—has been made in the early 1970s the threat and pleasures of a body politic. lack of (ideological, economic, cultural, The economization of the Dodge’s physical) closure, and produced in the fragile but persistent turning signal, how- languages of the political establishment, ever, not only confirms Franco’s subtle and in particular in Franco’s determining regulation of inside-outside tropes in his reconstruction of the event, a compensa- mensaje de fin de año, it also dramatically tory counter-eroticization of the reflexive unbalances it. How, after all, does one borders that keep the inner and outer regulate this excess value added to the spaces of the (State’s, people’s, Party’s) narrative detail? To the letter? Note again body under the sway of a corporate will. the terms that Campo Vidal uses to ex- This ghostly emblematizing proves in- press his shock: the advertisement is “in- creasingly ungovernable: the content of concebible,” its tone “rayana en la irreve- the assassination is rendered too literal to rencia.” The mechanisms that Franco de- be exhausted by the mechanics of ETA’s ploys in his mensaje de fin de año are in- substitutive logic, but not literal enough deed these triplets of Enlightenment po- to attach only to a single, given and un- litical economy, the doctrine of reverence representative body; too easily consumed for a concept (the State, say, or “el buen to be restricted to a regulated economy, pueblo español”) depending for its defi- but never entirely consumed in its circu- nition on established and well-policed lations in emergent commodity culture. borders—rayas, in the topology of this ex- Ungovernable, too, in any conventional ample, or the inviolable interior of the historiographical sense, for by now the President’s car. The libidinization of this chronological “borders” of the assassina- triplet itself, however, announces the tion have themselves also become strangely emergence of the field in which Carrero’s porous. We are not surprised to find, for assassination will be most thoroughly and example, that ETA’s blow against Franco’s unpredictably absorbed, the field of a de- deputy in 1973 repeated, in the form of sire-driven commodity-culture no less tragedy, a more or less farcical “blow” that shocking, inconceivable, and irreverent Franco himself had suffered in a hunting with respect to the conceptual topology accident in 1961. Spaniards were made of national identity than the field of ter- aware of the accident by means of a bulle- rorist acts it so avidly consumes. The ad- tin announcing that vertising copy for Chrysler España tiene chiste: it sings out the unforeseeable and [w]hile hunting this afternoon in El unregulated, excess affect-investment that Pardo, His Excellency the Head of State 190 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

suffered slight wounds in his left hand normal. The only exception,” they con- through an accident of his hunting tinued, rifle. ‘is that he tends to digest food slowly.’ Some days later the daily ABC printed an This observation, which to the lay interview with the attending physician; person might seem a trivial enough here again the strange logic of the Caudi- detail, was worth keeping in mind for llo’s mensaje de fin de año of a decade later the team of doctors. When under an- is anticipated, in quite a different key— aesthetic, a body’s reflexes disappear, almost, one suspects, de chiste: and particularly those that block the entrance of foreign bodies in the lungs —Did the Caudillo say anything? and windpipe. In these circumstances, —[Dr. Gil]: When I said to him, “This if the patient regurgitates, the contents is exciting,” he answered simply that of the stomach can invade the lungs “People are good.” and choke the patient [...]. The fact —Do you know the specifications of that the Generalísimo had suffered the the rifle that failed? accident some two hours after lunch —Not exactly; but it certainly isn’t a made it probable that the stomach Spanish rifle. (ABC 27/12/1961) contained something. (16)

Gil’s “not exactly”—“it certainly isn’t a The incidental similarities between the Spanish rifle”—captures marvelously the accident and the assassination are less sig- tautologous arrangement of foreign and nificant than the political continuities national, outer and inner identities played between the two crises, of course—and out in Franco’s words and policies in the yet it is hard to settle precisely on the cri- nearly two decades that followed. And yet teria to be used for distinguishing between the incident’s connection to Carrero’s as- “accidental” and “deliberate” or “neces- sassination is not as tenuous as it might sary” similarities or entailments, between seem. This early and accidental threat to the political content of the event and the the Caudillo’s control of the state was merely aesthetic matter in which it is among the principal reasons given for pass- couched, and which may threaten to in- ing the legislation that eventually stipu- vade, perhaps even to choke it when the lated the form that the transition would anaesthetic is applied. Consider that mat- take on Franco’s death—legislation that ter for a moment—for instance the over- Carrero was instrumental in crafting and determined wound to the Caudillo’s hand, in consolidating, legislation from which tropically wounded again in 1973, and he had stood to profit so signally. That reemerging in the truncated (and doubled) afternoon in El Pardo, the threat itself form of the chauffeur’s dead hands, posed concerned the Caudillo’s wounded hand, upon the steering wheel of the President’s but also (and much more importantly) car; consider how the “foreign” gun’s back- quite a different set of organs. Ramón firing finds its aesthetic complement in Soriano recalls Franco’s doctors comment- the failure of “foreign” elements—ETA— ing to the Marquis of Villaverde that “It’s to disrupt the characteristics that “el buen only a hand. We recently did a check-up pueblo español” carry treasured within on the Generalísimo, and everything was their breast, like the grim body of Carrero Jacques Lezra 191 within the inviolate Dodge 3700; con- of State had consumed, and of the “for- sider that the President’s car was indeed eign” gun that had backfired. When made in the very town—Villaverde—we Franco’s doctors sought to suture physi- learn to associate with the Marquis to cally the wound to his hand, and aestheti- whom the Caudillo’s doctors report cally the second wound caused to the Franco’s rather slow digestion. These are “transcendent synthesis” of party, State, surely “trivial enough details” to the lay nation and ruler by the threat to Franco’s person—but they reveal alternative, per- life, they anticipated unknowingly but haps even “foreign” “contents” within the with an exemplary clarity the cultural political “content” that ostensibly joins the functions of Franco’s year-end message— hunting accident to the political assassi- principally, the regulation of exchanges nation. For instance, the cryptic collusion between the inner and outer surfaces of between the Spanish aristocracy (the Mar- “el buen pueblo español,” and the polic- quis of Villaverde), the incipient global- ing of the borders or rayas of a concept ization of labor-markets signaled by the irreverently breached by ETA. The dan- location of Chrysler’s assembly plant in ger then posed by the anaesthetic lies just Spain (fabricado en Villaverde), and the where ETA’s treatment of the assassina- trial of leaders of independent trade tion also dwells, just where the reflex unions, scheduled to begin on the day of movement that keeps an event’s political Carrero’s assassination; and for example, content from being contaminated by its that the assassination of Carrero Blanco aesthetic expression or vitiated by “trivial might well bear examining as a reflexive enough details” also begins, and also fal- act: the Falange turning upon itself, ters: in the failure of corporate mechanisms wounding itself as foreign to itself, a self- for regulating the passage from external mutilation rather than an attack from to internal organs, from the outside of the “outside.” body to its interior. Here then would be a way of speak- I am not making an intentionalist ing to the event from the vantage of the argument. ETA’s rationale in the 1973 detail, and of sketching out thereby the bombing does not follow in deed or word shape we might ascribe to a transitional the description of Franco’s operation; the thought that arises conditioned by the organization does not envision the attack “movement” it rejects, and yet remains on Carrero in relation to the market pro- radically external to that movement: an- cesses that Chrysler-España would exploit; aesthetic thought. Where ETA eroticized the linguistic dissemination of partial the sphincter, anal-ized the street of ghosts across the geography of the city and Claudio Coello, re-embodied Madrid as across Spain’s recent cultural history was a body parasitized by a foreign State, and not ETA’s goal. The assassination of made this body’s reflexive, expulsive func- Carrero Blanco works culturally as an un- tion the natural figure for the assassina- bounded event rather than as a bounded tion of Carrero, the medical reconstruc- sign or act: it produces languages that tion of Franco’s operation a decade earlier designate it and histories that explain it— had sought to control and de-eroticize the the anatomies, ideologies, temporality and invasion and expulsion of what the Head economies of its sense; it exposes an 192 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies

underdetermination of social intent and work of suturing and de-suturing socio- an excess of social affect radically irreduc- cultural wounds, of tracking the unbound- ible to any definition of political interest. ing movement of cultural resemanticiza- To put it more compactly: in the domains tions within and across historical mo- of Spain’s political imaginary, of its eco- ments, of making space in political nomic symbology, and of the narratives thought for the habitation of social ter- forming its national history, the unbound- ror. But to believe that such logics “ex- ing of terror is a form of thought as well haust themselves,” or that the “movement” as a model of ethico-political intervention. beyond the material and ideological for- This an-aesthetic unbounding subjects mations that give rise to them can be un- “terrorism” to the rigors of terror, and sub- derstood on the model of a spatial dis- jects the mystification and paralysis to placement—say, the trace of a hand’s which such “terror” becomes bound (as movement, the movement of a car, the the sublimity of one or another corporate reflex-closure or opening of a frontier or a form) to the ethico-political demands body—is to set back in place Primo de posed in the terrorist act. Rivera’s dialectical fantasy of the “síntesis I’d like to conclude by mentioning trascendente [...] indivisible, con fines briefly ETA’s assassination of Miguel propios que cumplir” (66). In that way, Ángel Blanco in Ermua, in July of 1997. too, the twinned assassinations of Carrero It was possible in the months that fol- and of Miguel Ángel Blanco also radical- lowed to believe that the moving images ize the dangers to which an-aesthetic of silently marching crowds, white hands thought exposes itself—the belief that the outreached in a gesture that condensed cultural critic can act immediately out- the claim of innocence—hands unspot- side the corporativization of university ted by the blood of the killing—and the culture, beyond the material determina- name of the victim—manos blancas, tions that bind and bound his or her Miguel Ángel Blanco—marked the ex- speech; the fantasy, in short, that transi- haustion of the instrumental logic of na- tional thought acts as explosively as a tionalist terrorism, a logic for which the bomb. In its pathological form—as a fan- materialization of a corporate body-form tasy—this belief threatens to rebuild the itself serves to idealize concepts exempt closure of the act’s immediate exhaustion from critique. It made sense at that time in a sense given it, dialectically or imme- to track two braided strands of Spanish diately, by the institutional forms that fascism—ETA and the Falange—at the produce it (in the case of Carrero’s assas- end of the transition along the lines of a sination, as their content: ETA; or as the hand—las rayas de la mano—that reached notional form of an outside that defines across sixty years, from the first falanges the closure of a national identity: Franco’s to the Caudillo’s accident, the death of his mensaje de fin de año). Radical-democratic mano derecha, and the murder of Miguel thought assumes its most precise form— Ángel Blanco. It seemed useful to offer, as as an ethic of terror, in the sense we have an example of the critical, an-aesthetic come to understand—when it takes these thought preliminary to any future post- necessary fantasies as its condition of pos- national republicanisms, the intellectual sibility and as the irreducible object of its labor that this tracking still implies—a critique. Jacques Lezra 193

Notes in terms of collective opposition to 1 Earlier versions of this essay were read at them. (20) conferences at Yale University and at the Center Consider also Negri’s early argument: for Literary and Cultural Studies at Harvard. I Violence always presents itself to us want to thank the organizers of the Duke collo- as synthesis of form and content. In quium on “Brokering Postnationalist Culture” for the first place, as an expression of pro- their kind invitation. All the translations, except letarian counterforce, as a manifesta- where marked, are my own. tion of the process of self-valorization. 2 Matesa, a textiles company directed by an In the second place, as a destructuring associate of Franco’s Minister of Development, and destabilizing force—which is to Laureano López Rodó, was discovered in August say as a productive force and as an anti- of 1969 to have been involved in a massive diver- institutional force. It is therefore evi- sion of state funds, obtained through the Banco dent that proletarian violence need de Crédito Industrial. These funds had later been not show itself in an exemplary way, used to bankroll projects carried out by the Opus nor to choose for itself exemplary ob- Dei outside of Spain; not surprisingly, it turned jectives or targets [...]. [T]he central- out that the principal agents in this intrigue, all ity of violence presents itself all the high-ranking members of Franco’s government, more as synthesis of content and form; were themselves members of Opus Dei. A con- of a form of exclusion, by excluding frontation within the government ensued, between the enemy; and of rationality, mea- the faction associated with the traditional Falange sure, definition of the refusal of labor. ( most prominently), and the Violence is the rational cord [filo renovadores, religious technocrats allied with Opus razionale] that binds [legga] proletar- Dei. The appointment of Admiral Luis Carrero ian valorization to the destructuring Blanco as Franco’s successor followed the destitu- of the system, and this destructuring tion of a number of cabinet ministers associated to the destabilization of the regime. with Matesa and with Opus Dei, but as Carrero Violence is a revolutionary project was himself a close ally of the Opus faction, the become effective because the desir- renovador group within the government paradoxi- ability of the content has become the cally found its position much more secure after form of the programme, and because the scandal than before it. this program has been becoming a 3 In late-medieval jurisprudence, mortmain dictatorship. (67-68) refers to a restricted modality of ownership, par- 5 See Reinares: ticularly of tenancies or land, such that these prop- [T]he crisis derives in this way from erties held in mortmain cannot be sold or expro- an evident conflict between two wills: priated (they are in this sense entailed properties). basically, the will to be Basque, and Spanish law preserved the principle of mort-main the will to be Spanish. The dialectic or “ley de manos muertas” until the notorious between being Basque and being desamortizaciones, or seizures in particular of en- Spanish crystallizes this antagonism tailed Church property, carried out by Juan in a polarization, while hostility cata- Álvarez Mendizábal between 1834 and 1855. lyzes the conflict. At the root of the 4 Widdowson makes a cogent argument for confrontation there is an aspiration, recovering the notion of “terrorism” as critique: which is understood as a right: the Terrorism may be, in itself, a ‘charade’; recovery [la recuperación] of self-gov- but it is the sign and symptom of a ernment, of Basque sovereignty. (9) reaction to the terroristic behaviour This arrangement of “will,” “aspiration” and of the Western liberal democracies, in “right” bears closer scrutiny than I can give it which there is also a political vacuum here, but it is worth noting that Reinares’s last 194 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies claim—that the “aspiration” toward self-govern- Clemente, Josep Carles. Historias de la transición ment has the shape of the “recovery” of an his- (1973-1981). Madrid: Fundamentos, 1994. torical formation since lost to a central adminis- Crenshaw, Martha. “The Logic of Terrorism: Ter- tration—is still directly contested by Basque rorist Behavior as a Product of Strategic españolistas like del Burgo. Choice.” Origins of Terrorism: Psychologies, Ide- 6 The most complete account of the incident ologies, Theologies, States of Mind. Ed. Walter is in Bardavío (1974). Reich. Cambridge: Woodrow Wilson Inter- 7 For the function of excretive images as forms national Center for Scholars and Cambridge of symbolic resistance, see Aretxaga, “Dirty Pro- UP, 1990. 7-20. test” 125. Del Burgo, Jaime Ignacio. Soñando con la Paz: 8 Compare Baeza: Violencia terrorista y nacionalismo vasco. Ma- Los grupos antiterroristas, en lucha drid: Temas de Hoy, 1994. principalmente contra ETA, FRAP y Di Febo, Giuliana. Teresa d’Avila: Un culto Barocco GRAPO, nacen exactamente el día si- nella Spagna franchista. Naples: Liguori Edi- guiente del 20 de diciembre de 1973, tore, 1988. cuando es asesinado en un atentado Forest, Eva (writing as Julen Agirre). Operation terrorista realizado por la ETA el Pre- Ogro: The Execution of Admiral Luis Carrero sidente del Gobierno español, el al- Blanco. Trans. Barbara Probst Solomon. mirante Luis Carrero Blanco, (68) and New York: Quadrangle/New York Times Campo Vidal 28-31. Book Co., 1975. Fuente, Ismael, Javier García, and Joaquín Prieto. Works Cited Golpe mortal: Asesinato de Carrero y agonía Aretxaga, Begoña. “Dirty Protest: Symbolic Over- del franquismo. Madrid: El País/PRISA, determination and Gender in Northern Ire- 1983. land Ethnic Violence.” Ethos 23.2 (1995): Herrero, Luis. El ocaso del régimen: Del asesinato 123-48. de Carrero a la muerte de Franco. Madrid: ———. “Playing Terrorist: Ghastly Plots and the Ediciones Temas de Hoy, 1995. 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