Lezra Vilarós SS

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 Francisco Franco 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 political fantasy, the promise of a change of political movement 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 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies Volume 7, 2003 176 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 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 Spain 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.

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