In lieu of an abstract, here is a brief excerpt of the content:

The Ethic of Terror in Radical Democracy Jacques Lezra is Professor of English and Spanish at the University of Wisconsin at Madison, and Director of Graduate Programs in English . In addition to numerous articles on literary theory and criticism, he is the author of Unspeakable Subjects : The Genealogy of the Event in Early Modern Europe (1997), the editor of Depositions: Althusser, Balibar , Macherey and the Labor of Reading (1995), and coeditor «/"Suplemento al 'Tesoro de la lengua castellana o española' de Covarrubias (2001). Here's a joke with a trick to it. Francisco Franco spoke with a magisterial "we" that some found pleasantly archaic, others rather sinister. Taken with the syncopating hand-movements that punctuated his speeches, the collective pronoun irresistibly wed the notional corporate body of the Spanish state to Franco's own. In the early 1970s Franco is reputed to have announced the beginning of a new economic movement intended to catalyze the Spanish economy, threatening to stagnate after the brief boom of the 1960s. News of the announcement took the shape of this chiste, to be told with the Caudillos ponderous diction and mimicking the up-and-down movements of his hand: "After 30 years of a post-war state, we have decided to change our movement [or 'the direction of our movement,' or Our political program ,' 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 sideto -side rhythm. This was neither the first nor the best joke told about Franco, but it may be among the most subversive , since it requires the person telling it to envision what for many was the moments 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 174 Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies critic, the chiste furnishes a royal road into the remarkable association between the Falangist imaginary and the figure of the hand (see di Febo). A political historian turns to it for an example of the migration of the term Movimiento during the Spanish post-war, from its more or less proper historical use in the expression Movimiento Falangista, to the Movimiento Nacional after the nationalist victory in 1939, then to the entirely abstract movimiento found in the Dictator's speeches after the Matesa scandal, in 19692: the semantic movements of movimiento marked Franco's effort to distance himself from the Falange, and in the early 1970s from its heirs, Fraga, Soli's and Castiella (Preston 270, 694-95; Tusell and Garcia Queipo de Llano 344-64). Those keen to understand the shapes taken by Spanish cultural anxieties today, on the country's joining the European Union and renegotiating matters long cherished as the prerogative of national sovereignty, must puzzle out the emergence of popular-cultural treatments of the years of transition alongside institutional efforts to rescue the material traces of events long repressed: the opening of mass graves, consolidation and democratization of access to Civil War archives, the surprising success of television serials like "Cuéntame cómo pasó," etc. And of course the resuscitation of old jokes, which now circulate with a nostalgic surplus-value hard at times to square with their sharply satiric beginnings. Finally , the notional cultural anthropologist might note that the moving hand speaks to the way in which political change is imagined at a moment when the concept of political movement and the signifier movimiento remain tied to the corporatist model of association—indeed to the very body—that this notional movement might seek to abandon. Or one might put the matter like this. For Spanish society since 1989, economic and social integration in the EU is shaped by a troubled recollection of the "transition," the movement from forty years of authoritarian rule to a constitutional democracy federating weakly-autonomous regions under a nominal monarchy . The shapes that this recollection takes are tricky...

pdf

Share