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286 Arizona fournal of Hispanic Cultural Studies widi which we need not concern ourselves here" or "the problem is, then, broad and complex, and cannot be exhaustively dealt with here" ( 127,206). Readers may be frustrated at times and hardpressed to keep pace, but my recommendation is to not give up. The rewards to be gained from Rodriguez's study are many. His vast erudition and conceptual sophistication require that we approach the text repeatedly in order to grasp the totality of the author's project. For this is not "theory" as practiced by most North American academics (too often reduced to citing audiorities and accumulating abstractions) but a full-scale elaboration of an entire philosophical system. Rodriguez puts it this way: "As a text of (historical) literary theory, this book is nothing if not theoretical. It is not a historicist book or criticism as usually understood" (33). Although the book is divided into four "parts," the material covered cannot be contained within the borders of a linear trajectory. The Introduction boldly deconstructs the category of "literature " itself, asserting that "literarure" has not always existed but is a by-product of the ideological matrix that invents the bourgeois subject. The author then turns to a critique of Macherey and Balibar with asides on Weber, Camus, and Russian formalism. Part one opens with a discussion of die emergence of the public/private dialectic in the sixteenth century and its relation to the absolutist state. Hete the important binary "organicism (or substantialismj/animism" is inrroduced, the former a thematic born of the feudal matrix, rhe latter identified widi the bourgeois ideological field. Because Rodriguez is consistendy dialectical we soon learn that both sides of the binary exist in the other and so a "feudal animism" or spiritualism appears on the horizon. Related categories surface as a vast epistemological terrain is mapped out— Neoplatonism, Cartesian mechanicism, rationalism —and links are traced to early modern theater and its tropes of incest and androgyny. Rodriguez is equally at home in the Italian, English, or Spanish national archive. Parts two and three (the latter significantly longer than other sections) are no less impressive. We learn that the transition from feudalism to capitalism is not a "passage" (a Hegelian or Kantian concept) but a coexistence held together at the level of the political, i.e., die Absolutist State and its apparatuses. Brief but brilliant analyses abound— the Renaissance's construction of the Ancient world, the revolt of the Comuneros, and the Private Epistles of Antonio de Guevara. Part three presents an amazing unpacking of the sonnet form and exhaustive readings of die poetry of Garcilaso, Boscán, Fray Luis, San Juan de la Cruz, and Fernando de Herrera. The book concludes in Part four with an account of the Spanish monarchy's attempt to drive underground the animist matrix and its subsequent appearance in a different register in England and the poetry of John Donne. In his assessment of Garcilaso's achievement, Rodriguez coins a phrase rhat we might well apply to the work of Rodriguez himself: "Garcilaso's production constantly shows itself to be a unity whose perfection lies in its oscillating, that is to say, uneven, articulation" (153). To what extent can this book now almost thirty years old, deeply committed to a Marxist world view and a radically historicized analysis of ideologies, have an impact on North American Spanish studies given its longstanding dismissal of reading methods associated with the political left? Realistically speaking, the probability is slight that Rodriguez's approach will have wide appeal in the U.S. corporate university. But its appearance in English is a landmark event precisely because at unexpected moments in the future "free subjects" (who are not free at all) will pick up Theory and History of Ideological Production and build upon its insights in order to contest the academic status quo and reanimate new generations of anglophone Hispanism. George Mariscal University of California, San Diego Exorcismos de L· memoria. PolÃ-ticas y poéticas de L· meL·ncolÃ-a en L· España de L· transición Ediciones Libertarias, 2001 By Alberto Medina DomÃ-nguez Alberto Medina's text constitutes one of the most brilliant analyses...

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