Wild Materialism: The Ethic of Terror and the Modern Republic

Conclusion: Distracted Republic

Conclusion: Distracted Republic Of course, to be just republican is like being nothing at all. Along with being republican, one needs to be something more, something substantive, always with a noble ideology and looking toward the future. Not toward what we are, but to what we should and can be. —gregorio marañón The thrill, the joy are palpable: women and men squeezed onto the balconies and leaning out the windows of the Casino Republicano; a packed crowd lifting or tossing their hats; two figures—youngish, in coat and necktie—raise the tricolored flag, which hangs steep in the breezeless sunlight at the center of the photograph. We watch the throng from a balcony across the street, or through a window, or from a low rooftop; a trick of the composition lines up our eyes with the hands pulling the ropes that hoist the flag and thus places the camera’s work and our own (as spectators , observers, etc.) in some relation to the work so many within the frame now celebrate. Our experience, our time cannot be theirs, of course. The camera’s immobility is only accidentally mimicked by the flag’s frozen drapes; our witnessing is as distant from the thrill of the crowd, from the clutch of figures pressing upon each other, as the journalist is from the fact, the historian from the event, the exile from his or her land. But on another description, colored perhaps by the pathos that attaches to losing causes, we labor in looking as those distant youths do in raising the flag, we press forth like these crowds from the Casino Republicano—if not this one and at this moment, in Cullera, Valencia, on the day that Spain’s Second Republic was proclaimed, then from others elsewhere, at other moments, distant but in some important way related. From neighboring 202 Distracted Republic 203 10. Proclaiming the Republic in Cullera. ones in the literary and historical geography of Spain, like the Casino in Alzira, just a bit inland from Cullera, where Vicente Blasco Ibáñez sets Entre Naranjos (Among the Orange Trees; 1900), a novel in which the Casino serves as the focus of political, public life, standing against the casa azul framed by the orange groves where Rafael Brull finds love, music, and a profoundly 204 Conclusion private sense of subjectivity, embodied in the figure of Leonora. Or from more distant, figurative casinos republicanos, not detached witnesses to this or that particular event (say, the declaration of the Republic), but workers too in the longer task involved in producing something like a public experience of political dwelling: a casa or a casino republicano. Take, finally, a third tack into this photograph of the Proclamación de la República en Cullera (Valencia). The image works as an example of the proximate, arresting museum of images that mediate and condition any examination of the long and controversial cultural history of Spanish Republicanism.1 Say we find it artificial to distinguish, with regard to such mediating images, between the standpoint of reflection (the perspective of the witness, of the historian, of the journalist, of the exile) and the enthusiastic logic of identification (the perspective of the actor or of the activist). Surely we build and dwell in a political sphere when these standpoints come together—as they do, virtually, in the photograph, when our critical, reflective witnessing of the proclamation of the Republic maps onto the handiwork involved in actualizing it both as a symbol (hoisting the flag before the Casino Republicano) and as a political institution. We may then conclude that there is no republic without its witnesses, its critics, and its exiles, no criticism and no witnessing that do not entail, if merely as their acknowledged audience, a communal identity, as it were, in the works. Solicited by the image, we find ourselves in it; the long logic of mythic identification that has been slowly unraveling before us, that I have been trying to unwind in the course of Wild Materialism, appears to knit itself back up in and by means of this image and of so many others tinted with the melancholia of the museum. Eugénie’s blind needle drops from our fingers, or from another’s; eyes open, we follow Marianne. What is, what was, the modern republic? Does it have a future? Can the modern republic, the formal...