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147 Notes Introduction 1. Nicolás mentions a couple of other allusions by Mireille CalleGruber and Luisa López-Grigera (22). 2. All quotes from Teoría del saber histórico are from the 1967 edition . Maravall’s argument here has much in common with Walter Benjamin’s critique of the objectivist’s aim to reconstruct the past the way it really was: “Historicism contents itself with establishing a causal connection between various moments in history. But no fact that is a cause is for that very reason historical. It became historical posthumously , as it were, through events that may be separated from it by thousands of years. A historian that takes this as his point of departure stops telling the sequence of events like the beads of a rosary. Instead, he grasps the constellation which his own era has formed with a definite earlier one” (Benjamin 263). 3. According to Lacanian semiotics, the meaning of a signifier is retroactively fixated by means of a nodal rigid designator, i.e., an anchoring point (“point de capiton”), a surplus-signifier without signified that—as Z”iz“ek says—“totalizes an ideology by bringing to a halt the metonymic sliding of its signified” (The Sublime 99). The concept “anchoring point” appears in Lacan’s “The Agency of the Letter in the Unconscious of Reason since Freud” (Écrits 154) as a translation of his earlier notion of “quilting point.” This is Lacan’s original formulation of the “quilting point” in book 3 of his seminar on psychoses: “Everything radiates out from and is organized around this signifier, similar to these little lines of force that an upholstery button forms on the surface of material. It’s the point of convergence that enables everything that happens in this discourse to be situated retroactively and prospectively ” (The Seminar 268). 4. See Giménez Caballero 10–64. 5. See Castro’s De la edad conflictiva. 6. See Maravall (Estado moderno 1: 306). See also Maravall’s La cultura del barroco. George Mariscal has recently cautioned against Maravall’s alleged determinism: “I have already stated my reservations about a theoretical model that reduces the subject to an embodiment of ideological effects. Subjectivity may be socially constructed, but this is not to say that human beings are incapable of resisting or investing in any given set of positions. A concept of the dominant which is as totalizing as it comes to be in Maravall’s Cultura del Barroco, for example, leads to problems reminiscent of those surrounding Louis Althusser’s Trager (subjects as systemic supports), not the least of which has to do with the potential for oppositional movements and social change” (21). Mariscal’s objection may result from a common misconception of Maravall’s object of study in La cultura del barroco. We should note that Maravall is not talking about “a subject saturated by ideology,” i.e., a subject positively filled out by ideology in the field of material life 148 (that would be Althusser); rather, he is referring to specific forms of cultural representation that portray submission to the system of public authority as a religious duty. While Mariscal is correct in noticing that the limit of these representations is not always present in Maravall’s account of baroque culture in La cultura del barroco, this is not due to a deterministic understanding of subjectivity. Mariscal himself notices that Maravall refuses to accept the possibility of any “total system” and that he deals with manifestations of political, social, and cultural opposition elsewhere—see Maravall’s La oposición política bajo los Austrias, for example. Mariscal comments: “Elsewhere, it should be noted, Maravall sensed the impossibility of any ‘total system’ and reminded us that in seventeenth-century Spain, ‘we are faced with a society energized in its traditional elements, but in new circumstances […] Now, the restored tradition is more or less debated, or at least it is not exempt from questioning’ […] It is this suggestive thesis that continues to make Maravall’s work central to any de-aestheticizing approach to early modern Spanish culture” (21). 7. In his reading of Don Quixote as a perspectivistic narrative, Durán draws from Leo Spitzer and especially from Jean Cassou, as we can see in the following remarks: “Jean Cassou, entre otros, ha subrayado la importancia del perspectivismo en la totalidad de la obra y la ha relacionado con la ambigüedad, complicación y multiplicación de puntos de...

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