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87 chapter 3 Interrogative Signs The subject is the void of the impossibility of answering the question of the Other. —Slavoj Žižek The previous two chapters have detailed the way in which constructions of marranismo revolve around that which is fundamentally unknowable in the other, and how Inquisition allegories guard within them the spectral ruins of a traumatic history. Both the New Christian and allegory , I suggest, retain an untranslatable kernel of otherness: the Jewish other, the other of history, the other within the same. Yet conventional understandings of marranismo and allegory continue to rely upon the logic of masquerade, in which both marrano and allegory disguise the truth by “praying” or “saying” otherwise. The present chapter builds upon the parallel phenomena of marranismo and allegory by taking a sustained look at aesthetic scenes of Inquisitorial interrogation, the act by which the violent conversion of Jews is radicalized. I claim that interrogation exhibits a certain compatibility, or complicity, with marranismo and allegory because, returning to Jean-Paul Sartre, the desired goal of torture is to force from the body of the other “the secret of everything ” (preface to The Question, 23). The marrano, allegory, and interrogation all guard within them an idea of the secret, the unreadable, or the unsayable, which inspires these religious, cultural, and political practices while at the same time guaranteeing their impossibility. If the New Christian mask does not in fact conceal an “authentically” Jewish face, just as allegory does not hide the “true” story (which, under other conditions, could be related without fear), if marranismo, like the allegorical, hides nothing more than the fact that there is “nothing” to hide, how are we to understand the act of interrogation, the motive of which is to uncover the secret of everything? If there is no secret, or if the secret that lies at the heart of the other (of the subject, of narrative, etc.) exceeds representation, what purpose does torture serve, what subject is interrogated and what truth confessed? What is desired in interrogation— by interrogator and interrogated alike—and what (desiring) subject is constituted in the act of confession, in turning toward the Law? This chapter takes a final look at the Inquisition narratives discussed in the previous chapters in order to understand the way in which the aesthetic representation of interrogation oscillates between an avowal and disavowal of the spectral quality of marranismo, understood here to be the secret of the other (or of the other within the same). I explore the way in which many of these narratives reproduce Inquisitional logic in scenes depicting torture and confession—despite taking a moral or ideological stance that would indicate the contrary—and ask whether it is possible to signal an excess, or internal limit, to this logic through the language of the aesthetic. The inherently discursive nature of the act of questioning, as well as the subject that is constituted through this act, serves as the point of departure for my discussion. In the first section of this chapter, I trace the presence of confessional discourse through the realms of the legal, the literary, and the religious, following the recent work of Peter Brooks (Troubling Confessions). Considering Brooks’s argument that within the Western tradition, confession becomes the means by which the “individual authenticates his inner truth,” together with Paul de Man’s deconstructive reading of Rousseau’s Confessions as desire for exposure, I aim to highlight the decidedly literary quality of the confession, as well as of the narrative subject that is constituted through the performative act of confession. If the confession necessarily bears a literary or fictional quality, what does the fictional representation of confession do to our understanding of this practice? I analyze several confessional scenes in Gonçalves de Magalhães’s O poeta e a inquisição in order to investigate the way in which literary discourse can simultaneously profess innocence while performing guilt. In the second section of this chapter, I ask whether confession necessarily responds to the positing of a question—whether explicit or implicit—by exploring literary scenes of Inquisitorial questioning. Can we understand the dynamic of interrogation as a form of ideological interpellation in an Althusserian sense? In what way is modern subjectivity premised upon the “turning” of the individual toward the Law, as in Louis Althusser’s famous (allegorical) scene of hailing? Is it possible to trace the breakdown of identification? Here I consider the mutually interdependent acts of questioning and confession as a...

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