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1. The Ethic of Terror
- Fordham University Press
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c h a p t e r 1 The Ethic of Terror Movement is the indefiniteness and imperfection of every politics. It always leaves a residue. . . . the movement is that which if it is, is as if it wasn’t, it lacks itself [manca a se stesso], and if it isn’t, is as if it was, it exceeds itself. It is the threshold of indeterminacy between an excess and a deficiency which marks the limit of every politics in its constitutive imperfection. —giorgio agamben, ‘‘Movement’’ It might seem superfluous to talk about the motives of jokes, since the aim of getting pleasure must be recognized as a sufficient motive for the joke work. . . . The second fact which makes an enquiry into the subjective determination of jokes necessary is the generally recognized experience that no one can be content with having made a joke for himself alone. An urge to tell the joke to someone is inextricably bound up with the joke-work. —sigmund freud, Jokes and their Relation to the Unconscious In the right of sovereignty, death was the moment of the most obvious and the most spectacular manifestation of the absolute power of the sovereign; death now becomes, in contrast, the moment when the individual escapes all power, falls back on himself and retreats, so to speak, into his own privacy. Power no longer recognizes death. Power literally ignores death. To symbolize all this, let’s take, if you will, the death of Franco, which is after all a very, very interesting event. —michel foucault, Society Must Be Defended Why Jokes Must Be Defended 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 34 The Ethic of Terror 35 a new economic movement intended to catalyze the Spanish economy, which was 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 Caudillo’s ponderous diction and mimicking the up-and-down movements of his hand: ‘‘After thirty years of a postwar state, we have decided to change our movement [or ‘‘the direction of our movement,’’ or ‘‘our political program,’’ or ‘‘our political allegiance’’; hemos decidido cambiar de movimiento],’’—a phrase to be accompanied, midway, by a change in the direction of the joker’s hand, interrupted in its vertical flight and now made to move horizontally, with an equally stolid side-to-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 moment’s most pressing political fantasy , the promise of a change of political movement or of the political direction to be 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 critic, the chiste furnishes a royal road into the remarkable association between the Falangist imaginary and the figure of the hand.2 A political historian turns to it for an example of the migration of the term Movimiento during the Spanish postwar era, from its more or less proper historical use in the expression Movimiento Falangista, the Fascist-inspired movement founded by José Antonio Primo de Rivera, 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 1969. (That was a massive, well-publicized corruption case involving an important textile company, one of Spain’s largest public banks, three of Franco’s former ministers and appointees, and the sitting minister of development, Laureano López Rodó, who owed his appointment to Carrero .3 ) For our notional political historian, the semantic movements of movimiento marked Franco’s effort to distance himself from the Falange and in the early 1970s from its heirs, Manuel Fraga, José Solı́s, and Fernando Marı́a Castiella.4 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...