(originally
published as “The State’s Body, the
Intellectual and the Real/Subaltern: Autobiography
and Neoliberal Ideology in Postnational Spanish Basque Culture (On Savater,
Juaristi, and Onaindía).” Antípodas: Journal of
Hispanic and Galician Studies 16 (2006): 183-227).
In
memoriam Begoña Aretxaga and Christina Dupláa
Why this
pull toward the anatomy of the self? In part it reflects a phenomenon pervasive
in our culture – people confessing in public to an audience of voyeurs
James Atlas, “Confessing
for Voyeurs”
One of the most important developments in
recent Spanish-Basque postnational literature is the proliferation of
autobiographies written mainly by Basque intellectuals who were politically
active in the terrorist group ETA or in the opposition during the Spanish
political transition to democracy. This is a rather new development that begs a
detailed analysis, for it ultimately affects the body politics of the Basque
Country and
Here I will concentrate on three autobiographies:
Jon Juaristi’s La tribu atribulada. El nacionalismo vasco explicado a mi
padre (2002), Mario Onaindía’s El precio de la libertad, memorias (1948-1977) (2001), and Fernando
Savater’s Mira por dónde: autobiografía razonada (2003).1 Only two of them, Savater’s and Onaindía’s, are
technically autobiographies. The third, Juaristi’s, is a “letter to my father” where political
analysis, philology, poetry, and psychoanalysis are mixed with autobiographical
material in what could only be called a hybrid of intellectual and
autobiographical writing (although, as I will discuss below, a similar
tradition exists in early modern
Angel Loureiro, one of the most
important critics of autobiography in both Spain and the West, opens his book
on Spanish autobiography by stating that “
The cited Spanish Basque literature
allows us to explore precisely the relationship between autobiography and the
national subject.2 As I will argue
below, the fantasmatic or symptomatic condition of the nation and its bodily
fragmentation, triggered by different global and local forms of political
violence undermining the State, are ultimately responsible for the
proliferation of autobiography in Spanish-Basque literature. In these auto-bio-graphies, a body writes itself in
order to unsuccessfully perform a melancholic identification with an imaginary
and ideal Spanish nation – the national body – so that this identification can
serve for the rest of the Spanish citizens to identify with a Spanish subject,
the State, which is experiencing its crisis and fragmentation in globalisation.
Genealogically speaking, these
autobiographies are a more recent refashioning of another older genre, the
national essay, which fails to legitimise the State through an imaginary
identification between “Spanish history” and national body (Delgado). These
autobiographies are a final attempt to write the body of the intellectual: “the
last national body left.” They are a last resort to create identification
between the intellectual’s body and the national body in order to signify the
State – the national subject. Ultimately, these autobiographies can be read as
a farewell to the national body and its subject, the State. In this sense, they
are essentially postnational and point to a post-intellectual discourse that is
closer to the media’s new “reality craze”, involving tabloid press scandals, TV
“reality shows”, etc.
In order to understand the relationship between
State, nation, intellectuals and autobiography, it is important to elaborate a
theory of signification and identification that includes the effects of
subjectivation produced by the State. At this point, Lacanian psychoanalysis
and its ulterior elaborations by queer theory and feminism (
As Michel Foucault
expounds in his History of Sexuality, the relation between State and
individual shifts in the nineteenth century through sex: “Between the state and
the individual, sex became an issue, and a public issue no less; a whole web of
discourses, special knowledges, analyses, and injunctions settled upon it”
(26). But even
sex is part of a larger shift in the deployment of State power: “The old power
of death that symbolized sovereign power was now carefully supplanted by the
administration of bodies and the calculated management of life
However, one can also vet the
opposite but complementary argument, once again departing from Foucault’s work:
the earlier pre-knowledge/power The Order of Things. In an earlier
“epistemological” moment concerned with the archaeology of discourse, Foucault
stresses the way in which “things” become “words” (discourse), what he terms
“the return of language”: “It is clear that this ‘return’ of language is not a
sudden interruption in our culture… It is, in fact, the strict unfolding of
Western culture in accordance with the necessity it imposed upon itself at the
beginning of the nineteenth century” (384). In short, “the return of language”
becomes a privileged and singular instance in the epistemological configuration
of things, since things begin to resemble words and words become mysterious
things that defy enlightened representation. As Foucault himself
explains:
The threshold between Classicism and
modernity
Foucault affirms that the return of language
also represents the end of “man” and the human sciences that permitted its/his
appearance: “If this same language is now emerging with greater and greater insistence
in a unity that we ought to think but cannot as yet do so, is this not the sign
that the whole of this configuration is now about to topple, and that man is in
the process of perishing as the being of language continues to shine ever
brighter upon our horizon?” (386).
In that earlier phase, Foucault does
not incorporate institutions such as the State into his archaeological analysis
of the return of language. But one could claim that the State constitutes
precisely the ultimate subject of language’s return. Language is no longer a
transparent representational tool that allows the individual to access a
non-linguistic State. Rather the State organises itself as a linguistic body,
as a discourse of things, which represents the discursive organisation of its
body. The State becomes a linguistic subject whose power-effects the individual
needs to read, to interpret, and to decipher, since they exceed the
transparent, yet absolute representation of the enlightened despot and his body
– the order upon which the State rested until the nineteenth century.
In short, if the epistemic language
of The Order of the Things is updated to the later biopolitical
discourse of the History of Sexuality, one could state the following: as
State power moves to control and regulate the body of the individual – further
subjecting the body to the process of subject formation – the former also
begins to display a discursive body of its own, to speak a language of its own,
since it can no longer rely on the body of the despot king. The State is also
preoccupied with the production of its own body, in representing itself, in
developing its own language, although this is a sovereign body/language that is
not subject to anyone or anything but itself – thus, in this way, establishing
its representational sovereignty too.
As such, the State’s body is made
present, re-presented everywhere, but only fragmentarily, through different
signs. In this way, the sovereignty of the State is felt everywhere but always
through partial signs that represent the State as discursive body: coins,
flags, stamps, police uniforms, standards (the kilogram, metre, etc.), street
signs, wedding rings, pictures of government officials presiding over
classrooms and offices, railroads, dictionaries, etc.; they all become partial
and fragmentary signifiers of the body of the State. This is the moment, for
example, in which street names in
Ultimately reality’s materiality is
defined and established by the symbolic order of the State: every object, every
material that signifies the State, becomes a referent in the symbolic order
organized by the latter. Furthermore, the State’s body, its materiality, as it
is inscribed in any partial material reality, signifies this total hidden body
that only appears as veiled in discrete significant objects. This hidden body
that the State only displays partially through its physiopower becomes the nation: the nation is the material but
always veiled signifying body of the
State. Thus any attack upon a ship, a flag, a school, also represents an
attack upon the body of the State, that is, the nation. The nation is thus the
veiled and fantasmatic body of the State, which is partially present everywhere
but cannot re-present itself as such – i.e. except as veiled behind the
referents of the State.
The State only allows one body to
have an imaginary full existence that signifies its subject: the body of the
citizen. This apparent fit between subject and body is the imaginary moment in
which the materiality and full power of the State are fully hidden behind the
imaginary significant fullness of the body of the individual citizen, thus
giving rise to the democratic ideal of the independent autonomous rational
body: the “free” citizen. The individual citizen becomes the democratic modern
free-willing subject of liberal ideology. In this respect, liberalism is the
imaginary effect (and ideology) of the modern State’s symbolic order and
physiopolitics.
The new symbolic order inaugurated
by the modern State is a consequence of the secularisation of the body of the
monarch, which prior to the emblematic dates of 1776-1789, represents the
omnipresent body that, by the extension of his/her body, subjects the rest of
the bodies under his/her rule to the medieval category of “subject”, meaning
“subjected”. Royal subjects lack sovereignty and thus their bodies are only
significant in so far as they are signified by the monarch’s body. The latter,
in turn, signifies sovereignty by becoming the only body that represents that
State without being subjected to it: hence the doubly imminent and transcendent
nature of the body of the monarch.
The modern State, thus, can be
considered a symbolic order in the Lacanian sense. The State subjects all the
material referents under its power by either making them materially significant
(physiopower) or by subjecting them to its control (biopower). The State is the
only body that is materialised in every object, whereby its materialisation
creates the effect of the independent and individual subject who owns his3 body. The body of the citizen is
the only one exempted from the State’s physiopower – it is not a referent of
the State’s body and power, although it is subject to the State and only
becomes “subject” through that very subjection. However and precisely because
it is not part of the State’s body, the citizen’s body signifies its lack of
sovereignty, while at the same time veiling the sovereignty of the State behind
his body. In short, the State, as the only sovereign subject, expands its body
throughout the State’s matter (its partial, material signifiers) thus
constituting its national body. The individual body of the citizen only becomes
significant in so far as it signifies its lack of sovereignty while signifying
the sovereignty, the physiopower, of the State over its referents. By only
excluding the body of the individual subject from physiopower, the State turns
the body of the individual into the ultimate matter/signifier that signifies
the former’s power and sovereignty. In this sense, the State can be thought of
as a historical symbolic order that gives rise to the symbolic effect of the
individual, autonomous, modern subject (the citizen).
But the State also creates an
imaginary order that helps to engage the desire of its subjects through
biopower. Althusser’s Ideological State Apparatuses (ISA), such as the school,
are only part of the State’s larger national body, in the sense that the ISA
produce objects that, in combination with other objects produced by
non-ideological apparatuses (commerce, police, etc.), participate in the
general physiopolitical display of the State’s body. Žižek is correct when
emphasizing that, as opposed to Althusser, the ISA work because of a
fundamental misrecognition in the act of interpellation: “Althusser speaks only
of the process of ideological interpellation
The body of the State, the nation,
in any of its partial materialisations, represents the mirror in which the
fragmented body of the citizen is reflected, so that the latter sees an ideal political image
of his body. As Judith Butler clarifies, reflecting on Lacan’s article on the
mirror stage, “
The importance of these
identifications in the construction of a citizen subject resides in their
modelic or morphological nature. As
This libidinal and identificatory
complexity explains the reason why the State must also deploy a regime of
biopower to regulate its imaginary order and control the identifications and
desires that take place between subjects and objects, subjects and other
subjects. Precisely because these identifications are derived from the body of
the State, from the nation, desire – and very specifically sexual desire –
becomes the State’s concern. If Freud analyses sexuality and finds the
castration complex as the touchstone of the modern sexual matrix, and if Marx
analyses the economy in order to find commodity fetishism as the founding block
of bourgeois ideology and society, it is precisely because physiopolitics and
biopolitics are simultaneously deployed – through the penis and the commodity –
to subject the population within the State and in desire-identification with
the national body. Such a political model does not recognise the sexual matrix
and its psychogenetic origin as the sole substratum from which to theorise the
political, unlike psychoanalysis. Consequently, my proposal opens up the
Lacanian model to a more complex understanding of the symbolic and the
imaginary.
Yet if we were not to introduce the
third main theoretical element of Lacanian psychoanalysis in the above
structure, the Real, we would be reifying a closed model that, in its closure,
would eliminate history and thus revert back to an ahistorical psychoanalytical
model. All matter that cannot be embodied by the State, all matter that is not
significant (meaningful and pertinent) to physiopolitics, is dejected from the
national body and turned in-material, in-significant. As
This is the order of the Real
whereby every time a material is absorbed or dejected,
the entire symbolic order changes and the imaginary order is organised
accordingly. Therefore, the subaltern subject or material, which is not
symbolised or resists symbolisation, remains the main political element that
constitutes the modern State and its body. The Real in this sense can be,
historically speaking, equated with the subaltern (Gramsci 52-5), and thus the
subaltern can be understood as the trauma that haunts the State: the Real that
returns through violence to subvert the modern State. The upsurge of
nationalism in nineteenth-century
After elaborating a Lacanian definition of the
State and its body, it is important to understand the genealogy of the figure
of the intellectual and his function in the bio- and physiopolitical
organisation of the State, so that then we can also historicise the
intellectual’s recent turn to the autobiographical. The intellectual emerges at
the end of the nineteenth century (1898) as a new cultural subject in the West.
He is the result of the first crises undergone by the modern nation-state: wars
and new social groups. As Hobsbawn summarises, “The history of the Age of Empire
The intellectual is the cultural
agent that identifies with the body of the State in crisis and, through his
journalistic performance (mainly opinion articles and manifestos), creates new
national identifications to which the middle-class can relate. As Ronald Grigor Suny and Michael D. Kennedy
summarise, “
The intellectual is, first and
foremost, the harbinger of the crisis of the nation. As such, he also fades
away in
The word “intelligentsia” is already
used in the 1830s in
When Zola announces on the first
page of Georges Clemenceau’s L’Aurore “J’accuse!” regarding the Dreyfus
affair, he is identifying with the fragmented body of the French state and
reflecting an ideal national body with which the readers can identify. This is
also the moment in which manifestos are written by intellectuals for the first
time (“manifestes des intellectuels”). In
In
On a more sociological level, Pierre
Bourdieu highlights the relationship between bio-physiopower and intellectuals,
when he addresses the reasons that lead intellectuals to organise themselves as
a separate group and to devote themselves to what he calls “restricted
production”:
In the 1880s, a period when the
structure of the literary field was definitively established as we know it
today
Bourdieu
further emphasises the autonomy of the intellectual class and its production when
he explains the mechanisms by which a field of restricted production is
organised:
The autonomy of a field of
restricted production can be measured by its power to define its own criteria
for the production and evaluation of its products
Yet the intellectuals, properly speaking, not
all writers, constitute a transitional body of writers, since they partake of
both restricted and large-scale production. On the one hand, the intellectual
writes essays, which are read mainly by the intellectual class itself. The
essay legitimises the intellectual among his peers as a member within the field
of restricted production. For example, the influence of Unamuno’s Entorno al casticismo (1895) was limited
to intellectuals themselves but, within this class, legitimised Unamuno as a
rightful member. In this respect, the field of restricted production
legitimises the intellectual as a member of a very select group of writers who
acknowledge their ability to speak for and on behalf of the nation. On the
other hand, the intellectual also writes opinion articles in the daily press,
which are read by the middle-class public and, as such, belong to mass
production. The intellectual becomes a cultural political subject at the end of
the nineteenth century, not because he, as an elite writer, has to “sell out
to” or “avoid” mass production, but rather because he can write for both fields
of production: the restricted and the large. This double alignment across
productive fields allows the intellectual to create a dual identification.
First, he establishes an identification between his
own discursive body and the body of the State, which stands for the ideal
sutured State body and is legitimised by his membership in the restricted field
of production. Then, he establishes a second identification between the ideal
sutured body of the State and his readers, which allows him to situate his work
in the field of large or mass production. This dual trafficking is what
separates the intellectual from the modernist writer or the positivist
scientist of that time.
Because of the atypical position of
the intellectual vis-à-vis the field of mass or large production, his product –
the newspaper article – requires closer examination. Once the intellectual
exchanges and the public debate generated by the opinion article are examined,
it is important to emphasize that the daily (or opinion) article transcends its
initial published form and ultimately reveals a performative dimension. First
of all, the newspaper article’s function of suturing the fragmented State body
is performative in the Hegelian sense that the nation comes together every
morning when the newspaper is read by the bourgeoisie (Anderson 39-40). In the
practice of reading the newspaper, the intellectual’s article becomes a
suturing element: it acts out the process of the community coming together. But
the performance that begins in the morning with reading the newspaper article
continues throughout the day, at the workplace, restaurants, clubs, etc. where
the intellectual’s opinion article is discussed, debated, refashioned, etc.
(Baker 1-25, 111-45). Furthermore, the intellectual also writes in response to
other articles generated by his own, thus further highlighting the performative
nature of his writing. Ultimately, the endless process of written and oral
debate among intellectuals and public constitutes the real performative act of
the intellectual. The writer only becomes a “true intellectual”, in so far as
his identification with the nation, his suturing of the fragmented body of the
State, is performed by others through debate and response. At that point, the
intellectual and his production becomes a national performance in the literal
sense of the word: the entire citizenry becomes the performer of the
intellectual debate. The performative identification with the intellectual’s
written body becomes a performative identification with the body of the nation.
However, the intellectual’s
newspaper article is also performative in a different sense: it must be
performed daily in the newspaper; it must be repeated, performed endlessly, so
that the national suture has its desired effect. It is precisely in the
newspaper and its later daily discussion where the identification with the
nation is repeatedly performed and thereby the existence of the nation is retrospectively
created through repetition (
A final characteristic of the
intellectual’s position and work is constituted by his national transcendence.
He is the only subject who escapes the subjection of the State, but only in so
far as this transcendence is used for suturing the State’s body. When the
intellectual performs his identification with the body of the nation and, in
turn, the middle-class performs its own identification with the intellectual’s
work, the intellectual occupies a position of transcendence that legitimises
him qua intellectual. In short, the
intellectual stands precisely at the crossroad of physiopower and biopower and
becomes the exception, the transcendental body that, in his exceptional
discursive transcendence, legitimises the State and its body. The
intellectual’s article becomes the performative site in which the State becomes
words and thus legitimises its physiopower. At the same time, the
intellectual’s article also becomes the discourse that regulates the citizens’
desires towards and identifications with the State – and its monopoly over
sovereignty – thus also legitimising the State’s biopower. The intellectual’s
transcendence of bio-physiopower is what gives his words – his articles – the
effect of “truth”. At the same time, this very transcendence, the
intellectual’s access to “truth”, makes the identification with his discursive
body successful, since it ultimately escapes and transcends the citizen’s
identifications and desires, thus reinforcing the State’s sovereignty. In this
sense, Foucault’s summary and denunciation of the intellectual, later turned
“left intellectual” in the twentieth century, is correct: “For a long period,
the ‘left’ intellectual spoke and was acknowledged the right of speaking in the
capacity of master of truth and justice. He was heard, or purported to make
himself heard, as the spokesman of the universal. To be an intellectual meant
something like being the consciousness / conscience of us all” (Power/Knowledge
126). Unamuno’s incident with General Millán Astray, in which the former
asserted his power over the latter at the
At the same time, it is important to
understand the way in which the intellectual loses his social function in the
aftermath of 1968. James D. Le Sueur cites a very pertinent reflection by Paul
Ricoeur: “According to the French philosopher Paul Ricoeur the reconsideration
and reconstruction of French identity ushered in by de-colonization required,
perhaps for the first time since the Enlightenment, honestly coming to terms
with the fact that French culture was not universal” (5). This loss of
universality, which is clearly marked nationally as French (as opposed to
“modern” or “European”), is at the core of the crisis of intellectual discourse
in France. In short, the most important national crisis, colonial insurgence,
also represents the ultimate intellectual challenge of the twentieth century. As Le Sueur adds: “the French-Algerian War presented intellectuals
with perhaps the first and certainly the most complex intersection between a
critical rethinking of their own intellectual identity and the crumbling of an
empire” (6). Le Sueur also emphasizes the fact that colonial independence
also represents the first signal of the intellectual’s inability to suture the
national body and to symbolise the colonial Real: “Finally, the unsuccessful
attempt to achieve reconciliation between the French and Algerian people
encouraged French intellectuals such as Sartre to use the most radical notion
of identity, the concept of the Other, as both an analytical tool and a
political ploy” (9). The result was precisely intellectual failure: “Harbi
says, most French intellectuals did not understand this
In the
Spanish case (and the German, with figures such as Habermas and Sloterdijk),
the intellectual continues to have a very important role in the aftermath of
1968, precisely as a result of
Yet, and in the
Spanish case, the autobiographical turn taken by many intellectuals represents
their failure to produce national identification. They resort to autobiography, to
the graphing of their own bodies, to perform an
identification with the national body at a time when their bodies stand
for the only remaining ideal body of the nation. This turns the intellectual
and his bio-graphy into the last national body left for the readers’
identification, for the global problems that assail the Spanish state no longer
admit a national intellectual suture. Their bodies and histories are the
remains of a truth that, formerly, was universal but now is personal and
individual.
More specifically, and due to the
“reversed” historical process of the Spanish case, where a national identity
must be constructed from the rubble of a dictatorship, the Spanish state
requires that these intellectuals reject or deject both Spanish history and
their own historical body, their biography, which is, after all, part of the
historical ruins of Francoism. Their histories are marked by identifications
with violence (ETA) or activism against Francoism, and thus they have to be
rejected. The goal is to create a new ideal autobiographical body, void of history, that can identify with the new democratic national
body of the post-dictatorship
Another characteristic of the
intellectuals’ new graphing of their bodies, in a context of phantasmatic
identifications with a Spanish state in crisis, is the “proliferation of
bodies”. The new production of “bio-graphies of the self” has to be connected
to another type of bio-graphisms that also stand for the crisis of the State:
the new presence of bodyguards in most of these intellectuals’ lives. They all
live in a constant state of exception and threat, since their public stands
against ETA have made them targets of this group’s violence – a violence that
the Spanish state should have eliminated by now but has not. Therefore, body-guards and auto-bio-graphies have to be included in the
new re-symbolisation – in this case a bio-political re-symbolisation – and
identification with the spectral national subject in crisis. The bodyguard
symbolises the intellectual’s new dual bodily presence in the public space – a
deficient presence threatened by terrorism, which the State needs to
re-symbolise with its own body, i.e. bodyguards appointed by the police. In
turn, the autobiographies perform the intellectual’s new double public
discourse – a deficient intellectual discourse threatened by new forms of
violence, which the intellectual needs to compensate with the discourse of his
own private body. That is, the intellectual self re-symbolises his discourse on
the phantasmatic national body by adding a second body to that discourse: the
intellectual’s. Ultimately, the intellectual has several bodies: the bodyguard,
the intellectual public body, the private physical body, and the
autobiographical written body. This multiplication of bodies – public and
private, civil and state-appointed – is one of the effects of the impossibility
of a single identification with the national body, since the State can no
longer symbolise or deject these new forms of violence. The multiplication of
bodies points to the new unsymbolisable presence of the Real-subaltern which
makes the identification with the State and its fragmented body impossible. In
turn, the absence, in those biographies, of clear references to bodyguards
(with the negative exception of Juaristi, La
tribu 121-29) as well as to women (all these autobiographies downplay
love-life and friendships-enmities with women) points to the fact that these
autobiographies are still attempting to write the transcendental body of the
intellectual with whom to identify in lieu of a phantasmatic national body.
These autobiographies also reveal an
important geopolitical characteristic. The new shift in national identification
from national to intellectual body has had the effect of relocating their
discourses, not on a Spanish/French/universalist location (the intellectual’s
transcendental position vis-à-vis the State), but rather on a local level: a
postnational Basque Country whose body is no longer nationalist. These
discourses have become the representation of, and identification with, a body
that no longer is ideal and Spanish but fragmentary and Basque: the
intellectual’s body and its historical Basque rubble or abjection. This new
relocation also triggers a compensatory discursive process of rewriting and
emphasizing the identification with the body of the State; however, the more
this identification is underscored, the more phantasmatic the body of the State
appears. At the same time, this geopolitical identificatory shift has also had
the effect of forming a new Basque literature in Spanish written locally for
and by Basques. This possibility had disappeared since the end of fuerista
literature (Juaristi, El linaje) in the nineteenth century, after which
the nationalist discourses of Unamuno and Sabino Arana polarised the Spanish
and Basque languages into two separate nationalist bodies. Thus, the
intellectual autobiography written in Spanish is another new development of
postnational Basque literature, which also forces the critics to re-read Basque
literature written in Spanish, at least since the beginning of the twentieth
century. Basque literature in Spanish must now be considered not as national
Spanish literature, but rather as postnational and Basque; not as a literature
regionally or accidentally Basque, but rather as one defined by the constitutive
presence or lack of Basque, nationalist, political and linguistic bodies and
their respective histories.
From this newly regained perspective
one can also see the symmetry between hegemonic Basque postnational literatures
written in Basque and in Spanish respectively. Whereas, in recent years, canonical Spanish-Basque writers in Basque
have politicised their literature, by resorting to narratives about ETA in
order to create a political identification with a Basque nationalist body (and
thus regain nationalist legitimacy; Gabilondo “Terrorism”), Basque writers in
Spanish are turning politics into literature (autobiography) as a means to
uphold an identification with the Spanish national body. Yet both
literatures ultimately respond to the same attempt to uphold the national body,
Basque and Spanish, which at this point is mainly phantasmatic.
In the three autobiographies I will be analysing here, one
can detect a very Rousseauean compulsion to tell
the truth – most of these writers grew up in Catholic Francoist Spain. Savater,
for example, makes an almost direct reference to Rousseau, when he rejects
autobiography’s postmodern turn and reverts to the Enlightened
urge to tell the truth:
Como no soy posmoderno, no diré que mezclo realidad y
ficción ni que mi vida es como yo me la invento en el recuerdo. Dejando aparte
ciertas condensaciones y elipsis (por no escudarme solamente en los fallos de
memoria, que abundarán), lo que he contado es verdad, en cuanto yo puedo
retrospectivamente establecerla. No refiero toda la verdad, pero creo que lo
que digo es bastante verdadero siempre. (387)
From this autobiographical position of truth, these authors
can write a new body that simultaneously transcends and witnesses the crisis of
the State and its national body. If Rousseau presented his written body to his
fellow citizens, for the first time, in order to institute a new modern body,
as exemplary and metonymic, in order to identify with the democratic national
subject to come (the republic), Basque autobiographies present their body, for
the first time, as the identificatory replacement of a national body and
subject (the State) that are breaking down, while their addressee is just as
inexistent as Rousseau’s: a putative fully democratic, post-Francoist,
postnational, Spanish reader to come, who is supposed to identify with a
phantasmatic national body and State.
One can analyse
three different moments in these autobiographies, which refer respectively to
three different moments in the history of the Spanish state and its deployment
of bio-physiopolitics; those moments are then unified under a single
identification with the intellectual’s body. Although each autobiography
narrates and places these three moments differently, they all show this
three-fold “historical” identificatory structure. The first moment is that of
childhood during Francoism (1940s through 1960s), a second one is constituted
by the period of youth and coincides with the political transition (1970s and
1980s), and the third and final one defined by adulthood (the 1990s on), which
captures the violence and contradictions that define contemporary
Linda H. Peterson claims that Victorian autobiographies are
indebted to earlier spiritual autobiographies of conversion whereby different
texts and doctrines are discussed as a way to narrate changes in the self
towards a final, true doctrine. She describes them as “autobiographies of
textual encounters” (16). The three autobiographies I am addressing here have
the same component. They all present literacy as the turning point in childhood
in which there is a radical shift in the author’s perception of reality; the
world changes before and after discovering the activity of reading. Mario Onaindía’s
account of that moment is exemplary:
Uno de aquellos días cayó en mis manos un libro
What all the three autobiographies present is reading as
the first activity that gives childhood a discursive body with which to
identify. As Onaindía’s text makes clear, reading allows the child to access
other worlds (“otra dimensión de la realidad, otros mundos”), with which he
identifies (“estar enamorado”); it gives him ways to accumulate more
identifications and increase the layers of his self (“más íntima, vivir
intensamente”), while also increasing his desire for an absent reality.
A similar process
occurs in the case of Savater; his childhood is defined by his reading
activity, which is located in one specific place turned almost transcendental
because of its association with reading:
Imágenes
Furthermore, as the very poignant account of Onaindía’s
biography makes clear, books of adventure (from Kipling to Tarzan) make the
Victorian British imperialist State and its body the identificatory subject of
most of their childhood readings. That is, the imaginary body of their
identification is a full-fleshed imperialist subject who signifies the last
European empire and its full state sovereignty.
Although many
critics have stressed the religious influence in the conversion of Basque youth
to ETA, Onaindía’s account presents an earlier identificatory stratum (British
imperialism), which is then replaced by religion, due simply to Spanish
history: “Ser misionero, pues, era algo relacionado con ser sherpa o cualquiera de los personajes que
aparecían en los libros que vivían intensamente su vida sin estar sumidos en la
rutina. La diferencia era que sabía más o menos dónde había que
apuntarse para ser misionero, pero no para ser sherpa ni amigo de Tarzán” (95-6). In short,
Onaindía’s identification is not religious (misionero) but imperialist and
colonial (Tarzan, sherpa).
Savater recounts
the first traumatic moment of his life as a familial lie that makes him believe
he is going to
Yet, this first
political identificatory moment must be read within the symbolic order that
enables identification while also marking the limits of symbolicity and, thus,
abjection. The children’s identification with British imperialism is strong
precisely because it compensates for Francoism. The Francoist state exerts
abjection towards other Spanish realities with which the children want to
identify but cannot. All three writers account in very specific passages the
ways in which the violence of the Francoist regime shapes their childhood’s
identifications. Consequently, they narrate their perception of earlier
Republican and/or Basque nationalist history as part of a history to which they
belong, but which has been repressed and thus is abject. They feel they cannot
identify with that history except through abjection. Onaindía recounts several
instances in which different relatives tell the history of the second
De vez en cuando, muy de tarde en tarde, se filtraban en
la conversación comentarios sobre la guerra, tema que en casa hubiera sido
inconcebible
Savater, in turn, relates the violent presence of
Francoism, as it makes itself present directly in his home, because of his
father’s job; his father is a public notary who has his office at home. A
photograph autographed by Franco while drafting his will in Savater father’s
office, which the family keeps hidden in a drawer, becomes a violent figure
that invades the home and haunts it – so as to signify the partial abjection
under which the Savater family lives. When the political situation changes in
the 1960s and Savater joins the resistance against Franco during the political
transition, the same autographed image of Franco becomes mobilised to
reorganise the family’s identifications. Franco’s autographed photograph is
taken out and displayed clearly by the family to signify their son’s abject
status; the image signifies the juvenile error committed by the son. In this
way, the portrait goes from haunting the family during Francoism to
re-signifying the position of the family and their son in the transition:
A mi modo, también soy un niño de la guerra. Recuerdo
vagamente las cartillas de racionamiento y unos emblemas
Savater also sees the other main form of violence and
abjection that Francoism exerts over the “losers” of the Civil War, the Basque
nationalists, in his own house:
Muchos de los clientes de mi padre eran acomodados
burgueses a los que se suponía simpatías con el proscrito nacionalismo vasco:
cuando se aproximaban las fechas estivales, acudían a su despacho para acelerar
la firma de las escrituras más urgentes, porque mientras el dictador veraneaba
en San Sebastián
From another different organisation of his textual
autobiography, Juaristi also notes the abjection in which his parents’
generation and his own lived during Francoism. Juaristi, who is familiar with
psychoanalysis, states this violence in Lacanian terms. However, his account
does not include the Real and the imaginary:
Así que tu
Therefore, the childhood of these autobiographies is marked
by an imaginary identification with British imperialism, from a position of
political abjection, outside the Francoist symbolic order. In this sense, these
accounts begin from a subaltern position, on the side of the Real, whereby
State violence marks their political position outside the symbolic order as
abject. This abjection, however, does not foreclose their identification with a
different symbolic order – British imperialism – or with the abject history of
the
As we will see,
this original, imaginary identification is dejected when the State’s symbolic
order changes as does their position within/outside it. This change gives rise
to a first cycle of repression by which their childhood’s historical
identification with British imperialism and abject Spanish history (the
Republic/Basque nationalism) is dejected into autobiographical abjection.
Onaindía’s and Savater’s autobiographies narrate a second
moment, from the late 1960s through the late 1970s and early 1980s, in which
they join ETA and the opposition respectively. As a result, they leave behind
their abject past, dejected by Francoism, and find a position in the new
symbolic order of the democratic transition. However, this symbolic order is
not stable and is determined by the shifting nature of the State’s sovereignty:
from dictatorship to democracy, from rural society to consumerist industrial
society, from national to global. Thus, the physio-biopolitical order changes
and, consequently, the State is defined by its shifting rather than stable
sovereignty. At that moment, the imaginary identification of the intellectuals
with the body of the State becomes constitutive of their political
subjectivity; but they carry out this new identification by dejecting their
previous abject (Republic/Basque nationalist) and imaginary (British)
identifications. This moment of full identification becomes euphoric and, in
its imaginary nature, does not register lack of sovereignty as source of
desire; it is a moment of jouissance
defined by the shifting nature of State sovereignty. Savater states clearly the
imaginary way in which he recalls this identification cum jouissance. At the
time, he was a professor at the University of the Basque Country’s Zorroaga
campus:
Los años de Zorroaga fueron divertidos, turbulentos e
imprevisibles: lo mejor que uno puede pedirle a la vida.
This identification is further emphasized in its jouissance aspect by the shifting
character of its projection on a national body that is both Basque and Spanish.
Rather than representing a stable symbolic order, with a sovereign subject (the
State), this moment represents a changing one, in which any subject of
sovereignty is possible. Also, any form of violence is potentially a form of
non-contradictory sovereignty. Due to the shifting nature of the moment,
abjection and symbolisation no longer are separate processes and therefore any
identification is possible; hence its jouissance.
As Savater states, “
Onaindía narrates
his liberation from jail, after the
Al pasar a la altura de Euskadi pude ver, al fondo en la
niebla, el mar. Desde la lejanía parecía sereno pero moviéndose firme a su
aire, indómito. Pensé en los paseos
nocturnos por Lekeitio cuando tenía dieciséis años, recién salido de Sarria,
soñando qué ser de mayor. En líneas generales pensaba que había merecido la
pena haber planteado soluciones no de una manera individual, como el abuelo
Manu, yendo a Estados Unidos y volviendo a jubilarse en Lekeitio, sino colectivamente, cambiando de régimen,
habiendo terminado con el franquismo y conquistado no sé si la libertad, pero sí al menos los
instrumentos por los que los vascos podríamos resolver no solo los problemas
derivados de haber padecido cuarenta años de dictadura franquista, sino también
los traumas del pasado que habían
provocado que la heroica lucha del pueblo y el abnegado combate de la gente que
conocí en aquel período épico no
fuera más efectivo. (622, my emphasis)
When Onaindía leaves jail, the Basque nationalist past of his
parents is not even mentioned, except for the reference to his grandfather who
migrated to the
In the case of Juaristi,
he writes from a contemporary time in which he disavows even his history during
the democratic transition as member of the oppositional left. Citing his
psychoanalyst friend Iñaki Viar, Juaristi concludes: “La izquierda
In Onaindía and
Savater’s autobiographical accounts, there is a full imaginary identification
with the (Basque and Spanish) national body precisely because the symbolic
order is not regulated by a fixed subject or form of sovereignty. In short,
this is a symbolic order with a historically shifting subject and sovereignty
structure. However, these authors do not configure their current self out of
previous identifications (British imperialism, the Republic, Basque
nationalism). Rather, they disavow earlier identifications in order to narrate
the present self as utterly disconnected from previous ones. In these
autobiographies the author’s self is refashioned anew by disavowal, by violence
towards past identifications. However, their current identification does not
and cannot account for the violence that this identificatory disavowal entails.
In short, these writers’ current identification with a new symbolic order (the
contemporary democratic Spanish state and its body) requires from them that
they violently disavow their past, their historical body. In this way, although
a new symbolic order is instituted and a consequent full imaginary
identification with the new national body of the State is established, this is
accomplished by dejecting the past and disavowing it. These autobiographies ironically
enough, do not remember but forget, just as the Spanish political parties did
during the democratic transition, in what became known as “el pacto con el
olvido” (Resina 1-15). Thus, all historical identifications become forms of
historical abjection. At the end, historical abjection comes back to haunt
these autobiographical accounts.
When these autobiographies come to the 1990s and beyond and
attempt to narrate the democratic Spanish state and their full identification
with its national body, they make room for a third moment in which the two
previous historical moments and their respective identifications are dejected,
thus rendering their own histories unnarratable and abject. Savater, for
example, thematises this continuous dejection by making reference to a present
that he can only reconstruct by voiding its history. He imagines an ideal Donostia (
Madrid sigue siendo el cepo gris y San Sebastián la
libertad azul. Aún hoy, cuando volver a mi txoko
In short, this new refashioned Donostia, void of history,
becomes the prosthetic memory of a Donostia that has been severed. His present
identification with an ahistorical Donostia, which Savater can imagine past the
risks involved in his home return, is the prosthesis of an abject past.
In Onaindía’s
case, his autobiography ends in 1977 and therefore cannot be directly compared
to that of Savater, which comes nearly down to the present. However, one can
detect in the last sentences of Onaindía’s autobiography an unease that is
organised around a non-political identification (he wants to become an
intellectual) that disavows past political identifications and thus is haunted
by them: “Soñaba con aportar mi grano de arena trabajando en la editorial Lur
Juaristi, in
turn, identifies with a current imaginary Spanish nation that is void of
violence and whereby the Real is simply non-existent (it is radically disavowed
in the text), since his definition of Spain is derived not from Spanish-Basque
history and his own identifications within it, but rather from North American
theorisations of the nation-state (patriotism). Thus Juaristi
concludes:
me siento un patriota español
y vasco, puesto que los patriotismos, al contrario que los nacionalismos,
pueden ser inclusivos y compatibles, y que, al mismo tiempo, soy un decidido
partidario de la Nación-Estado como fórmula política
As a result, this imaginary identification with the State’s
body that is supposed to be “patriotic” results in the dejection of Juaristi’s
own autobiographical identificatory history.
At the dawn of
the new millennium, the Spanish state cannot be narrated as a stable symbolic
order, but rather as one that is in crisis and is haunted by destabilising
violence (from migration and globalisation to peripheral nationalism, terrorism
and European unification). This violent history has the effect of turning these
autobiographies into discourses haunted by a historical and textual violence
that they cannot narrate. These graphings of the body are haunted by their own
dejected identificatory history and, thus, they repeatedly look for new
identifications.
Yet, in their
last pages, these autobiographies go beyond the body of the nation and unravel
a new “stronger” symbolic order on which to ground identification: religion, a
symbolic order that transcends political and social violence. In Savater’s
case, he does not embrace any form of institutionalized religion but,
nevertheless, opens up to a new form of existentialism:
En resumen: noto como si aumentase la insipidez y por
tanto tuviese cada vez mayor dificultad en saborear lo que siempre me ha
parecido sabroso. Para nuevas delicias, tengo poco paladar. Y eso me asusta, me
asusta de veras. Empiezo a darme cuenta de que quizá acabaré triste, como
cualquier imbécil. Pero os juro que hubo una alegría dentro de mí, incesante,
una alegría que lo encendía todo con chisporroteo de bengalas festivas precariamente
instaladas en las oquedades de la gran calavera
As the reference to the “great skull” makes clear, regardless
of whether it connotes some Mexican or Jesuit context, an existential death is
the abjected layer that haunts his past celebration of life. The fact that this
death is in-significant (he cannot symbolise or account for it), but haunts the
entire book, reveals its autobiographical nature: it is the identificatory past
of the philosopher that is violently haunting his present.
Juaristi has
converted to Judaism. However, even this new religious identification responds
to a dejection of his identificatory history. As he himself
clarifies, his religious choice is determined precisely by a dejection of his
father’s religious identification: “si fueras judío, yo debería cantar el kadish en tus funerales, pero lo más
probable es que, si fueras judío, yo me habría hecho bautizar por el primer
cura que encontrara” (15). Thus the fact that Juaristi
now seeks a religious interpretation of Basque nationalism (he calls it
“ethno-Christianism” 51) only hints at the fact that the haunting continues and
therefore he seeks a stronger, more stable, and less historical symbolic order:
religion. Even when citing his sources for his political thinking on
nationalism, he acknowledges the importance of authors identified as Jewish:
“Lo que voy a exponer a continuación no pretende ser
original. Son ideas que aparecen en diversos autores, y, sobre todo,
en algunos escritores norteamericanos que leo con avidez desde hace unos años.
Buena parte de ellos son judíos, lo que no es casual, porque existe un nexo
bastante especial entre la identidad judía y la Nación-Estado” (42-3). Although I do not
analyse another critical intellectual’s text here, Juan Aranzadi’s Archiloc’s Shield, it is worth noting
that he embraces Buddhism.
To sum up, the
continuous historical shifts in symbolic orders narrated in these
autobiographies, as well as the author’s continuous dejection of that history,
forces these autobiographies to deject their past identificatory history and,
thus, to resort to textual violence. Yet, this textual violence haunts the intellectuals’
bodies and discursive self-fashionings. If the Spanish transition is marked by
the pact with oblivion (“el pacto con el olvido”), these autobiographies are
defined by an uninterrupted pact with the obliteration of their own selves and
identifications, so that their new imaginary ideal bodies can continue to seek
new identificatory ground. In short, these autobiographies are written in a
continuous dejection of the subjects’ history in order to attempt to find the
symbolic order on which these subjects will finally find themselves reflected
as full intellectuals and citizens of the State – a feat that cannot be
accomplished and is, thus, bound to continuous failure, violence, and haunting.5 In this sense, these autobiographies are bio-graphies written for a
sole reading subject and addressee: the sovereign State. They narrate the
continuous dejecting of their own imaginary identifications with a sovereign
State and symbolic order that has never existed in
I could conclude by stating that modern bourgeois
literature has finally arrived to the Basque Country and
The violent and
continuous dejection of past identifications in these autobiographies is
organised so that their newest identification transcends the body of the State
and reaches a supra-state reality such as religion. Yet, from this final
religious positioning, these intellectuals still posit a transcendental and
quasi-religious nation-state, precisely one that negates past identifications
and history and, ultimately, also negates the reading public’s own
identifications. It is no coincidence that Juaristi proclaims the
semi-messianic “coming” of the nation-state to
Mientras no se demuestre lo contrario, solo en el
contexto de la Nación-Estado ha sido posible implantar las libertades
individuales, generalizar el principio de igualdad ante la ley y establecer
sistemas democráticos de control del poder. No en todas las Naciones-Estado,
claro está, pero sí en bastantes de ellas, y no hay que desesperar de que el
ejemplo cunda
In short, the nation-state continues to be a symbolic order
that is elsewhere (the same way British imperialism or the Republic was for the
young intellectuals of the early 1950s), and could have happened in
These new autobiographies, with a penchant for a melancholic identification with a non-existent hegemonic State and for a new transcendental identification with “strong, religious symbolic orders”, are refashioning a new self, a new body and subject, which is ultimately not Basque or Spanish but transcendental. Yet this transcendentalism is no longer one by which the intellectual transcends the State’s sovereignty and bio-physiopower in order to create an identification that will suture the body of the State – so that the readership can identify with the State’s body and thus become the nation. Although the original aim of these autobiographies might not be global or neoliberal, they respond to the political ideology and strategy of neoliberalism. These days, in globalisation, neoliberal discourse is attempting to repress the history of each state, the historical identifications of the respective populations with the body of their state, so that a larger symbolic order that transcends the State can regulate the desires and identifications of the population. In short, when several neoliberal authors are justifying the global/local hybridisation of culture and society, they are legitimising a global political reorganisation by which local history becomes a past moment of dejection vis-à-vis a new global culture and politics. In this way, the history of each State and its identifications becomes the new abject material, the in-significant matter, against which a global symbolic order and identificatory system is built. A similar neoliberal strategy explains ultimately these autobiographies. These autobiographies transcend the State, not to suture its body but, rather, to articulate a transcendental symbolic order through religion: this is the articulation of a global symbolic order that requires the dejection of previous national historical identifications, thus, turning the State into an ahistorical object of melancholic identification.
These autobiographies’ new
neoliberal identification with religion – and not with any religion but with
major Western religions that found civilizations – points to the fact that they
are legitimising globalisation by identifying with the referents that embody a
new global symbolic order: Western civilization and religion. Different strands
of neoliberal political theory are striving to legitimise a new pseudo-religion
that allows neoliberalism to articulate, intellectually, the body of the global
empire. Habermas’s emphasis on first-world cosmopolitanism, Fukuyama’s Hegelian
teleologisation of the liberal state, or Huntington’s scatological history of
the clash of civilisations only represent different ideological and
intellectual attempts to articulate an ideology that transcends the State and
thus allows neoliberal identifications with the global body of the new empire
(defined by the dominance of the USA over Europe and China/Japan and by the
USA’s exploitation of the rest of the world).
Because of the transcendental nature
of intellectual discourse, it always ran the risk, from its inception in the
nineteenth century, of identifying not with the sutured body of the nation but with an authoritarian elite that would, in turn, suture the
body of the nation. From Unamuno and Ortega y Gasset on, Spanish intellectual
discourse has historically flirted with authoritarianism. Some intellectuals in
This neoliberal
and authoritarian bend can be best understood if compared with forms of
biography produced in other parts of the world. Most autobiographies in the
first world, and especially in the last decade, were triggered by the private
violence originated within the nuclear family: sexual abuse, dysfunctional
relationships, etc. (Gilmore). Basque autobiographies recount a national
violence that spans from Francoism to ETA, and thus are political rather than
familial in nature. Therefore the Basque autobiography deserves first a
comparison with the other main form of “autobiographical” writing that also
derives from a political context: testimonio
literature. Basque autobiography has a very interesting parallel in
Testimonio began
as an adjunct to armed liberation struggle in
Similarly, the new Basque discourse of the self is
also a testimonio to the failure to consolidate the Spanish state in
connection with Basque nationalism and terrorism. Yet, here the “great
intellectual” rather than the subaltern masses that endure the violence of ETA
and the Spanish state, writes the Basque “testimonio”.
In this sense, Basque testimonio is the political opposite of its Latin
American counterpart. Yet, in both cases we have a postnational literature that
emerges in the aftermath of the crisis of the “great writers”, who narrate the
Basque and Latin American national allegories respectively (García Márquez,
Atxaga). Furthermore, because of the dissymmetrical location of the Latin
American and Basque testimonios – third and first worlds respectively –
we see that the testimonio form can be mobilised to give voice to the
subaltern masses –
As a final reflection, one also has
to hail these intellectuals and their autobiographical writing as the farewell
to the intellectual class, since they represent the collapse of the
biopolitical and physiopolitical and, thus, the dissolution of the State’s
sovereignty. The intellectual is the last subject and body left capable of
mirroring the State, albeit melancholically or religiously. At the same time,
the intellectual is the last subject whose identification is defined by the
State; it is not a coincidence if the three authors bare their souls in their
autobiographies but do not speak much of love, sex, friendship and/or
antagonism with women. The rest of the population of the Spanish state is now
adrift in a shifting symbolic system in which the national and the global superpose
over different and contradictory forms of identification. These varied
contradictory forms of identification allow Spanish people to identify with
previous historical identifications but they also impose serious forms of
dejection upon those very same identifications, in a complex libidinal map that
remains to be charted. At this point, we only know that, in this transitional
local-global symbolic order, bio- and physiopolitics collapse into a single
order and the intellectual’s autobiography represents a farewell to that dual
order that defined the modern State and its national body.
NOTES
1 I would like to acknowledge the following colleagues for their contributions to this article: Laura Mintegi, Casilda de Miguel, Kathleen Etcheverry, Demosthenes Papaeliou, Imanol Galfarsoro, Txema Montero and Pedro Oiarzabal. I would also like to thank William Douglass for his editing. I also would like to acknowledge the anonymous reader who reviewed the article and made many insightful comments..
3 Throughout the nineteenth century, the individual/citizen
is always male, white, and European. There are no official women intellectuals
either at this point; therefore the use of the pronoun “he/his” reflects a
historical rather than universal pronoun. At this point, important women
intellectuals such as Madame De Staël or Emilia Pardo Bazán are perceived as
transmitters and conduits of culture, rather than as intellectual subjects.
4 In his genealogy of intellectuals and philosophers, Zygmunt Bauman only establishes one break between the Enlightenment and our times, across the modern/postmodern divide. In this way, Bauman does not take into consideration the important rupture that happens at the end of the nineteenth century when the figure of the intellectual is consolidated against that of the philosopher/legislator.
5 Yet, the new formation of a private space, as an imaginary displacement of the national body and its subject – its autobiographical displacement to the private – has very interesting imaginary effects that escape the symbolic order and create unanticipated power effects. The compulsion to tell it all creates a very rich web of personal references and revelations, which move intellectual discourse closer to tabloid journalism.
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