Introduction

What are we waiting for, assembled in the forum?

The barbarians are due here today.

Why isn't anything happening in the senate?

Why do the senators sit there without legislating?

Because the barbarians are coming today.

…..

Why this sudden restlessness, this confusion?

(How serious people's faces have become.)

Why are the streets and squares emptying so rapidly,

Everyone going home so lost in thought?

Because night has fallen and the barbarians have not come.

And some who have just returned from the border say

There are no barbarians any longer.

And now, what's going to happen to us without barbarians?

They were, those people, a kind of solution.

Constantine P. Cavafy. “Waiting for the Barbarians.”

Barbarians at the European Gate

This book chronicles a very specific moment and geopolitical juncture in Spanish and European history—globalization—and focuses on the ideological discourses developed to articulate that history. More specifically the book analyzes the central and crucial role played by several Spanish-Basque intellectuals in shaping what can be considered the most important shift in recent Spanish and European history. These intellectuals are responsible for the articulation of a neonationalist and neoliberal ideology, which prepares the ground for the implementation of globalization in Europe through the reorganization of political and geographic borders, internal and external.

The contention of this book is that Spanish and Basque history is not marginal but rather central to understanding the recent history of Europe, and thus globalization. As the initial confusion about the identity of the perpetrators of the terrorist attacks of 3-11-2004 in Madrid made historically and symbolically clear, the Spanish state is defined by a past that was never consolidated as nation-state (hence the monstrous continuation of Basque terrorism) and by a present that is global in so far as it signifies the neoimperialist expansion of European states with an imperialist past, such as Spain, over their old colonies; Spain today is the second largest investor in Latin America (Casilda Béjar).

As a result of this double juncture, which developed throughout the 1990s, Spain had to redefine itself not only vis-à-vis its new European history—the European Community—but also in regards to the USA. In 2003, the Spanish government backed the USA invasion of Iraq, thus, opening the door for the retaliation of fundamentalist Muslim terrorist groups in Madrid. The initial confusion on the part of the government and police whether it was ETA or Al-Quaeda, turned into a certainty (terrorist groups from the Al-Quaeda cluster). The Spanish government could not use it to its advantage since the ideology of a globalized Spain was more recent than that of a national Spain and was contested by a majority of the Spanish population. Never before has another state embodied the Benjaminean angel of history so clearly, as when Spain was trapped between a vision of a Francoist past from which Basque terrorism emerged, on the one hand, and an unforeseeable future that was already shattered by a new form of violence---global terrorism---on the other. The only word that needs to be changed in Benjamin’s reference to the angel of history is ‘progress,’ which today has been replaced by ‘globalization:’

This is how one pictures the [Spanish] angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage upon wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. This storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This is storm is what we call progress [=globalization]. “Theses” (257-58)

The Spanish angel of history, looking at the past wreckage of the nation-state and moving forward to a globalization marked by the violent effects of neoimperialism, is the harbinger of Europe’s future history.

Another geopolitical way to look at this scenario is the old trope of the barbarians: against what the second article of the Spanish constitution declares, Spain no longer is a nation-state—if it ever was one—but rather one of the most important European gates, if not the most important gate, to the divide that keeps the global barbarians (immigrants from Africa and Latin America, fundamentalist Muslim terrorists, drug and arm traffickers…) out of the eternal European city that claims an enlightened humanist history of cosmopolitanism dating back to the ur-European city, Athens. Valéry Giscard d’Estaign’s scandalous statement that accepting Turkey to the European Community would amount to the end of Europe (Le Monde), reflects better than it seems at first the new neoliberal climate that begins to prevail in the Community. As the Nietzschean genealogy warns, this new divide between global barbarians and European citizens forgets its imperialist history and, as I will contend below, also hides ideologically its new necessity to expand in a neoimperialist fashion over its former areas of influence (colonies, protectorates, neighboring states, etc.) in an attempt to compete with a USA that does not hide its global hegemony and imperialist thrust. In this respect, thus, Spain becomes the European gate of a new global divide, a barbarian divide, which merits careful examination. As I will elaborate below, this new geopolitical refashioning of Spain ultimately requires that we rethink Spain not as a nation-state, a postnational state, or even a postempire on the brink of a neoimperialist global rebirth, but rather as a divide, a border, a borderland, following Gloria Anzaldua’s work. The strategic move to deploy Chicano theory to rethink Spain is intended to reverse, at the very epistemological level, the denial of coevalness that defines every European discourse on the non-European other. In turn, the oscillation between “border” and “divide” explains the political chances of a future Spain: it can be a borderland where different cultures meet in a complex multicultural situation or it can become a divide where the heralds of difference, the barbarians, are kept at bay by neoliberalism.

Within this general context of Spain as borderland and divide, this book highlights, from a locally conscious position that challenges any classical conception of regional studies (Appadurai), the importance of a group of Basque intellectuals. They all share in common a similar political biography: they begin as young enthusiasts of ETA’s activity against the Franco dictatorship and/or identify with a Basque political difference in the 1960s and 70s but ultimately end up as the staunchest defenders of the Spanish state and its raison d’etre as well as the most zealous critics of Basque difference and globalization in the 1990s. These intellectuals are at the forefront of a new discourse that I denominate simultaneously neonationalist and neoliberal: this ideology disavows the difference that globalization brings to the European border, to Spain, and in return demonizes multiculturalism so that other internal borders and differences, such as the Basque or that of gender, are also disavowed. As I will elaborate in this book, these Basque intellectuals repeat the very Spanish ideological syndrome of the converso who becomes the most zealous accuser of his/her past difference and overidentifies with the State and its institutions (including the Church). More recently, these intellectuals repeat with interesting differences the political maneuver of what is has become known as the Generation of 1898, a generation of writers who become the first intellectuals in Spain and are disproportionately of Basque origin (most notably Miguel Unamuno).

The new battle between European citizens and global barbarians is being fought in a very radical way in Spain by Basque intellectuals at the cry of assimilation, as a way to attain equality, and at the complementary shout of civilization, as a way to naturalize only certain differences that, then, retrospectively can be hailed as equality (the ghosts of De las Casas and Sepúlveda seem to be returning to globalization in unsuspected ways). Thus the battle fought at the European border is one between neoliberalism and multiculturalism, between a European-defined universalism and a non-European subaltern difference. The goal of this book is to read this new ideological maneuver to uphold civilization as the ultimate sign of barbarism. In short, this book claims that these neonationalist and neoliberal Basque intellectuals who are defending Spanish and European civilization against the old (Basque) and new (global) barbarians are the ultimate barbarians; hence, the double meaning of the title of the book.

It is the contention of this book that if this Spanish-Basque intellectual discourse is compared to other more well-known European ones (Habermas, Agamben, Derrida), the Spanish-Basque debate, in its marginal position, advances and articulates problems that still remain unacknowledged by most European intellectuals—hence the importance of following this “provincial” and “insular” intellectual debate fought at the outskirts of the European city.

The Barbarian Divide: Geopolitics of Difference

The intellectual discourse of the Basque authors studied here, which was originally developed to address the tensions between Basque and Spanish nationalisms in the 1970s and 80s, became afterwards redeployed in the 1990s to deal with new forms of otherness, such as the ones generated by immigration from the Third World. In order to analyze the ideas of equality and assimilation articulated by Basque intellectuals to deal with Basque nationalism, terrorism and immigration—in an other-ed continuity that now seems unprecedented—one must first advance a new theory of Spanish history and geopolitics that challenges existing historiographic conventions. The following is simply a very sketchy and tentative outline of the way in which Spanish history could be rethought from a global perspective as border and gate rather than as state or nation; it situates itself along the of and s groundbreaking work of Benita Sampedro and Simon Doubleday.

There are few histories of Spain that are multicultural, but still Americo Castro’s España en su historia remains foundational within its clear historical and nationalist limits---after all, Catro’s history is ultimately nationalist. Although later critics, such as Maria Rosa Menocal, have followed Castro’s lead to emphasize multicultural coexistence and balance in medieval Spain, there is a more interesting reading of Castro’s work that involves border thinking rather than discourses of “tolerance” and “coexistence” (always liberal words). That is, Castro depicts the emergence of Castilian imperialism as the result of the collusion, the fold, of two borders. On the one hand, Castile emerges against and in image of Muslim kingdoms in the southern Peninsula:

Desde el siglo IX al siglo XVII el eje de la historia hispana, en lo que tuvo de afirmativo, original y grandioso, fue una creencia ultraterrena, surgida como réplica heroica a otra creencia enemiga [Muslim religion and culture], bajo la cual agonizaban los restos de lo que fue la Hispania de los visigodos... La España del siglo IX se rehízo y pudo subsistir gracias a la creencia en Santiago [the counter Mahoma], en el que yace en la ciudad de Santiago de Compostela. (103)

But on the other hand, the Castilian (as well as the Aragonian) state emerges as a result of French influence, which extends over the border delineated by the Road to Santiago and which is controlled by the interests of Bourgogne and the Cluny order:

Los reinos cristianos [of the Peninsula] necesitaban a Francia para alejarse en lo posible de la atracción islámica. Sabían los reyes que su poderío descansaba únicamente sobre la creencia y el puro valor personal... y para todo lo demás, su horizonte era el de las tierras musulmanas. Mas ahora, gracias al imperialismo cluniacense, los reyes cristianos iban a gravitar hacia Francia, cuya civilización matizará vivamente los aspectos cristianos de los siglos XI, XII, y XIII. (136)

With the synthetic historical imagination that defines Castro’s style, he captures the historical continuity of this other northern border when he concluyes that “[L]os designios franceses, en lo que hace a su esquema, eran en 1100 análogos a los de 1800; el Napoleón de entonces era el abad de abades, Hugo de Cluny” (147). Therefore, one can rethink the “birth” of modern Spain as the collusion or coming together of two different borders, two cultures, from which Castile and, later, Spain emerge as a hybrid border culture.

Similarly, if the expansion of Spanish imperialism in the Renaissance is reconsidered from border thinking, certain characteristics that so far appear as anomalies to Spanish historiography gain their historical raison d’être. Spanish imperialism, unlike the French or the British, is not the center of capitalist accumulation. In short, political power does not follow economic imperialism. Giovanni Arrighi, one of the best commentators of modern imperialism, explains Spain’s non-centrality in the development of modern capitalism in the following way:

In 1617, Súarez de Figueroa went as far as claiming that Spain and Portugal had become “the Indies of the Genoese”… The hyperbole contained an important element of truth… in the half century or so preceding 1617 the ‘invisible hand’ of Genoese capital, operating through the triangle-of-flows that linked Seville, Antwerp, and Bisenzone to one another, had succeeded in turning the power pursuits of Imperial Spain, as well as the industrial pursuits of Genoa’s old rival and “model” city-state Venice, into powerful engines of its own self-expansion. (83)

The fact that even in the 1600s two “Indies” were perceived (Spain and the Americas), begs that Spanish imperialism is reconsidered as the border of a larger European economic and historical reality and not simply as an empire in expansion.

Although I discuss the nineteenth century in chapter five, dedicated to Juan Pablo Fusi, it is worth advancing that the issue of the so called “Spanish bourgeois revolution” has not been settled and, instead, the influence of French and British economic and cultural imperialism has been downplayed when explaining the lack of a Spanish industrial revolution in the nineteenth century—especially considering that Catalan and Basque industrializations evolve in complex and autonomous ways in regards to the Madridean bourgeoisie and the Spanish state. Similarly, the orientalizing romantic discourse deployed by northern Europe on Spain (the infamous “Africa begins at the Pyrenees”) is at the core of what later will become costume literature and casticismo in ways that we only begin to fully understand now (Afinoguénova and Martí-Olivella). At the same time, nineteenth-century Spanish history is marked by colonial loss in ways that have not been yet fully explored, except for the moment in which loss becomes traumatic, 1898. In short, a double border, European and Atlantic, also marks the nineteenth century, which, in its complex influences over the Spanish state, generates what we now call “Spanish history” and consider it to be a “national.”

If the Francoist period is the moment of Spanish history that seems to be the most “national,” that is, endowed with “a Spanish essence and history,” it is important to remember that tourism is the main economic engine of that era, and that, therefore, a complex border involving Europe and Africa (from which the exotic and touristic idea of Spain ultimately derives, thanks specially to flamenco and Andalusian culture) is at the core of Francoism.

Therefore, when I approach the globalized history of contemporary Spain and propose to think of it as a border that neoliberalism is turning into a separating divide—a gate to keep barbarians at bay—my proposal is not simply to advance either a new historiographic trick or a theoretical tour de force to think Spanish history and geopolitics in a new and fashionable way. It points to the core of modern Spanish history.

When Gloria Anzaldua reflects on the border between Mexico and the USA, and focuses on the Reagan era, from which neoliberalism emerges, she clearly states that the formation of border culture and economy becomes a reality, a “country” of its own: “Barefoot and uneducated, Mexicans with hands like boot soles gather at night by the river where two worlds merge creating what Reagan calls a frontline, a war zone. The convergence has created a shock culture, a border culture, a third country, a closed country” (11). As Anzaldua concludes, border history also alters human reality and thinking: “Not only was the brain split into two functions but so was reality. Thus people who inhabit both realities are forced to live in the interface between the two, forced to become adept at switching modes. Such is the case with the india and the mestiza” (37). Therefore, I think that, at this moment, it is strategically important to appropriate border theory to think contemporary Spanish and European reality. As the following study will elaborate, the Basque Country can also be thought as an internal border to Spain and France. This internal Basque border is the reason why those who had to deal with an internal border are now in charge of reorganizing Spain’s external global border.

I believe that a border-theory approach to the Basque Country, Spain and Europe, allows us to rethink history in a multicultural way and to solve many of the problems that have plagued Spanish historiography and intellectual discourse. This theory also allows us to rethink the fact that the border can be either a zone of interaction and hybridation or a gate that divides and separates people. As Mike Davis has claimed recently, neoliberalism is building another “Great Wall.” As a result, any multicultural theory must develop strategies and tools to take that wall down. In the Spanish translation published in the Mexican newspaper La Jornada, Davis establishes an important historiographic connection between different political walls:

Libre comercio significa un laberinto de puestos fronterizos fortificados. Cuando las multitudes delirantes derrumbaron el Muro de Berlín en 1989, muchos alucinaron que se avecinaba un milenio de libertad sin fronteras. Se suponía que la globalización inauguraría una era sin precedente de movilidad física y virtual-electrónica. En cambio, el capitalismo construyó la barrera al libre tránsito más enorme de la historia.

It is this wall that Spanish-Basque intellectual discourse is contributing to build at the European border of Spain and thus we must study it critically in order to turn the neoliberal wall that the former is constructing into a multicultural border of passage.

Spanish History and the Traumatic Scene: Towards a Ghostly History

A border theory on neoliberal Spain also requires that we think a different type of history, a ghostly history, or as Jo Labanyi puts it, following Derrida, a hauntology (Constructing 1,2), so that a different border, a historical rather than a geopolitical one, is also incorporated into our analysis. As Labanyi argues, a ghostly history is a double history that narrates simultaneously what has been allowed to become history and what has been repressed. Labanyi states that this double history can be narrated as a result of the logic of postmodernity:

ghosts are the traces of those who were not allowed to leave a trace; that is, the victims of history and in particular subaltern groups, whose stories—those of the losers—are excluded from the dominant narratives of the victors [...]. It can in some respects be argued that postmodernism [...] is characterized by the recognition—in the spectral form of the simulacrum—of modernity’s ghosts. (Constructing 1-2)

A border history, thus, is a ghostly narrative that accounts for both res gestae and res represae, one that responds to a double temporality. Historical events evolve and develop, change and mutate, whereas repressed events are fixed in a punctual time to which they bring back, they force by haunting, any other historical development or happening. In short, and paraphrasing Lacan, one can state that repressed history is atemporal, it does not take place in time, and, furthermore, warps historical time into its non-temporal or fixed time. A brief excursus in recent Spanish history can illustrate the advantages of a ghostly border history.

After an initial moment of political opening, economic prosperity and cultural resurgence, which could emblematically be dated from 1975 to 1992, a moment best defined by Spain’s turn towards Europe—commonly known as “europeization”—a new and unexplored phase begins in the aftermath of the celebratory year of 1992 (Olympic games, Universal Fair, etc.). The persistence of terrorism, the increase in illegal immigration from the Third World, the economic instability triggered by the neoliberal policies of “de-nationalization” of state-run businesses, the loss of privileges granted by the welfare state, the globalization and hollywoodization of Spanish culture, the backlash in the process of “europeization,” the turn towards a more traditional Spanish identity (casticismo) accompanied by a more aggressive and neoimperialist approach to Latin America (via the USA), the right-wing attack on social minorities (gays, women, etc.), and the recalcitrant persistence of the problem of the peripheries (mainly Basque and Catalan nationalisms, but also Galician) are some of the problems that define this new and yet indefinable historical moment that follows 1992. The almost even split among voters between socialists and conservatives (PSOE and PP) and the so far regular alternation between both parties is only the emblem of this complex historical shift. As writer Manuel Vázquez Montalván concluded already in 1991: “Lo que sí ha cambiado con respecto al antes de Franco es que nos hemos quedado sin proyecto histórico peculiar, español e intransferible” (cited in Moreiras 16).

In this new post-1992 phase, as unresolved problems of the past have come to haunt the present alongside new global problems, Spain has reorganized itself through what can only be considered a neonationalist ideology and identity, which has been legitimized mostly by the Spanish-Basque intellectuals I study here. This neonationalist refashioning is the key political maneuver by which the rest of historical problems still pending are being ideologically neutralized and repressed in Spain. Ironically enough, “Spain” has become the free-floating signifier deployed by a neoliberal, neonationalist, globalized Spanish elite—one that remains understudied but must be genealogically traced to “la gente guapa” and the “movida madrileña”—in order to create a new ideological hegemony. This neonationalist hegemony is nevertheless generating, rather than solving, many problems and resistances from many fronts of Spanish reality, thus giving rise to a very unstable situation defined by repression, trauma and violence. The result is a “ghostly reality:” most aspects of contemporary Spanish reality are haunted by a repressed history that should be narrated—historicized—but it is silenced instead. The debates and scandals surrounding the iniciatives to unearth and bury properly the bodies of victims from the Spanish Civil War piled in anonymous graves till now, are the ultimate representation of a ghostly history of cadavers that embody the return of the repressed. Spanish history is ghostly and therefore double: the present is being warped by a past that is fixed in its ahistorical moment of violent repression. As Cristina Moreiras concludes in a book that captures the centrality of this traumatic and ghostly history in its title, Spanish culture is a Cultura herida:

la violencia tanto de la borradura de la memoria (de la historia) como la violencia originada por la presencia de los residuos impresos en esa borradura, y que interviene inevitablemente también en las generaciones que no han vivido ese pasado. Estos residuos se entretejen así no sólo en las huellas dejadas por el pasado sino también en las nuevas formas culturales a las que la posmodernidad y la hegemonía del mercado y los medios masivos de comunicación dan entrada en la “nueva” España democrática. (17)

In this neonationalist refashioning of a phantasmatic Spain, what is most noteworthy and has gone most unnoticed so far, is precisely the importance of Basque intellectuals. If they have been so instrumental in defining neonationalist and neoliberal Spain, it is precisely because they partake of this ghostly history, they are marked by one of the most traumatic events of this ghostly history: most of them belonged to ETA or to the anti-Franco resistance and thus, precisely because they have been able to repress their own political and intellectual history, they are now capable of repressing every other ghostly instance of Spanish history. In this sense, and as I will unravel in the following, Spanish-Basque intellectual discourse is haunted by Francoism and ETA, and one of its temporalities, the ghostly one, still remains fixed in that historical moment, one to which this intellectual discourse returns with traumatic compulsion while on the other historical temporality they distance themselves as much as possible and identify with its opposite: the hegemonic ideology of the Spanish state and its apparatuses.

I will simply mention the most prominent intellectuals here, the ones this book studies: Fernando Savater, Jon Juaristi, Mikel Azurmendi, Juan Pablo Fusi, Javier Pradera, and Antonio Elorza. These are intellectuals who, in different ways, were involved in the Basque terrorist group ETA or had embraced the idea of a politically avant-gardist Basque Country in the years following the end of the dictatorship. Eventually, and throughout the late 80s and 90s, these intellectuals reacted against the nationalist (democratic and radical) hegemony being formed in the Basque Country. At the end, and as result of the complex intersection of different forms of political violence erupting from the conflict between Basque and Spanish realities, these intellectuals have ended defending the anachronistic ideal of a Spanish nation-state—in a moment of rampant globalization—as the only alternative to the violence that still defines Spanish and Basque politics. This (neo)nationalist Spanish alternative, because of its capacity to repress history, has been later redeployed to deal with any other form of historical conflict in Spain: immigration, religious difference, global terrorism, etc.

Therefore, this book, first and foremost, attempts to effect an archeology of the ways in which Basque politics and intellectual discourse have generated, in a phantasmatic reaction, the discursive basis for the articulation of Spanish neonationalism. As Ernest Lluch had already perceived with uncanny insight in 2000:

Personalmente, pienso que a partir de 1980 se ha constituido un grupo con características parecidas que se distinguen por haber pasado a residir mayoritariamente en Madrid, haber pertenecido a bandas armadas (Jon Juaristi, Mikel Azurmendi, Patxo Unzueta, Mario Onaindía) o por sus defensas de la dictadura del proletariado o de los principios ideológicos del anarquismo (Fernando Savater). La mayoría, en edad algo madura en 1978, no votaron afirmativamente la Constitución española.... Juan Pablo Fusi pertenece a este grupo aunque sin antecedentes fuera del terreno democrático… (148)[i]

Echoing Fusi’s own words, Lluch puts in perspective the importance of the ghostly Basque component of Spanish neonationalism. In statistic terms that reveal the true historical dimension of the problem, Lluch concludes: “Cerca de un 50 por ciento del nacionalismo español entre 1900 y 1936 y entre 1980 y 2000 ha sido formulado por vascos españolistas en general trasladados a Madrid. Del 5 por ciento que representa la población vasca en el conjunto de España procede cerca de la mitad del bagaje intelectual del españolismo” (148).

The above development is part of a larger European neoliberal arrangement. In France, a similar neoliberal development was carried out by the New Philosophers that gained intellectual hegemony starting in the late 1970s. As Dominique Lecourt states sucintly: “Well-positioned, the antitotalitarians-turned-neo-libertarians were set to end up as neo-liberals!” (63). In the USA, this phenomenon has been labeled “the Rise of the Neocons” (Heilbrunn).

Biopolitics and Masculine Hysteria

It is not a very innovative claim to assert that a minority, such as the Basque, is in charge of defining a mainstream political ideology, such as Spanish (neo)nationalism. As Lluch puts it, 5% of the Spanish population—the Basques—are responsible for 50% of Spanish nationalist discourse (148). Yet, in order to capture the complex historical reality that leads to the Basque articulation of Spanish (neo)nationalism, this book also studies several other dimensions of this Basque intellectual activity as a way to also contribute to a more general analysis of politics and ideology.

By analyzing Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936) first, I attempt to capture the specific nationalist nature of intellectual discourse in Spain, to the point of defending that intellectual work is precisely the central discourse engaged in articulating the idea of the state (Spain) as nation. In other words, by studying the way in which Unamuno, a Basque intellectual who had been a Basque nationalist in his youth, became the central intellectual figure involved in defining Spanish nationalism at the turn of the nineteenth century, I analyze the specific and historical relationship between Basque and Spanish nationalisms, thus problematizing both. Unfortunately, the majority of discourses on Spanish and Basque nationalisms, so far, have become victims to the nationalizing effects of their object of study, thus, engaging in what could only be called “presentist history.” Therefore, most analyses have not been able to elaborate a historical framework that exceeds the nationalist dimension of the problem so as to study both nationalisms and their interactions without becoming overdetermined by them. It is the claim of this study that neither nationalism is reducible to the other, although they fully constitute each other.

I use the concept of “performance of masculine hysteria” in a political context in order to create a non-nationalist framework of analysis. I first effect an archaeology of fin-de-siècle cultural politics, when hysteria’s diagnosis shifts from a man’s disease—connected with war and poverty, as studied by Charchot—to a woman’s disease—void of history and connected to domesticity, as elaborated by Freud. This political archaeology of the term “hysteria” represents a way to connect politics with biology; it is intended to articulate a new way of understanding biopolitics (Foucault, History), so that issues such as masculinity, nationalist ideology, and war can be connected in a single analytical framework---it is not a coincidence if Unamuno’s intellectual generation is known as “the Generation of 98;” it is a generation defined by Spain’s colonial loss and war defeat. Ultimately, this study redefines intellectual discourse as a masculinist hysterical performance of the body of the state. In short, intellectual discourse is a biopolitical performance of the nation. The processes of phobia and conversion that take place in hysteria can, in this way, be connected to the concepts of antagonism and articulation, as developed by cultural studies and postmarxism (Althusser, Hall, Laclau, Zizek…). As a result, intellectual discourse can be understood in its complexity: not simply as a discourse that mobilizes nationalist ideas, but rather as a discourse that produces dis/identification, desire, otherness, and more generally, subjectivation. In this respect, Unamuno’s “me duele España” remains the epitome of intellectual discourse as performance— parallel to Émile Zola’s “J’accuse.”

In this new biopolitical approach, the issues of national identity, masculinity, patriarchy, and class identity can be combined in a single analysis. A biopolitical take also explains why at a moment in which gay scandals—such as Oscar Wilde’s in Great Britain and, later, the debates over decadence in Weimar Germany—define fin-de-siecle debates and culture in capitalist countries, gayness is co-opted by hegemonic hysterical masculine discourse in Spain. This analysis also allows us to explain why the most important cultural practitioners of the Spanish democratic transition (1975-1992) can be classified in very specific groups along the spectrum of masculinity. For example they can be male and gay but not marked by nationality (Almodóvar, Juan Goytisolo) or male and heterosexual but marked by nationality (the intellectuals studied here). This approach also hints at an explanation as to why women’s discourse is not allowed to become a “universal” (=intellectual) discourse on the nation and, instead, is always reduced to “women’s writing,” “feminist discourse,” etc., in short, literature that is neither universal nor intellectual. Finally, this approach also allows us to isolate specific sexual structures in Spanish society. They respond to the older sexual organization of a single-sex, which is replaced at the end of the eighteenth century in northern Europe by the two-sex model, as studied by Foucault and Laqueur, but remains in place in Spain.

In the following, I propose that Spanish-Basque intellectuals hystericize their own traumatic experience with Basque nationalism, which, rather than becoming a marginal problem in Spain, is relived and re-hystericized by the Spanish national body, so that the latter proves the centrality of the Basque problem. Ultimately Basque nationalism is truly a Spanish problem, although it is not exhausted or determined by Spain, as the French-Basque and diasporic cases make it clear. This “problem,” as such, is a Spanish problem rather than a Basque one; that is why it can be enjoyed by every Spaniard in its traumatic nature---in its uncanny scenario of ghosts and violence. It represents the ultimate Spanish nationalist primal scene in a way that only Jews, Arabs and “reds” could it in the past. Ultimately, a full history of Spanish-Basque intellectual discourse would have to go back to another ghostly historical moment and primal scene: the Basque letrados and language-apologists, such as Esteban Garibay or Andres Poza, who articulate the first discourse on the Spanish racial primordiality of the Basques (the Vizcainos) in the 16^th century, while opening Basque history to anti-semitism and xenophobia in general. In that respect a study similar to Angel Rama’s The Lettered City remains to be done for the Spanish peninsula.

At a biopolitical level, the Spanish state apparatuses are traumatized by the primal fantasy that Basques are more primordial than the Spanish state itself (even at the level of violence, i.e., ETA). But this enjoyment of the primal scene of the other is ultimately Spanish; it does not reverberate in the French Basque Country or in the Basque diaspora of the Americas. In this respect, the ghostly history inaugurated by Unamuno, in its traumatic and temporal fixity, still responds to the same traumatic scenario that contemporary Basque-Spanish intellectuals articulate today. The ghostly part of this history is still fixed in 1898 and warps contemporary history as a bubble that keeps expanding but still originates at the same point from which it will eventually burst.

Neonationalism, Neoliberalism, Melancholia

This study could also be entitled “The Spanish ideology,” since even Marxist analysis and history can be repeated as comedy (if I can paraphrase Marx’s introduction of his Eighteenth of of Brumaire). In the following I will explain that the masculinist histerical performance of the nation by Basque-Spanish intellectuals produces a single subject structure: melancholia. In other words, the intellectual performance of the nation generates melancholia for a non-existent nation-state, for Spain. Therefore, this book explores the ways in which Spanish history is dismissed in favor of a melancholic refashioning of an ahistorical but enlightened Spanish state. The effects of this “state melancholia” (melancholia for the State) are decisive for politics; it articulates a phantasmatic structure that eliminates even national history.

Any aspect of Spanish national history that cannot be reduced to the global conflicts that these Basque-Spanish intellectuals exorcize (immigration, terrorism, etc.) is eliminated from their discourse and ideology, thus rewriting a new form of global nationalism: neonationalism. For example, the Latin American wars of independence (1810-1825) are absent in Fusi’s neonationalist history of Spain (1492-1992), as I will discuss in chapter 5. Such elimination is necessary in order to uphold a historically homogenized and “egalitarian” Spanish nation-state in which most historical, colonial, and national differences (as well as the new ones triggered by immigration and globalization) are erased. In short, in order for Fusi to claim that Spain is a continuous nation-state since 1492 where internal differences and conflicts have been solved internally, Latin America’s colonial independence must be actively forgotten. By the same token, once Latin America’s wars of independence are forgotten, Spain’s new neocolonial presence in Latin America can be legitimized as a natural continuation of Spain’s national history. At the end, the ahistorical and unchanged Spanish nation-state that Fusi refashions from 1492 on, creates a structure of melancholia, since history and contemporary reality negate Fusi’s national construct. Yet, melancholia also guarantees the desire not to let go of this lost or inexistent object---hence the need to continue performing the existence of the Spanish nation through the structure of masculine hysteria organized by intellectual discourse.

As a result of this structure of state melancholia, a neonationalist oblivion of history is enforced as a departure point to articulate a new Spanish state that can embrace the neoliberal politics and culture unleashed by globalization in the 90s—in an entangled web that also encompasses different institutions and treaties such as the GATT, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, etc. To my knowledge, there is still not a good and thorough analysis of neoliberalism and neonationalism similar to the one effected by Benedict Anderson for nationalism. This book cannot fill this gap, but attempts to explore different aspects of both ideological formations and practices.

It is not a coincidence if Spanish neoliberal oblivion (and melancholia) is originally imported from Germany, and more specifically from Habermas’s theories of postnationalism and constitutional patriotism. Germany is the other European country that, after its reunification, needs to refashion its history in neonationalist terms. After all, state melancholia is a way to do away with these countries’ respective fascist histories (Franco, Hitler) and, consequently, to open them to neoliberal ideology. Furthermore, and as one of the final chapters of the book points out, the Spanish and German cases might become the testing grounds, because of the severity of their histories, of this new neoliberal ideology that could be then implement throughout a unified Europe in the twenty first century---since the exceptionalism of French nationalist republicanism does not lend itself so readily to be imported to the rest of Europe. Although this is a latent possibility, rather than a historical reality at this point, it is important to highlight it so that it is dealt with politically.

Finally this book historicizes the “end” of the intellectual. By analyzing the new mediatic discourses on “reality”—the “reality shows” and the scandals that shape the new Spanish elite, from Boyer to Count of Lequio—this book attempts to explain the reasons why intellectuals, so central since 1898 to Spanish politics and culture, but also to French or Russian histories as well as to Third-World countries after 1945, are about to fade away once neonationalism and neoliberalism make the best use of them, just as Catholic priests were previously demoted by industrialization and consumerism.

With this announcement of the “end” of intellectuals, this book might be read as a repetition of the end of Garcia Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude, when the last Buendía finds the manuscript that chronicles Macondo’s and his own historical self-cancellation: “wiped out by the wind and exiled from the memory of men,” for intellectuals and academics like us “condemned to one hundred years of solitude did not have a second opportunity on earth.”

Genesis and Schedule of the Book

Just like many children, this book was not planned; it came as a surprise. In a way, I owe this book to somebody I never met: Ernest Lluch. I think it is worth telling the story of its genesis for it reveals the reasons for the approach and the structure of the book.

In the late 1990s, I taught two courses on nineteenth-century and fin-de-siècle literature at Bryn Mawr College. A queer reading on Galdós’s Tristana, which remains unpublished, allowed me to explore the importance of masculine hysteria in Spanish cultural discourse, an idea originally advanced by Lou Charnon-Deutsch (Gender 163-181). This led me to extend this initial analysis to Unamuno. When the editors of Género y escritura: 1850-2000, Barbara Zecchi and Raquel Medina, graciously extended an invitation to contribute to the volume, I accepted hoping to develop a new approach to the Generation of 98 and modernism, and, more specifically, to Unamuno, whom indeed proved to be the epitome of the masculine hysterical performer of the nation, that is, the epitome of the Spanish intellectual. At that time, I never thought I would further pursue this topic.

Around the same time, Jon Juaristi’s El Bucle melancólico came out and gained a popularity that it was as obvious as intriguing. Although Basque nationalism and terrorism had always been an important topic in Spain, it was still difficult for me to understand the Spanish voyeuristic excitement generated by a topic that seemed to be so local and so Basque in its discursive specifics; I could not see how an Andalusian reader, for example, could read an entire chapter on somebody as obscure as Augustin Chaho. Yet, Gregorio Monreal invited me to contribute to his journal, RIEV, with a review of Juaristi’s work. Not knowing me too well, Monreal did not impose any limits on my contribution and the review became an article-length piece.

The two above articles would have stayed in my curriculum as just two punctual interventions, except for the fact that Joseba Zulaika, the director of the Center for Basque Studies at the University of Nevada, Reno, the institution I joined in 2001, mentioned Ernest Lluch and his opinion that, rather than Juaristi, Fernando Savater was a more central character in the political change that Juaristi’s book had brought about—a book that till then appeared to me as an isolated editorial phenomenon. This revelation was surprising to me, since I only knew an older Savater concerned with anarchism and nihilism, via Nietzsche.

By then, Lluch had already died victim of ETA’s terrorism. Yet, he had implanted indirectly in my mind the possibility of an intellectual seriality (Juaristi, Savater… x, y, z). This serial obsession allowed me to perceive a more complex Basque intellectual reality that, till then, I had always ignored, basically because it had always appeared to me boring (it is hard to read authors like Savater after one has read Irigaray, Butler or Foucault), seemed rather old-fashioned (these intellectuals still lean on humanist and positivist paradigms), and resounded in my head with the overtones of a family argument, in which, as it is well known, it is always wise not to get involved, specially if the arguments have already been heard ad nauseam.

Yet, another topic that interested me further at that time made the above Basque reality more complicated and compelling: the Spanish neoimperialist expansion in Latin America and the ensuing “Hispanic globalization,” which could be traced even in Antonio Banderas’s move to Hollywood. As a result of what can only be considered the revelation of a terrible family secret, past any mundane argument, I realized that there was a global ramification, a geopolitical world seriality, in the production of these Basque intellectuals, which went beyond the familial Basque scenario I already knew all too well, one that affected the shape of this new Hispanic globalization—and, thus, of globalization tout court. Suddenly, the Spanish implementation of the ideology of “constitutional patriotism,” Habermas, German and Spanish fascisms, neoliberalism, Telefónica and Iberia, Latin America, Spanish attacks on multiculturalism (such as Mikel Azurmendi’s infamous statement that multiculturalism is a form of social gangrene), immigration (which exploded with the events of El Ejido and Goytisolo’s writings on racism), sexual tourism to Cuba, and the global future of Europe, came to the fore. As a result, I had to put this familiar puzzle, now turned into something so globally unfamiliar, in perspective so as to understand the Basque involvement in the implementation of neoliberalism and neonationalism in Spain and Europe. Consequently, I began to follow the work of intellectuals I never meant to read till that point: Juan Pablo Fusi, Mikel Azurmendi, Antonio Elorza, Javier Pradera, etc. In short, I became trapped in the family argument I knew all too well I should have avoided; but now the neighbors were involved too. The familial metaphor is not accidental: the intimacy and disfunctionality of the Spanish-Basque reality requires of such primal metaphors in order to narrate one’s own intellectual biography and involvement.

As a result, and in a more planned way, I began to write other articles following the newly discovered global seriality. They were written from very different perspectives and in heterogeneous circumstances, but they were all produced with the intention of adding materials to this new archaeology of a family drama that eventually had become less familial and more global. Ironically enough, and as I was already finishing the first draft of this book manuscript, Ernest Lluch made a second ghostly appearance to guide me once again and, I want to believe, to encourage me in my pursuit. In 2004, Fernando Molina, now a good colleague of mine, visited the Center of Basque Studies and mentioned an article written by Lluch for a Valencian journal, Pasajes, in which the latter had advanced one of the central thesis of my book. I was gladly surprised by the fact that Lluch had announced and advanced my book in few masterful paragraphs. At that point, I knew that in a ghostly manner, Lluch had guided the development of my work. This book is nothing more than an addendum to Lluch’s article. As I have mentioned already, there is a ghostly temporality in Basque, Spanish and global contemporary histories, which makes perfectly natural the “active” participation of Lluch in this book.

I would have never written this book had it been just about a “Basque thing.” Although one never is the final author and reader of one’s own work, I would like to think that my Basque positionality has allowed me to map out European intellectual discourse and, by doing so, has also allowed me to rethink Spanish history (as border rather than nation-state), European globalization (as an affair with barbarians), and the new geopolitical shape of late capitalism, in a way that no other European positionality has done so before. I hope this book to be a critical singularity in this respect. Only in so far as this general map comes to the foreground, can I find some solace and political hope in having dug in the familial Spanish-Basque backyard or closet—one plowed with violence and trauma---which I directly avoid. To this day, I only approach it in indirect ways, as one usually does with one’s own political psychodramas, specially when one attempts to narrate them and ultimately give some kind of recognition to their ghosts. I am haunted myself and I cannot give complete closure to my own haunting.

At the same time, this is perhaps the queerest of my works and I am not sure what Lluch would have thought of this perverted spin on European-Spanish-Basque intellectual history. I want to believe that he would have approved it with the astonishment of any wise historian who understands the inevitable changes brought to intellectual discourse by history.

Structure of the Book

The following is a first draft of a book manuscript I hope to finish soon. So far I have only collected the different essays and organized them coherently, so that they show the plan in which I became involved involuntarily. Most quotations remain in the original languages and will be translated into English in the final version. My English remains to be edited by a native speaker in many chapters, including this introduction. The first and seventh articles represent two different elaborations on the genealogy of the intellectual in Spain and Europe. The first chapter advances a new definition of the intellectual as the subject who performs masculine hysteria on the state’s body. The eighth chapter takes a more Butlerian approach and, after exploring the relationship between the intellectual’s and the state’s body, on the one hand, and subalternity, on the other, it also explains the latest trend among Spanish-Basque intellectuals to write autobiographies as the only performance left to them, after having become victims of their own success; they narrate the global crisis of the state, which also signals the triumph of neonationalism and neoliberalism. Autobiographies, thus, are the performance of intellectuals only left with their own bodies as object of their discourses, after the demise of the state’s body leaves no other body behind. In that respect, this chapter also advances a new theory of autobiography.

The chapters in between analyze a different author each. All the intellectuals studied here hail from different academic or cultural disciplines, and thus they are approached differently, so that each analysis also allows me to develop new theoretical tools and concepts to rethink global politics. From “state melancholia” to “the nationalist primal scene,” most concepts attempt to explain the complex biopolitical dynamics of any intellectual discourse. I want to emphasize that intellectual discourse cannot be approached traditionally as a referential discourse on the state and the nation; it is endowed with a libidinal apparatus that makes it “true” precisely because of its libidinality.

The final chapter steps out of the Spanish-Basque scenario and opens up the analysis to contemporary European intellectual production (Habermas, Agamben and Derrida) in order to study this production from a Spanish-Basque perspective. This approach allows me to question the work of these intellectuals as geopolitically marred in traditional European universalism and nation-state ideology (what Dipesh Chakrabarty calls “provincial Europe”). The goal of this final chapter is to underscore the fact that the Spanish-Basque intellectual discourse, in its neoliberal-neonationalist and reactionary articulation, is more aware of the geopolitics of globalization and, as such, at this moment, is more “advanced” than some of the most prominent and progressive European intellectual discourses.

As the reader will see, there are no many biographical and personal references in the analysis of each author. Unlike much writing in Spain, these chapters are not written ad hominem. There are intended to capture different discursive and cultural articulations that, altogether, allow us to detect an ideological horizon or cluster. This book concerns itself with this ideology rather than with the authors qua individuals. Ultimately this analysis intends to be the chronicle of an ideological formation rather than that of a generation, a group, or an elite.

I would like to end with a final institutional and political reflection on the history and organization of the book. In mainstream Anglo-American academia, it is frowned upon to publish anything that resembles from afar an “essay collection,” which is always considered the Cinderella of a market run by monographs—although even this trend is changing lately. I believe that in the case of a marginal area of academic production, such as the Spanish and the Basque, to abide by that publishing rule is actually to further marginalize the area. At this point, I think that any work written on Spanish or Basque culture and history is best published twice. First, it must be circulated within the academic journals of the area, both in Spain and here in the USA (as well as in the UK and Australia) in order to generate a local discussion (different from a discussion among specialists), without which our discourse remains globally meaningless; this is one of the reasons why some of the articles collected here have been previously published in journals that are locally important but sometimes are not recognized by mainstream Anglo-American academia.

At the same time, these local discussions must be rewritten and published in English in mainstream publishing houses with a wider public in mind, so that the work in the area of Spanish and Basque studies presents a global audience with new and challenging ideas. I believe that this is a double academic work that Peninsularists ought to carry out at any given point of their academic production. Thus, I do not see a better way to fulfill this double task than to publish locally in Hispanic journals first, either in English, Basque or Spanish and, then, to edit this published work with a global style in order to republish it for a global public in English. These local publications have allowed me to meet new colleagues and to make myself known across an Atlantic divide that still separates Anglo-American scholars working on Peninsular matters from colleagues living in Spain, France, and Portugal. Such a collaboration and dialogue is paramount in the global world we live. At this moment, and given the marginal status of Peninsular studies in global academia, my strategy might be more a desideratum than a reality; but, just the same, this problem must be addressed in its complexity, without narcissistically engulfing ourselves in our own highly specialized areas.

I was also told that a “true” monographic would not approach each intellectual separately and, instead, would have treated them together as a group, as a historical and cultural phenomenon, thus exploring different aspects of their discourse in separate chapters. I hope that the theories I advance on performance, masculine hysteria, and the state’s body, make clear the reasons why each intellectual is studied separately. I have also revised the most recent monographs on twentieth-century French philosophy (Wicks, Gutting); they all approach each philosopher separately. Therefore and considering the almost super-ego-like status that French discourse still enjoys in Spanish and Peninsularist academia, I hope the French placeat will confirm my own decision to take an authorial approach.

I will end with a final note on the status of the manuscript. This introduction and the chapter on Antonio Elorza, the most recent pieces, still remain underdeveloped and are the ones that need more elaboration. The chapter on Javier Pradera remains unwritten. The rest of the chapters have to be rewritten so that repetitions are eliminated, underlining themes and connections are brought to the fore, and the historical coherence of the book is clearly articulated, especially in regards to the overarching idea of the book: the barbarian divide. The other core idea about the difference between hysteria and psychosis, as cognitive and intellectual structures, remains still to be developed through a more thorough elaboration of melancholia. Each intellectual hails from a different discipline and thus the institutional framework of discursive production must be emphasized following the work of Pierre Bourdieu. In some cases, the most recent work published by some of the intellectuals studied here needs to be incorporated, as in the case of Jon Juaristi and his work on Europe: El bosque originario. The work of Juan Pablo Fusi was approached within a broader context—recent Spanish historiography—and thus must be rewritten so that his own opera is studied in more detail, etc. It remains to be seen if I need to add a chapter on the Basque editor of El País, Javier Pradera, editorial colleague of Fernando Savater in the publication of the journal Claves de la razón práctica; so far he has never published a single book but has written editorials for El País for almost two decades. This book manuscript will be circulated among willing readers and some unwilling good friends; their input will be central in reshaping it.

Most of the following chapters were published in article form, often in shorter versions, in the following publications:

1- "Histéricos con casta: Masculinidad y hegemonía nacional en la España de fin de siglo. (Para una arqueología feminista, torcida, marxista, poscolonial y posnacional del noventayochismo)." Género y escritura: 1850-2000. Eds. Barbara Zecchi and Raquel Medina. Barcelona: Anthropos, 2002. 120-61.

2- “Savater and State Melancholia: On Spanish History and its Postnational State in Globalization” Revista de estudios hispánicos 37 (2003): 357-81.

3- "Jon Juaristi: Compulsive Archaeology and the Basque Nationalist Primal Scene." Revista Internacional de Estudios Vascos 43.2 (1999): 539-554.

4- “Historical Memory, Postnational Spain, and the Latin American Postcolonial Ghost: On the Politics and Ethics of Recognition, Apology and Reparation.” Arizona Journal of Hispanic Cultural Studies 6 (2003): 1-15.

5- “State Narcissism: Racism, Neoimperialism and Spanish Opposition to Multiculturalism (on Mikel Azurmendi).” Border Interrogations: Crossing and Questioning Spanish Frontiers from the Middle Ages to the Present. Eds. Benita Sampedro and Simon Doubleday. Oxford: Berghahn Books, 2008. 65-89.

6- “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.

7- “Posnacionalismo y Biopolítica: Para una crítica multiculturalista del estado y su soberanía en Europa y el País Vasco (notas sobre Habermas y Agamben).” Inguruak: Revista de la federación vasca de sociología 37 (2003): 1-23.

8- “A Multicultural Atlantic Critique of European Universalism: Neonationalism from Derrida to Agamben.” Tropos 31 (2005): 8-53.

Finally I would like to thank the following colleagues and coworkers for their participation and input in writing this book: Deborah Achtenberg, Silvia Bermúdez, Jill Berner, Alda Blanco, Carlos Blanco Aguinaga, Kate Camino, Oliva Cardona, Lou Charnon-Deutsch, Malcolm Compitello, Elena Delgado, Casilda de Miguel, Simon Doubleday, William Douglass, Brad Epps, Kathleen Etcheverry, Gabriel Gatti, Imanol Galfarsoro, Ander Gurrutxaga, Eli Imaz, Catherine Jagoe, Stewart King, Jo Labanyi, Bernardette Leonis, Jaume Martí Olivella, Iñaki Martínez de Albeniz, Raquel Medina, Laura Mintegi, Fernando Molina, Gregorio Monreal, Alberto Moreiras, Geraldine Nichols, Pedro Oiarzabal, Sue Ollman, Demosthenes Papaeliou, José María Portillo, Joan Ramon Resina, Benita Sampedro, Kristen Shelton, Paul Julian Smith, Eduardo Subirats, Akiko Tsutsiya, Marc Ugalde, Teresa Vilarós, Valerie Weinstein, Barbara Zecchi, Slavoj Zizek, Joseba Zulaika.

Notes