“DISREMEMBERING THE DICTATORSHIP The Politics of Memory in the Spanish Transition to Democracy © Edited by Joan Ramon Resina (Cover husaton: "El 14 de abvilen las Ramblas’ by Julio Borrell, ‘The paper on which this book is printed meets the equcements of “ISO 970651994, Information and. documentation ~ Paper for documents Requirements for permanence” ISBN: 90-420-1352-4 (CEitions Rodopi BV, Amsterdam - Adana, GA 2000, Printed in The NetherlandsIntroduction Joan Ramon Itis often said that the current interest in memory goes back to the nineteen-eighties, Ww an ines identities and the disappearance of the generation that had experienced the dramatic mid-century events, most notably the surv f extermination camps (Ginzburg 353). Since that decade, with memories of all kinds has been mounting? with place: s, landscape, traumatic experiefices, holocaust iain and COunRSETRTTNNTT, Htseart pOuTES, and eved the ‘emergence of a new "social science,” Hauntology, whose theoretical foundation has been bolstered by as illustrious a philosophical contribution as Derrids's Specters of Marx. It may be worth noting, however, that the appeal of memory was already strong in the seventies. That decade saw renewed interest in Maurice Halbwac! important work, Les Cadres sociaux de la mémoire (1925), a boo ‘which, as Carlo Ginzburg noticed, started to claim attention only after its author had died at Auschwitz in 1944 Ginzburg 353). Under the impact of the events of May '68 and, more decisively, of the anti- colonial struggles.and the resurfacing of supressed national concen among subjugated European peoples on both sides of the Iron Curtain, social thinkers and literary authors busied themselves with the presents relation to the past—a past that was then beginning to Took problematic after the sea change of the Cold War and the full blast of consummerist capitalism. “Theoretical stirrings of a preoccupation with the past can be found in the poststructuralist phase of Roland Barthes, in essays like "Le discours de histoire” (1967), which anticipates a finer, subtler work like Camera Lucida (1980), an essay devoted to 1 ble immaterial F has been and to the effects of tose traces-on- the, contemplajor's emotions. Implicitly, Barthes was (Greek for image or appearance). The language ipl thi is deliberately suited to the relation between a body's technological epiphany and the unnatural atmosphere in which it appears, an atmosphere in which live bodiescannot breathe. Speaking of Avedon's photograph of Phill Randolph, he writes. poe ° ‘Thus the ai is the luminous shadow which accompanies the body: and if the photograph fails 10 show this air, then the body moves without a shadow, and once this shadow is severed, as in the myth of the Woman without's Shadow, there remains no moce than astrie body. (110) Barthes trenchantly defined the viewer's relation to photography as ‘one might deseri iect's relat smory: as intentionality Without 2 clearly defined object; perhaps without any object at all Ine might say that the Photograph separates attention from perception, and yields up only the former, even if itis impossible ‘without the latte; this is the aberrant thing, noesis without noeme, an action of thought without thought, an aim without a target” (111) “Aberrant” is the right word. The ghost is deviant, for itis. sit fers" or strays because it disorients others. What is the sense of its ‘ute Taterpelation, that looking withoat seeing about which Barthes would wax so eloquent? How is one to catch this pure appearance and hold it down, like Odysseus held Protheus, in order to extract the truth? Can it know for us then, if its gaze is turned towards that hich is not us? This is for Barthes the photographs paradoxical 1 accomplishes the unheard-of identification of reality (’that-has-been) ith there shes comes at once evident and exclanative i the effigy 1 that crazy point where affect (love, compassion, grief, ‘enthusiasm, desire) isa guarantee of Being, (113) Characteristically, Barthes put his finger on sensitive areas of intelligence. Is not the current concer with memory, whether in relation to traumatic experience or to the subject's potential identifications—ethnic, cultural, national, gender, or sexual—, Jargely a concern with rescuing Being from the ocean of fluctuating abstractions in which late modernity submerged it? Does not the ‘concern with the trace verge on that hallucinating craziness which a ctitic of the national imaginary as unsympathetic as Jon Juaristi denounces as a political pathology? At the same time, is not the ghost, that residue of the past in the emotions of the living, the only guarantee, in a world of simulacra and media-powered discourses, 2 that something has actually been and that itis still soldered to Being, ‘our being? There is no evading this evidence: whether dreamed or suffered, the past is the stuff we are made of. History, for Marx, was ‘a nightmare weighing heavily upon the living. And he too knew about specters. He could announce a new specter haunting Europe, the specter of Communism, only insofar as Communism was visited by the nightmare of millennial exploitation and suffering. Marxism is not a serenely contemplative philosophy of history but one haunted by the cries and whispers of bloodless and nameless figures. Resonating in the rarefied medium of the past, those voices clamor for a justice that will always come too late for thent—too late and yet also ioo soon, for the end of history is expected te lay all the ghosts to rest. In that way history will twice make casualties of its uncelebrated agents, first as victims and then as definitively disremembered anachronisms. Until that second coming, though, specters will not let up. They will continue to importune the remorseful memory of the living, asking for the arrears of an ever: outstanding debt. If the endurance of the grief of history as lived in each agent's particularity—social class, ethnic or racial others, women, oppressed national groups—is evidence of a melancholy disposition, of incapacity to renounce a bygone world, itis also clear proof that affect has survived the strictures of bourgeois abstraction and has returned to haunt the ruined spaces of our technologized postmodem fantasy. Specters can radicalize the present, whose roots they are. It was their demands on an affect-blind and sense-blocking modemity that Foucault, atthe beginning of the seventies, sought to incorpora into critical discourse. He asked for a "philosophy of the phantasm to facilitate the reappearance of realities that called into question the cozy categories of modern thought: body, stat, reason, image, inside and outside, the imaginary. He urged that "Phantasms must be allowed to function at the limit of bodies; against bodies, because they stick to bodies and protrude from them, but also because they touch them, cut them, break them into sections, regionalize them, and multiply their surfaces" (169). Furthermore: "Phantasms do not extend organisms into an imaginary domain; they topologize the materiality of the body. They should consequently be freed from the dilemmas of truth and falsehood and of being and non-being" (170), A hypostatization of memory, the phantasm is an imageless presence (one recognizes ghosts by their lack of reflection in a 3