Description
Book SynopsisThough neither king nor priest, Spanish dictator Francisco Franco nevertheless conceptualized his right to sovereignty around a political theology in which national identity resembled a sacred cult. Using Franco’s Spain and la España sagrada as a counterpoint to European secularity’s own development, By the Grace of God is the first sustained analysis within Spanish cultural studies of the sacred as a political category and a tool for political organization.
William Viestenz shows how imagining national identity as a sacred absolute within a pluralistic, multicultural state leads to dictatorship, scapegoating, and exceptional violence. Using novels and poetry from the Catalan literary tradition and stalwarts of the Castilian canon, his analysis demonstrates that the sacred is a concept that spills over into key areas of secular political imagination.
By the Grace of God offers an original theory of the sacred that challenges
Table of Contents
Acknowledegments 1. Introduction: La Espana Sagrada as a Political Category Francoist Spain, Post-Secularism, and a Sacred Politics The Sacred's Slippage into the Profane The Sacred and Metaphysics Spain's 'Time of the Sacred': Literature as a Political Matter Iberian Studies: A Parallax View 2. 'He aqui una plenitud espanola': Catholicism, Cultural Regeneration, and Spanish Essentialism Por Dios hacia el imperio: Spanish First Causes Nineteenth-Century Spain: Cuando la legalidad no basta Spanish Regenerationism: Displacing the Sacred onto the Secular Catholicism as a Social Force: 1936 3. Politics by Other Means: The Sacred Core of Collective Imagining Post-War Stimmung The Scapegoat Mechanism and the Mimetic Reduction of Difference Beyond the Victimary Principle 4. Intimate Strife: Inside Juan Goytisolo's Sovereign Exception Against Sacred Forms Conde Julian's Inclusive Exclusion Human, All Too Human A New Nomos of the Earth? 5. The Eternal Present of Sacred Time 'In illo tempore' Numa's Sacred Wood Killing Time: Ritual Death and the Origins of the Sacred 6. 'Desacralization' and 'Sacrogenesis', or How to Step Outside of Sacred Time Sacred Dialectics Le regard d'autrui: The State's Loving Embrace Rerouting Sacred Time: Tiempo de destruccion 7. Espriu's Sepharad and the Equitable Restoration of Sacred Sovereignty Sacrifice and the Poetic Expulsion of Self The Sacred Bonds of Kinship Death by Way of the Pen: Les hores Espriu's kehre: El caminant i el mur& Final del laberint: Redeeming a Lost Religiousness Rethinking Iberia: A New Temple of Sacred Communion 8. Conclusion: The Aesthetic Disruption of Political Truth Works Cited Index
