Description
Book SynopsisThe Ghost in the Constitution offers a reflection on the political use of the concept of historical memory foregrounding the case of Spain. The book analyses the philosophical implications of the transference of the notion of memory from the individual consciousness to the collective subject and considers the conflation of epistemology with ethics. A subtheme is the origins and transmission of political violence, and its endurance in the form of symbolic violence and “negationism” in the post-Franco era. Some chapters treat of specific “traumatic” phenomena such as the bombing of Guernica and the Holocaust.
Trade ReviewReviews 'Intellectually engaging, thoughtful, coherent, and logically developed. Resina writes with an elegance of style uncommon among scholars ...the most apt synthesis and expansion of ideas on memory and latency that I have read in recent years.'
David Herzberger, University of California Riverside
‘There is ample thought-provoking material and some stimulating insight in The Ghost in the Constitution, resulting from extensive research presented in polished writing.’
José Colmeiro, Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies
Table of ContentsAcknowledgments ix
Introduction 1
1 Historical Memory and the Limits of Retrospection 9
2 Why Memory? Reflections on a Politics of Mourning 22
3 Memory and Imputation 39
4 Denial and the Ethics of Memory 58
5 Warming Up for the War: The Cultural Transmission of Violence in Spain since the Early Twentieth Century 72
6 Guernica as a Sign of History 103
7 Delenda est Catalonia: The Unwelcome Memory 114
8 Allez, Allez! The 1939 Exodus from Catalonia and Internment in French Concentration Camps 135
9 The Corpse in One’s Bed: Mercè Rodoreda and the Concentrationary Universe 147
10 Transatlantic Reversals: Exile and Anti-History 155
11 The Weight of Memory and the Lightness of Oblivion: The Dead of the Spanish Civil War 168
12 Between Testimony and Fiction: Jorge Semprún’s Autobiographical Memory 184
13 It Wasn’t This: Latency and Epiphenomenon of the Transition 224
14 Window of Opportunity: The Television Documentary as After-Image of the War 243
15 Anachronism and Latency in Spanish Democracy 260
16 Negationism and Freedom of Speech 276
17 Exhaustion of the Transition Pact: Revisionism and Symbolic Violence 292
Bibliography 307
Index 323
