The Fiction of Invulnerability. Silence and Otherness in Francoist Spain

Abstract

The normative understanding of the subject is based on a fiction of invulnerability, a fantasy of mastery that considers vulnerability as an accidental feature, often associated with passivity and the susceptibility to being harmed, and that is usually disavowed and projected onto other with whom one disidentifies and who are othered. In a similar fashion, as Judith Butler’s work of grief has shown, the fiction of invulnerability also governs the action of individual states as national subjects. Nations and states as subjects engage in political processes that reproduce the hegemonic discourses based on performative practices of repetition and exclusion. In this article I discuss how the Spanish state has engaged in politics of forgetting and silencing, which created hegemonic frameworks that feeds the victor’s narrative and the creation of an ungrievable other. The lives and deaths of thousands were kept silent during decades through la desmemoria, the performative process of forgetting that uses silence as a mechanism to foster willful ignorance and create unitary narratives. Against la desmemoria, a labor of remembrance is being done as a counter mechanism that helps recognizing each other’s precariousness and interconnectedness.