The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society by Joan Ramon Resina

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society by Joan Ramon Resina Patricia Keller Resina, Joan Ramon. The Ghost in the Constitution: Historical Memory and Denial in Spanish Society. Liverpool UP, 2017. 332 pp. "The past is always debatable. So is memory. …" (299) Joan Ramon Resina's The Ghost in the Constitution is a tour de force for memory studies today, constituting a practical yet poetic, historically-grounded yet literary-inspired, theoretically rigorous yet conceptually accessible manual for anyone interested in the Spanish transition, the Franco dictatorship that preceded it, and the aftereffects of both. It is also, importantly, a study that will speak to anyone—students, scholars, policymakers, and ordinary citizens alike—invested in the political and philosophical stakes of the complex, often contentious, contemporary debates over the value of memory in relation to history. In line with his scrupulous articulation of such stakes, Resina's inquiry ultimately hinges on a related but much larger (and much more pressing, if difficult, question): what place should memory have in the writing of history? The question takes its point of departure from a series of events that have come to define Spain's political transition from fascism to democracy during the mid-1970s, a period now widely scrutinized yet no more intelligible today than it was forty years ago. However, the central question regarding the importance of historical memory bears relevance to any sociopolitical context, whether Germany or South Africa, grappling with what could be called the "wounds of the past"—a trauma that returns and takes up residency in the present moment, actively resisting oblivion, erasure, and silence. Indeed, Resina's investigation is likely to spark considerable attention among historians, literary scholars, and cultural theorists seeking a deeper understanding of the vicissitudes—the failures and pitfalls—of post-dictatorship democracy in the modern European context and beyond; among those who, through such an understanding, hope to gain a better orientation—an ethical compass, an historically informed roadmap—for how we might collectively rethink some of the most urgent issues dominating the twenty-first-century's political landscape. These concerns are of no small scale: how political power is structured around dominant narratives of violent historical events; how public responsibility is influenced—affirmed or negated—by these structures and narratives; how the politics of forgetting compromises the social necessity of mourning; how the ethics of forgetting necessarily (and problematically) constructs an image of social unity and healing where there are still fissures, ruptures, and wounds in the sociopolitical body; how denial operates as a powerful, unwieldy force that writes and rewrites the past; how denial's other side, renewal, might be linked intimately and profoundly to the work of [End Page 803] memory, and to the working through—the awareness, acknowledgment, and reconciliation—that historical memory makes possible. History, like memory, is not a fixed or static thing. The past returns to us. It returns in the form of traces that shape and sustain the present; that form and inform the future. As Resina poignantly asserts in the introduction to his exemplary exploration of the critical importance of approaching the past as return, "the traces left by the past in the form of social relations feel the influence of the environment, of forces and currents that modify both what is remembered and the range and strength of its aftereffects" (4). For Resina, "there can be no question that these 'returns' constitute a form of historical memory" (5). Thus the questions remain: how to recognize the signs of history at work in the present; and once recognized, how to appropriately and adequately reckon with their return; how to understand the various contours and layers of such signs; and how to respond to the sociopolitical implications as well as the ethical demands that they inevitably bear. At the heart of the book's extraordinary defense of the work of historical memory, understood as a moral injunction against forgetting, one finds an intricately nuanced interpretation of the Spanish transition. Here, Resina frames Spain's re-entry into democracy as "a skillful case of social surgery, the painless removal of a not-so-malign tumor, nonchalantly setting the country...