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AFTERLIFE AND BARE LIFE: THE VALLEY OF THE FALLEN AS A PARADIGM OF GOVERNMENT

2011; Routledge; Volume: 12; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1080/14636204.2011.691670

1469-9818

Justin Crumbaugh,

Political Theology and Sovereignty

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size Notes 1. The umbrella term "historical memory" that is so often heard in Spain today refers to a complex and multi-faceted push to reassess the sordid and controversial past of the Spanish civil war and Franco dictatorship. It includes historical studies, literary works, films, and archeological digs, in addition to political activism and legislative initiatives. The movement seeks to break what proponents view as a generalized cultural amnesia or desmemoria surrounding the Franco regime's crimes. Silence is considered a form of complicity with the official history imposed throughout the dictatorship and with the impunity legislated as part of the transition to constitutional monarchy. The movement intensified when the ruling Socialist Party officially declared 2006 the Year of Historical Memory and spearheaded the 2007 Law of Historical Memory, which condemns the Nationalist uprising and Franco dictatorship, recognizes victims of the regime, and stipulates removal of Francoist symbols and monuments from public buildings and spaces. One provision specifically addresses the Valley of the Fallen, but not to require its removal. Instead, the law simply prohibits political acts and rallies on the premises in order to put a stop to the frequent fascist rallies that had been held there for decades. Recent cultural production likewise reflects the revived interest in the monument. To cite just a few examples, the Valley of the Fallen was the focus of two books written by prominent journalists in 2009 (José María Calleja and Fernando Olmeda) and of several recent television documentaries. It was also featured in Fernando Colomo's hit film Los años bárbaros starring Jordi Mollá, and is even the setting of a new adult film titled Antonio Ramírez, el Facha. 2. Among the scholarship striving toward that same goal, I would highlight two excellent historical studies that successfully integrate analysis of the regime's legal, ideological, symbolic, and physical activity: Paloma Aguilar's Memory and Amnesia: The Role of the Spanish Civil War in the Transition to Democracy and Michael Richards' A Time of Silence: Civil War and the Culture of Repression in Franco's Spain, 1936–1945. Tatjana Pavlovic's books Despotic Bodies, Transgressive Bodies: Spanish Culture from Francicso Franco to Jess Franco and The Mobile Nation: España cambia de piel, both written from the perspective of cultural studies, have also made great strides in this direction. 3. Failure to analyze the complexities of Francoist rule risks falling into a simplistic caricature of the regime as an evil qua undemocratic system. Such reductionism proves troublesome for two reasons. First, it constitutes a form of historical amnesia of its own. And second, it can facilitate a self-congratulatory and uncritical attitude toward Spain's current constitutional monarchy as a democratic ideal. The notion that Spain was "different" under Franco must be challenged not only because, as I have argued elsewhere, the regime bore striking resemblances to fellow European democracies and the US (Crumbaugh Destination). Fracoism's perceived exceptionality must also be questioned because, as some proponents of historical memory have adamantly insisted, there continue to be unexamined continuities between the dictatorship and the postdictatorship. 4. It is in this sense that my approach differs from other analyses of the Valley of the Fallen and of similar cases of politicized glorification of the dead. For instance, I agree with Paloma Aguilar's analysis of the Valley of the Fallen as a discourse of legitimization but would argue that the figure of the caído also serves to control and regulate life as such. Francoist enshrinement of martyrs also goes beyond the exculpatory mechanism that some scholars have identified in postwar German victim discourse, which sought to establish distance from the horrors of right-wing extremism, not to justify and perpetuate them (for an analysis of political victimhood in postwar West Germany, see Helmut Schmitz's A Nation of Victims? Representations of German Postwar Suffering). Alberto Medina Domínguez, drawing on Michael Taussig's theory of the "magic of the state" and other sources, brilliantly explains the power of the caído in terms of the pubic fetishization of dead founders and ancestors ("Teatro"; Excorcismos). I wish to explore how this mystification takes on a specifically governmental function. At the same time, my study finds in the caído figure more than a political instrument in the struggle to establish historical culpability and facilitate nation-building in the way Catherine Verdery describes "the political lives of dead bodies" in the former Yugoslavia's post-socialist transition. 5. It is also true that Stalinist architects, like those in Germany, Italy, and Spain, drew on the themes of heroism and the dead (the Lenin Mausoleum in Red Square and the numerous monuments to Stalin himself being prime examples) (Aman 88–93). Still, certain similarities between mid-century German, Italian, Spanish, and Soviet architecture notwithstanding, one must be extremely cautious when making comparisons between fascism and Stalinism, which were otherwise very different and stood in violent opposition to one another. Of course, the very term "totalitarianism" proves highly problematic. In fact, Slavoj Žižek denounces the term as a "key ideological weapon of the West in the Cold War ideological struggle" (2) and argues that "the notion of 'totalitarianism,' far from being an effective theoretical concept, is a kind of stopgag; instead of enabling us to think, forcing us to acquire new insight into the historical reality it describes, it relieves us of the duty to think, or even actively prevents us from thinking" (3 emphasis in original). 6. Both these monuments were demolished after the war. For more on the figure of the fallen soldier outside Spain, see George Mosse's analysis of Germany during World War I and the interwar period. 7. For instance, the majority of the poems collected in the Antología poética del Alzamiento focus on the caídos. 8. For instance, top Nazi architect Albert Speer stated in regard to architecture that "it is not a matter of technical questions or aesthetic values but of a political life-form speaking from the buildings" (qtd. in Koshar 129, emphasis added). For a comparative overview of the relationship between architecture and politics in Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Francoist Spain, see Stephen Sennott's "Fascist Architecture." 9. In fact, one of the main tropes of caído cultural production is the "guardia eterna," which casts the caídos as guardians keeping watch over the living, ensuring the fulfillment of God's will on earth and, in some cases, even maintaining the hierarchy of their respective military ranks within the kingdom of heaven. On this trope in poetry specifically, see José Antonio Pérez Bowie's 73–96. 10. The following information about the monument's dimensions comes from the same tourist guidebook. 11. See Vicente Sánchez-Biosca's analysis of newsreel coverage of the Valley of the Fallen in No-Do: El tiempo y la memoria (495–514). He too emphasizes the alternation of low-angle and aerial shots. Indeed, the same low angle/aerial alternation appears time and again throughout the dictatorship, and is reproduced in Jesús Saiz's 1959 documentary In Memoriam: El Valle de los Caídos and even in Samuel Bronston's surprisingly pro-Francoist film Valley of the Fallen (1963). 12. Because of the difficulty in repackaging the monument as a symbol of national reconciliation, Sánchez Biosca argues that the Valley of Fallen, by the time of its inauguration, was already an inconvenient anachronism for the regime. Similarly, Paloma Aguilar sees the Valley of the Fallen as a particularly tense point of convergence of the regime's two incompatible means of legitimization. The monument, she explains, crystallizes the regime's strategy of origin-based legitimacy, centered on the putative need to destroy the Second Republic in order to save Spain. And yet, it was restyled as a symbol of the peace and unity for which the regime wished to take credit in its scramble to claim performance-based legitimacy. 13. As mentioned in the previous paragraph, the Valley of the Fallen did indeed come to house executed Republicans and dissidents, although not until after the monument's inauguration (Olmeda 199–207). 14. One prisoner describes a nightmarish scenario of daily fatalities: "Every day they were throwing in dynamite packs. When someone died, they took him away. It was a real inferno" (qtd. in Olmeda 75). 15. Here Butler's assessment echoes Castelli's analysis in Martyrdom and Memory, which I address later: "The other side of the elevation of the martyr to a level beyond the human is, in other words, the degradation of the one responsible for her suffering to a level below the human" (Castelli 202). 16. At several points throughout the book, Butler cites Agamben's Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life. Chapter Three of Precarious Life is devoted almost entirely to Agamben's theory, which Butler uses as a lens for rethinking "enemy combatants" and Guantanamo Bay prisoners. 17. So far, the project includes three volumes, which were not published in chronological order. Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life (Citation1998) is volume I, State of Exception (Citation2005) and The Kingdom and the Glory (Citation2011) are parts I and II of volume II, and Remnants of Auschwitz (Citation1999) is volume III. 18. It is worth noting that Walter Benjamin's notion of "divine violence," also addressed repeatedly throughout Agamben's Homo Sacer project, mirrors and dialogues with Schmitt's understanding of the divine endowment of the sovereign. Of course, Schmitt and Benjamin were contemporaries and even corresponded briefly during the 1920s. It is pure coincidence that both men, each driven for very different reasons by the horrors of Nazism, should end up in Spain. Schmitt, after 1945, was moved by the shame of his role in the Third Reich to develop close ties with the Franco regime. Benjamin was fleeing Nazi persecution when he committed suicide in Port Bou, Catalonia in 1939. 19. Agamben employs the term "genealogy" in the Foucauldian sense. In "Nietzsche, Genealogy, History," Foucault defines genealogy as the study of the continuities, transmutations, and alterations of discursive formations over time. 20. Alain Badiou argues that democracy, in recent decades, has legitimized itself by constructing a notion of Evil, and defining itself in opposition to that Evil. Democracy, then, "defines man as a victim" and creates a situation wherein the only ethical option is to foreswear active political agency and define subjectivity negatively (10 emphasis in original). Likewise, Baudrillard characterizes the mentality that accompanies advanced capitalism as a "victim society" in which narcissism becomes compatible with an absence of agency (15).