The Marrano Specter by Erin Graff Zivin

Author:Erin Graff Zivin [Zivin, Erin Graff]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780823280643
Google: l4HEuQEACAAJ
Amazon: B078YWW4Y1
Barnesnoble: B078YWW4Y1
Goodreads: 40095363
Publisher: Fordham University Press
Published: 2017-11-21T00:00:00+00:00

PART III

Between Nonethics and Infrapolitics

CHAPTER 6

Marrano Spirit? . . . and Hispanism, or Responsibility in 2666

Gareth Williams

There’s nothing inside the man who sits there writing. Nothing of himself, I mean. . . . There’s nothing in the guts of the man who sits there writing. . . . He writes like someone taking dictation. . . . His novel or book . . . arises . . . as the result of an exercise of concealment.

—ROBERTO BOLAÑO, 2666

The following pages begin by offering a brief reflection on the conference panels that were organized by Erin Graff Zivin at the American Comparative Literature Association and the University of Southern California in 2014, under the title “The Marrano Spirit: Derrida and Hispanism.” These panels were the origin of the current volume.

What remains to be said about spirit? Indeed, is there anything at all to be said about a specifically Marrano Spirit that titles our conference and brings us together with both words capitalized and without quotation marks around either of them, individually or collectively. And what can be said of the and Hispanism in the volume’s title—of Spirit in relation to a field, to a certain form of territorialization, a sociology, and therefore in relation to a will to know and a will to power all unburdened of quotation marks? Furthermore, how to transmit what remains to be said when fidelity on either count—on the count of Spirit and of Hispanism; again, both without a hint or mark of a doubling, of a spectrality—cannot be an option, although it might also be the only condition of what brings them, and us, together? What can be the place of any decision, and therefore the place of any notion of the political, in the relation between these words and the problems they entail at first glance?

In a section of his memoir An Impatient Life titled “Fourth Person Singular,” Daniel Bensaïd reflects on the question of fidelity and inheritance: “It is the heirs who decide the inheritance. They make the selection, and are more faithful to it in infidelity than in the bigotry of memorial. For fidelity itself can become a banally conservative routine, preventing one from being astonished by the present. How not to distrust, anyway, that virtuous fidelity which betrayal accompanies like a shadow?” (3). In a later section of his memoir, titled “The Marrano Enigma,” Bensaïd continues his critical reflection on the bigotry of memorial and political responsibility, referring to the “imaginary Marrano” as “an ambivalence, refractory to roots and rootings. An intimate wound” with “an aptitude to perform this game of hide and seek that escapes the identifications of police and tyranny” (284). He ends these reflections on “the marrano enigma” (no reference to Spirit here, either with or without quotation marks or capitalization, for they evoke very different gestures) with the following reference to the political: “And certainly there have been, and probably still will be, many Marrano communists. . . . The Marrano is both patient and impatient. Slowly. He bets on the long run” (284).

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