The Turning Wheel of Hostility: The E.T.A. in Literature and Film in Spain Since the 1970s.

Abstract

Through an analysis of the terrorist subject, focused on the Basque separatist organization known as the E.T.A (Euskadi Ta Askatasuna, 1959-2011), this dissertation demonstrates that a paradigm of war continues to structure Spanish politics. Scholars in Spanish cultural studies often avoid the contentious core of separatist violence, focusing instead on questions of identity, on the victims, or on the E.T.A's value as a historical reference. Faced with these positions, it is more important than ever to redirect critical attention to the intertwined realties of Spain's democratic present and its conflictive past. This study begins by considering the goals of the E.T.A and the paradigm of war that shapes the group, based on Carl Schmitt's understanding of politics as enmity. In this light, the E.T.A.'s assassination in 1973 of Spanish Prime Minister Luis Carrero Blanco, as retold in Eva Forest's Operación Ogro (1974), is analyzed as an act of war rather than a symbol for political transformation. This is developed through Rancière's critique of consensus in Dis-agreement and Derrida's work on hospitality. Then, the film La fuga de Segovia (Imanol Uribe, 1981) is read as emphasizing a practice of freedom, presented in Jean-Luc Nancy's terms, with unique implications for the functioning of democracy. Next, the split nature of subjectivity is examined in Ramón Saizarbitoria's novel Hamaika pauso/Los pasos incontables (1995). With the help of Derrida's discussion of a passive decision in The Politics of Friendship, it is argued that true decision is conditioned by the unconscious and, thus, cannot guarantee a specific political outcome. Finally, in a discussion of the consequences of symbolic and structural violence via Zizek and Derrida, it is shown that Spain's fixation on the victim's of terrorism results in the nullification of the political subject, risking the suppression of historical memory. This emptying of the political subject is problematized through a reading of Jaime Rosales's film, Tiro en la cabeza (2008), which proposes that reflections on memory and the victim must relate differently to death since it is human finitude (rather than the duration of memory) that makes a thinking of the past significant.