Re-Imagining Justice: A Study of Ethics, Politics, and Law in Contemporary Spain.

Abstract

My work examines the changing conceptions of ethics, democracy, and law in contemporary Spain through a comparative analysis of Spanish novels, films, and legal texts. The study wishes to identify some of the democratic shortcomings that stand in the way of an equal, diverse and politically active civil society. The first chapter rethinks the notions of political community and democracy in Alex de la Iglesia's film La Comunidad (2000), in the context of Spain's integration into the European Monetary Union (EMU). Taking as a point of departure Jean Baudrillard's critique of the consumer society and Jacques Rancière's critical thought, it shows how both neoliberal economic policies and a politics of consensus lead (against what the proponents of these policies claim) to alienation, exclusion, and ultimately to an enfeebled concept of democracy. In its place, the film articulates a new ethics that combines the respect for the singularity of the other with the democratic demand for equality. The second chapter addresses the recovery of the historical memory of the victims of Franco's dictatorship (1939-1975), in light of the recent Spanish Law of Historical Memory (2007) and Antonio Muñoz Molina's novel Beltenebros (1989). It focuses on the ethico-political relationship between memory and justice in the sense proposed by Walter Benjamin and Jacques Derrida. Through a rhetorical reading of the law that runs contrary to its declared objectives, the analysis shows that the law reproduces an official version of Spanish history which has been insensitive to the memory of the victims since the Transition. Molina's novel, in contrast, brings to light the ghosts of the past that the law renders invisible, making it possible to do justice to the traumatic experience of the past. The final chapter addresses the jurisprudential challenges of an ethics of alterity through Pedro Almodóvar's film Tacones Lejanos (1991). In contrast to Orit Kamir's feminist reading of the film, it argues that the multiple performances of the on-screen Judge propose an understanding of law as a queer performance that responds effectively to the ethical demands of those marginal subjects who have been traditionally excluded from the law.