In the post-humanist era, we run the risk of
becoming simple algorithms. “Individuality” is a
venomous notion tied to this somber forecast.
Just by chance, in the last State of the Union
Address, the president, triumphant over any and
all impeachment procedures, said that “freedom
unifies the soul.” It made me shudder to think
about the consequences of such “unified soul” (Ein
Volk, Ein Reich, Ein Führer) dependent on the
peculiar notion of freedom that today’s Trumps
or Bolsonaros or Putins have. Our current
isolation due to the coronavirus only takes to
the extreme the dictatorship of the algorithm:
each one (each little unified One) of us in our
own little square via Zoom.
Dividuals
explores the other side, or hidden side of
modern subjectivity, as seen in (mostly four)
early modern Spanish classics. Veering away from
the hypertrophied notions of individuality and
identity, which constitute the bases of our own
post-humanism and even anti-humanism, this essay
looks into how, as humans, and as humanists, we
have a long history of showing dividuality,
a never-ending split in our beings. The split
manifests itself in the humanist’s split between
historicist, socio-economic explanations of
subjectivity (i.e.: how “modern man” is
historically bound to a time, a space, and a
specific mode of production/ideology), of which
Marxism has been the most characteristic
expression, and explanations of subjectivity in
which, on the contrary, the human psyche emerges
every day of every era in relation to more
universal traits such as language (i.e.: how
“modern man” was always “there” as long as the
construction of individuality depends on
language and its endless signifying mechanics),
of which psychoanalysis is the main discourse.
But the split also manifests itself in the
deeply contradictory nature of Don Quixote,
Celestina, Lazarillo, or Diana.
The split, then, can be seen as a split
between production economy vs. libidinal
economy, or between desire and need, or between
love and food, or between idealism and
materialism, or between character and fate, as
Benjamin put it; or between acquisitive time and
consumptive time, as Ferlosio saw, or between
being and being other, as García Calvo or
Levinas discuss.
But Dividuals is not a pure book
on philosophy. To the “philosopher’s desire,” as
Egginton described it, it adds “the
story-teller’s desire.” This book’s specific
subject matter or corpus are the classics of 16th
Century Spanish literature. It does not try to
do a Marxist or psychoanalytical reading of
these classics (that has already been done and
is of less interest to its author). What
Dividuals is doing, instead, is a reading of
the classics in modern philosophy (Marx or Lacan
or Guattari or Žižek) in the light of La
Celestina, or Don Quixote or
Lazarillo de Tormes, or Jorge de
Montemayor’s La Diana. It attempts to
show how the unsolvable contradictions that
prevent humanism from explaining “Man”—and even
more so “Woman”—are inherent to humanism, and to
humans, and were there before and simultaneously
with the shifts in ideology or socio-economic
bases. It is in the classics of narrative that
we find this fundamental dividuality,
better perhaps than in the thoughts of the best
philosophers, because philosophers, even
post-modern or post-human ones, are supposed to
make sense, when good stories are not so
obliged. Good stories are good places in which
to show contradiction (unsolved contradiction)
as such, as close to the Real as can be. Only in
stories can the old pirate actually get away
with explaining how he lost his leg in both
a battle with a Spanish galleon and a
shark off a cove, answering to the sceptic’s
remark “Aye, laddie, that too!”
The author limits himself to his area of
expertise (Renaissance and Baroque Spanish
literature). The analysis is not extrapolated to
the classics of France or England or Italy.
Perhaps a parallel analysis of such texts in the
same vein would yield identical results, or
perhaps not so. That is another issue: the issue
of how “Spain is different,” and different from
what (it would be a matter of exploring whether
or not Spain is, as Paul Julian Smith famously
put it, “the woman of Europe”).
From the corpus of Spanish classics,
Dividuals focuses on four, with incursions
into a few others. Using the heuristic
formula/tool “Lazarillo is to Marx as
Diana is to Freud,” a “diamond” is formed
using Celestina (1499) and Don Quixote
(1605) as the horizontal beginning and end of
the 16th Century. In both, “Marx” and
“Freud” (or “labor” and “desire,” or “fate and
character,” etc.) can be seen as complements to
one another and as unresolved opposites. But in
the middle of the century, Lazarillo
(picaresque) and Diana (pastoral) seem to
completely diverge, going in opposite directions
(they constitute the upper and lower corners of
the diamond). Zero (or close to zero) “love” in
Lazarillo (100% toil and material needs);
zero (or close to zero) toil in Diana
(100% love issues). The obvious split of these
issues as seen in the radical split of narrative
genres post-Celestina and pre-Quixote
is an obvious symptom of the fundamental split,
of the dividuality that resides in any
phantasmagoric “individuality” or “identity.”
But the terms of the split, however, refuse to
be absolute monads themselves. Parts of the
study focus on how there is a political economy
in the pastoral Arcadia, after all, or how in a
love-less story such as Lazarillo we find
a few tears, a few leaks of the body or of “the
soul” into the dog-eat-dog world, or how a text
like La lozana andaluza both follows and
contradicts Celestina and both precedes
and contradicts Lazarillo.
A peculiarity of this book
is that it is structured in many small units of
analysis (mini essays), rather than in a few
long chapters. These sections analyze specific
aspects of duality, with the results of the
analysis going back to the general discussion,
which interrupts and refocuses the specific
analyses in the form of paseo or
promenade, as the central theme of Mussorgsky’s
Pictures at an exhibition does between
each picture. This paseo is Dividuals’
“peripatetic” counterpart to a pure Platonic
symposium in which everyone invited would be
sitting at the table. Dividuals is
conceived as a “moving symposium” in which,
unlike in Plato’s gatherings, there will be no
“Socrates” to always have the last word. The
mini essays and the paseo interludes
combine into one large essay with no chapters.
The author thinks that there
is one other aspect of this book that makes it
an original and necessary contribution.
Dividuals gives voice to magnificent Spanish
contemporary thinkers who belong in the same
league as Žižek or Levinas but who are virtually
unknown in North American academia. It is time,
perhaps, that American scholars and students can
be persuaded to read them.
Baena’s previous books have
been all written in his native Spanish language.
But after some colleagues who couldn’t read
Spanish asked him if a translation was
available, and after having written some
articles in English with little intervention
from the copy editor, he decided to write
Dividuals in English. His intended reader is
somewhat different from his previous one. The
intended reader now doesn’t necessarily read
Spanish, or hasn’t necessarily read Don
Quixote or La Diana, but s/he is
interested in its main theme (the dividuality of
humans and humanism) and in the Spanish culture
through its masterpieces.
