Las cosas que no son

Abstract

This paper discusses the project of a history of material cultures under the Franco dictatorship. This history of things is part of a marked affective and emotional turn of events that does little to account for the historical relationship to “things” under the dictatorship, which this article seeks to restore. By reevaluating the contribution of the philosopher Xavier Zubiri’s thought to its centrality in the Catholic knowledge produced under the dictatorship, things only make sense when they are tied to the subjective instance that invests them through language, the human person as Christianly understood. By unearthing this personalist relationship to things, the article invites us to reassess the presence of Paulinism and its effects at a time when the new consumerism and its “inventaire des choses” was built under the dictatorship, prompting a metahistorical discussion of the theoretical project of this historiographical turn that extends performativity beyond language. Failing to restore a theological relationship with matter, this turn forces us to ask whether the sole gamble of an extensive performativity effectively eliminates the cognitive legacies of knowledge developed under the dictatorship.

Keywords

• Francoism
• catholicity
• material cultures
• deconstruction
• Paulinism
• Xavier Zubiri