The Master Signifier of Galician Culture: Manuel Fraga and Undemocratic, Affective Populism

Abstract

This chapter studies the work of Manuel Fraga as that of the greatest ghostly writer of recent Galician literature. In psychoanalytical terms, he is its main referent: The master signifier of the agency that regulates the symbolic order of Galicia. Literary history’s refusal to engage with Fraga has always had the effect of generating his repeated return and haunting, as he defined the continuation of Francoism by other means in Galicia, and more generally, in Spain. This chapter further argues that Fraga managed to advance a postnationalist history and theory of Galician literature and culture, which instead of highlighting the oppression inflicted by Spanish imperialism/colonialism, created a non-democratic‚ populist‚ and affective unity of Galicia’s history and future as universal (thus, reworking the Francoist “Spanish universalism through unity”). It concludes that in the 1990s and 2000s, the nationalist left in Galicia‚ due to its rationalist politics‚ did not take seriously the politics of affect in its historical complexity and thus enabled Fraga’s hegemony.