Processes of Destitution in Spain: Unavowable Communities between the Regime of ’78 and the Total State

Abstract

This essay analyzes what I call processes of destitution as a result of the various social movements that took place in Spain throughout the 2010s. I argue that the exhaustion of the Regime of ’78 meant an epistemological turn away from hegemonic concepts such as consensus, truth, and historical agreement toward those central to a new destituent process: dissent, divergence, and plurality, among others. Over the course of this essay, I carry out a genealogical review of the two intersecting social movements of the period which drove that change: first, the anti-austerity movement—better known as the indignados, or 15M, movement and its political derivatives, such as municipal platforms, the “mareas,” and Podemos—and second, the Catalan pro-independence movement. Finally, based on Carl Schmitt's political theology, I study the Spanish State's reaction beginning in 2017 as the creation of a state of exception based on the intensification of “the political” and on a shift in the “friend/enemy” paradigm, from a relationship between nation-states to an intranational relationship between the Spanish State and the Catalan pro-independence movement.