Fellow in Research Area 1: "Competing Communities"

August – October 2024

After Mnemosyne: A [Political] Atlas of Violent Masculinities

This research proposal, part of an ongoing, more ambitious research project, provides a Warburgian modus legendi of the masculinities of contemporary European Nouvelle Droite –always in strict relation with a much broader aesthetic, political, and rhetorical universe from which they should not be separated– based on their "surviving" and "reverberating" characteristics. C.G. Jung and Roberto Calasso each explained the cultural process of return and reactivation, loss and retrieval, with beautifully crafted metaphorical formulations, respectively: certain cultural elements are compared by the Helvetian scientist to ancient river beds still filled with fresh water, and which enjoy a new lease of life; the Italian intellectual and writer underlines, on the other hand, the perpetual characteristics of surviving myths that "reverberate", vibrate and reemerge, taking form in novel, refurbished archetypes, elements which suddenly provide sense and coherence to what seems to be incompatible, strictly speaking.

Culture and cultural elements, far from being forgotten or transcended, resonate, reappear, ascend. Mythological, mythical (and political) images are capable of a "vertical travel" from the depths of the surface in which they mix themselves with more recent imaginaries, occasionally losing partially of their original essence; sometimes, as Eliade points out, reappearing only – if such reappearance in literature is to be considered a minor form of manifestation – as literary or artistic motifs. The ideas of Calassian reverberation, of post-life, of survival (Rivas Venegas refers here specifically to Aby Warburg's concept of Nachleben), notions that Rivas Venegas draws on and explores in his book Lo viril y lo viscoso, aim to overcome the usual logic of periodicity or specific geographical contexts, addressing the hyper-masculine reaction of the present times as a political-cultural percorso articulated through elements that return. Spectral reappearances, in which the images of virile virtue and images of monstrosity and alterity coexist, shape refurbished representations of the nation, of the epic and the heroic, the monstrous, and the anti-national.

Miguel Rivas Venegas (PhD Universidad Autónoma de Madrid, 2018) is Distinguished Researcher of the EU Excellence Programme María Zambrano (2022-2024) and a former postdoctoral researcher of the Spanish Ministry of Science Programme Juan de la Cierva at the University of the Basque Country (2020-2022). The study of masculinities, national identities, monster narratives and political cultures of the New Right constitute the core of his ongoing research at MEDUSA: Genders in Transition: Masculinities, Affects and Bodies at the Universitat Oberta de Catalunya (Barcelona). He is the author, amongst others, of Lo viril y lo viscoso: alteridades, fantasmas y héroes en el primer franquismo (Cátedra, 2024), co-editor and co-author of Marginality and Resistencia: Narratives of Alterity, Dissent, and Belonging in the Spanish-speaking World and beyond (De Gruyter, 2024), Memoria(s) en jaque (Trea, 2023) and part of the Iconography Experts Committee (CSIC/ Secretaría de Estado de Memoria Democrática) working on-site at the Valle de los Caídos.