coldhearted scientist وداد

Imperio restaurativo is the ideology the elites of the Spanish state articulate to resolve the crises they generate. It proposes that the state as an institution is the solution to these crises, because it can restore us to a former condition – an imperial one. So we promote a political fantasy of constant and open restoration.

The original crisis is the loss of the colonies and “imperio restaurativo” is proposed as the solution to fragmentation and social heterogeneity. It is brought out as a possible solution to any problem. It thus structures political thought, and we must examine nationalism and populism in a postimperial light.

The ideology of restorative empire is based on a logic of constant crisis, that can only be fully resolved in the imperial past. This appears to be a melancholic ideology, since to legitimate itself postimperialism always takes the loss of colonies as a starting point.

But unlike Freud’s melancholic subject, “restorative empire” always finds and mobilizes another subject, an Other, that it makes responsible for the crisis and the lost. So this ideology is not nostalgic but hysterical: it moves against the Other, blames it for the loss and eliminates it, at the same time as it appropriates for itself the position and history of that Other. In postmarxist psychoanalysis, this hysterical maneuver would be defined as the intention to appropriate the enjoyment of the Other (Zizek 1989).

For instance, Roca Barea’s presentation of Spain as a victim of other empires. Another example: the way Ciudadanos interrupted an LGBTQ+ march. Ciudadanos presents itself as the victim and LGBTQ+ as an antipatriotic victimizer. So, Ciudadanos becomes the “true” LGBTQ+.

Axé.