Conference paper
CERVANTES’ DON QUIJOTE, AGAMBEN AND POWERHOLDERS’ EVIL DEEDS
Ante Armanini
; Šubićeva 26, 10000 Zagreb, Croatia
Abstract
The great story of don Quijote is the first novel in the literary West which attempts
to restore the lost gestures (of mercy, chivalry, generosity, morality,
and politicality as common interest), or rather bring them within the range of
remembrance of the new epoch. Or, in the words of G. Agamben, “it tries for
the last time to evoke that which threatens to elude it forever”. The insanity
of the epoch is manifest primarily through the insanity related to “loss of control
over the gestures”; thus a demented gesticulation with absolute gestures
of power becomes a universal symptom. It is precisely to this insanity of his
time that the insane don Quijote responds with imagined or imaginary pure
gestures of pure chivalry. This is the code of don Quijote’s insanity: everyone
claims that he alone is insane, but no one is aware that they themselves
have fallen into the trap of insanity. The historical events testify to this fall
into insanity, to the forgetting of every genuine chivalrous gesture, first and
foremost towards adversaries, women, children, the elderly and the politically
deprived. The end of religious tolerance is connected with the collapse
of chivalrous idealism. The unhappy or lost mankind has lost its gestures of
chivalry, morality and politicality, and this is the hour of the cruel world of
outright political violence. The centre of this world of dismay is the court as
“the court of death”, as the image of “evil giants” and “colossuses” which it
sends forth from its deadly womb as the sole life-forces. Presently the court
spreads the seed of wizardry as the seed of death to all corners of the world,
as well as all arbitrary powers, from wizarding to nuclear, both in the present
and in the future.
Keywords
power; persecution; hell; gestures; spectacle; Cervantes; don Quijote; Sancho; Agamben; Unamuno; Levinas
Hrčak ID:
55102
URI
Publication date:
12.4.2010.
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