Introduction

This chapter navigates the possibilities of explaining the Spanish (post-) Franco experience through Deleuze and Guattari’s idea of microfascism as a cancerous Body without Organs (BwO). Its aim is also to advocate the need for a micropolitics to dislodge trauma and face the challenge of creating another political framework in Spain. Although there is still an ongoing debate about whether Franco’s regime was actually fascist (Hadzelek 2012), this chapter will use the denomination of fascism to refer to Francoism.

During the Franco dictatorship and even after its end, during the so-called Transition, a dangerous repetition of the same codes led to a lack of recoding that constituted cancerous strata in Spain. Understanding fascism as sets of codes that fix subjects in rigid systems of thought and desire, I suggest that silence is the most appalling characteristic of the fascist Spanish rigid system. During the civil war and the dictatorship, opinions were violently silenced; afterwards, even nowadays, the fascist processes of silencing opinions have in turn been silenced.

The processes of intergenerational transmission of the trauma of political violence have been shaped in Spain by a crushing silence that has left an unhealed wound embedded in our (political) subjectivities. The lack of decoding and overcoding, the crippling silence, meant the impossibility of healing the wounds, the impossibility of reparations (especially since the desire for silence led to the juridical erasure of Franco-era crimes), and the impossibility of embracing our potentialities. It meant immobility, as individuals were oriented to unity and molarity.

Against this politics of silence and forgetting, an overcoding labour of remembrance should be done at frequencies that are maybe differently audible. The political framework in Spain still does not permit a different decoding and overcoding that allows dealing with trauma. How can we create cracks in this fixed framework and enable critical thinking towards a micropolitics of transformation in Spain against very ingrained, old and new fascist flows?

The Franco-era dictatorship is a historical manifestation of macrofascism. Nevertheless, in this chapter, I am more interested in explaining the Spanish rigid system of codes as microfascist phenomena and in shaking off our transgenerationally transmitted political trauma through a labour of remembering against fascist molarity. In order to do so, this chapter is divided into four parts.