Alberto Cardín, yo mismo: transatlantic essayism and psychoanalysis in Como si nada (1981)

ABSTRACT

Spanish cultural history has relegated Alberto Cardín to oblivion due to his uncomfortable intellectual stance. Cardín’s marginal placement illuminates and delineates the Transition’s cultural conflicts: champions of transitional dissent faced being either excluded entirely or incorporated into the hegemonic logics of consensus. In Como si nada (1981), Cardín crafts an intransigent and polemical essay that openly challenges the Transition’s political and cultural institutionalization. His intellectual ties with Argentine writer Oscar Masotta allow us to explore the transatlantic links between psychoanalysis and literature during the Transition. Like Masotta’s essay “Roberto Arlt, yo mismo” (1965), Como si nada turns Lacanian psychoanalysis into a self-reflexive interrogation of Spanish intellectuals’ conditions of enunciation. On the one hand, Cardín stresses how the cultural field has been institutionalized and reconfigured. On the other, he critiques the textual forms that were consolidating media intellectuals’ prestige. Como si nada translates the essay form into a poetics and politics of differences, creating a discursive stronghold capable of confronting any consensual imperative. Cardín’s theoretical standpoint questions which intellectual models come with democracy, which public figures and textual forms obtain recognition and what the cost of cultural institutionalization may be.

KEYWORDS:

• Cardín
• Masotta
• psychoanalysis
• essayism
• Transition

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to the library staff at the University of Oviedo in charge of Alberto Cardín’s personal archive.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Notes

1 Cardín’s letters are currently archived in the Fondo Alberto Cardín, belonging to the University of Oviedo.

2 Morán defines consensus as “un inseguro equilibrio de fuerzas, … la constatación de que el sistema no podía ser derribado, aunque sí condicionado” (2015, 2383). For Vilarós, interparty political harmony represses the traumas of the Civil War, guaranteeing the passage from dictatorship to democracy: “la voluntad social que exige una restauración democrática pasa sobre todo por la querencia de integración de la sociedad española en el aparato económico global impulsado por el capitalismo tardío” (2018, 1881).

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Rodrigo López Martínez

Rodrigo López Martínez is a PhD candidate in Latin American Cultural Studies at the University of Manchester. His areas of interest encompass the links between fiction and artistic and political avant-gardes in Latin America, and the transatlantic convergence of Argentine and Spanish psychoanalysis and literature during the Spanish democratic transition. His most recent articles are: “El vicio de criticar: Teoría, crítica y polémica según Alberto Cardín” (Kamchatka: Revista de Análisis Cultural 16, 2020); “Essays in (Transatlantic) Transition: The Argentine Journal Sitio (1981–1987) and Alberto Cardín’s Como si nada (1981)” (Bulletin of Spanish Studies, 2022). Email: [email protected]