Lorca's relics. Positivist fetishism and hermeneutic misrepresentation

Abstract

The search of Federico García Lorca’s bodily remains has necessarily reopened a debate over the poet’s cultural significance. The testimonial compulsion shown by many of the instigators of this search is largely rooted in an ideological unconscious marked by a factual positivism that is characteristically phenomenological, with phenomenology misconstrued as an immediate collusion between the ideal and the empirical, between Lorca as idealized symbol of Spain or the Republic and his body as the “thing” that brings about collective salvation. Through a strategy of cumulative distancings, the present article seeks to set up arguments against the convenience of bringing such unconscious back to life. I argue too in favor of the suitability of a return to the poet’s body of writing, yet a return untouched by what Husserl called “naiven Positivität”.