'The ambiguous word': ways of being intellectual in Spain

The easy thing is the intellectuals of straight trajectory.

What is difficult is the adventures of those who zigzagged on the margins of the central discourse of modernity.

David Jiménez Torres undertook the difficult path: he dedicated his thesis to the career of Ramiro de Maeztu, the prose writer who moved from Nietzschean anarchism to an exalted nationalism that refounded the Hispanic reactionary tradition.

His brilliant monograph

, focusing on Maetzu's role as a mediator between Spanish and British cultures throughout the Silver Age, ended with a nod to the present.

If the 2008 crisis had been the main trigger for the emergence of populist movements whose claim was to “redefine the established political geography”, Maetzu was exemplary as a case study to understand how these ideological mutations are produced in depth.

Somehow, that regenerationist turned anti-modern was a prototype for discovering the way in which an ideologue participates in public debate and redefines political culture thanks to his influence.

He would be one of the most perfect models of an intellectual.

The playwright Alfonso Sastre in Madrid in January 2007.Bernardo Pérez

After

, Jiménez returns to his research topic: Spanish intellectuals.

He does not exactly present a history of intellectuals, but rather a philological investigation into how the word has been redefined in Spain over more than 130 years.

Because here it is discovered that the figure of the intellectual was already being talked about before his official baptism with the publication of

by Émile Zola at the beginning of 1898. It was at the end of the 1880s, as happened with other languages, when the use of the word began to be normalized.

And almost immediately he did it with one of the constants that will be practically associated with his constant appearance in print: the speech against intellectuals.

No one seemed comfortable with the name.

“Intellectual me?”

Unamuno wondered.

Azorín had the honor of being the first on whom the idea of ​​the "traitorous intellectual" was projected.

In Baroja's great novels, if the protagonist had intellectual traits, they were young men with virility deficits.

And in 1916 Ortega —the intellectual who has defined the model— ruled that “on this date in which I write, the researchers of the year 2000 know it,

The most discredited word of all that is heard in the Peninsula is the word 'intellectual'.

But, despite this, despite sentencing his death on various occasions, the intellectual has been omnipresent in our public conversation.

There is no way to show how much intellectual discourse influences the redefinition of political geography, but if they were irrelevant they would not generate so much aversion.

That of the dictator Primo de Rivera had continuity with the discourse of the publicists who legitimized the anti-republican military insurrection by attacking the intellectuals of the liberal tradition.

Until the Transition, this was surely the great issue of our time in relation to intellectuals in Spain and the meaning of the word: if the mold from which that figure was defined or challenged or intended to be replaced was that of an institutionalist tradition opposed to that of a reactionary tradition with difficulties in equipping itself with a powerful intellectual discourse.

Santos Juliá formulated it in the classic

.

The complaint reappears in

expanding the chronology and incorporating key issues of our democracy: the relationship of intellectuals with television and the cultural State institutionalized by the PSOE, the position in relation to ETA (the Alfonso Sastre thing is grotesque) and Finally, the consideration of intellectual women.

It is an exciting, infinite discussion, open as the definition of the word.

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