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Cervantes And The Paradoxical Meta-Rhetoric Of Renaissance Magic

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Cervantes and The Paradoxical Meta-Rhetoric of Renaissance Magic
Notes on State Ontology and the Hauntology of La Mancha in Don Quixote Parts I-II

INTRODUCTION

Problem Diagnosis, Bibliographical Review and Thesis Statement. The centrality of magic to Cervantes’s Don Quixote Parts I-II1 is hard to deny. Indeed, a lexicon belonging to the semantic field of writing-as-magic is already pervasive in his prologue to the first part: <>,<>, <>, <>, <>, <>, <>, <> are some of the words that appear in the reduced space of two pages (I). These motifs are then furthered through the deployment of various narrators (the author-historian Cide Hamete Benengeli, Avellaneda as the writer of the spurious second part of the book) puppeteers (Ginés de Pasamonte), …show more content…

The structural openendedness of the creative capacity of language (i.e., of its ontological performativity) upsets any authoritarian expectations about it. The intended ontology of the Spanish State is a case in point and compromises the Monarchy's and The Inquisition's ability to impose social homogeneity by law. The spectacular failure of their conversion policies will be presented as a paramount instance of such tendency.
(ii) The Spectral Ontology (Hauntology) of La Mancha. As an ingenious writer, Cervantes draws upon the limited performativity of language in order to produce specters (an ontology of the haunted, a hauntology [Derrida, 1993]). Their emergence exposes the misfires of the State's ontological aspirations through the literary interpellation of the marginalized political subjectivities of La Mancha/Spain. The inefficacy of conversion policies is satirized by Cervantes via its displacement into the literary realm, where conversion adopts the form of a recurring transformation across objects and people.
Argumentative Strategy. I would like to account for the ontological ambivalence of Renaissance magical rhetoric in Don Quixote Parts I-II I on the basis of the three stages that define every magic

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