Journal of Medieval and Early Modern Studies 39:1, Winter 2009
DOI ./-- © 2009 by Duke University Press
“A Spaniard Is No Englishman”:
The Ghost of Spain and
the British Imaginary
Jacques Lezra
New York University
New York, New York
En efecto, cayendo y levantando, llegó donde Isabela estaba, y asiéndola de la
mano le dijo: “¿Conócesme, Isabela? Mira que yo soy Ricaredo, tu esposo.” “Sí
conozco,” dijo Isabela, “si ya no eres fantasma que viene a turbar mi reposo.”
— Miguel de Cervantes, “La española inglesa”
[It] is reasonable to maintain that the “phantom effect” progressively fades
during its transmission from one generation to the next and that, finally, it
disappears. Yet, this is not at all the case when shared or complementary phan-
toms find a way of being established [trouvent à s’instituer] as social practices
along the lines of staged words [à la manière . . . du “mot agi”]. . . . We must
not lose sight of the fact that to stage a word . . . constitutes an attempt at exor-
cism, an attempt, that is, to relieve the unconscious by placing the effects of the
phantom in the social realm.
— Nicolas Abraham, “Notes on the Phantom”
Worlds hang on Abraham’s words.
Notice the provocatively impersonal
phrasing: in certain cases “shared . . . phantoms find a way of being estab-
lished as social practices,” or perhaps rendering “trouvent à s’instituer” bet-
ter, these “phantoms find a way of erecting or installing themselves as social
practices.” A flurry of questions, on different levels, posed to Abraham and
to generations of readers of Freud’s last, cultural works, from Marcuse to
Lacan and Copjec, from professional associations for the Psychoanalysis of
Culture and Society to the “hantology” of Derrida’s Specters of Marx: just
how do “staged words” find their way into social practice? Do they “find
their way” in the same way, at all times, in all places, in all languages? What
does it mean to “stage” a word? On what stage do words play, become exter-
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