854 Reviews There are some problems with the selective slant of the essays as a whole: thirty-one pages out ofaround three hundred is not enough to do justice to the entire period up to the 1820s; in the twentieth century, discussion ofthe years after 1940, and especially post-1960, occupies disproportionate space; and some important aspects ofthe period 1800-67 are neglected, notably the more experimental fictionand (but foran insightful intervention by Randolph Pope on the subject of Larra) the historical novel. In places, there is also some unwillingness to engage with more recent perspectives on Spanish history. Such matters aside, the Companion will serve its broad readership well as a stimulating introduction to the Spanish novel. University of Edinburgh Andrew Ginger Assertive Hispanisms: Tensions and Affirmations in Cultural Identity (=Forum for Modern Language Studies, 36.3 (July 2000), 225-336). Ed. by Gustavo San Roman. St Andrews: Oxford University Press. 2000. 112 pp. ?12 single issue (personal copy). ISSN 0015-8518. This special issue of the Forumfor Modern Language Studies is a slender but appar? ently ambitious volume. Under the title of 'Assertive Hispanisms' are included essays that range from medieval Iberian linguistics to early twentieth-century Uruguayan cultural criticism, and from indigenous writing in New Spain to the nationalist discourses of nineteenth-century Galicia, pausing on the way to take in also the seventeenth-century Spanish press, nineteenth-century Mexican poetry and essays, the Latin American publication history of Antonio Machado, and the popular mytho? logy of Portuguese national identity. In one sense, this ambition fails: unsurprisingly, the notion that these articles are connected in any meaningful way, let alone by the theme of 'assertive Hispanism', is faintly ludicrous. Indeed, the only contribution that expends much effortto address the concept of assertiveness is Roger Wright's piece on Ibero-Romance, which defines 'excessive self-assertion' of linguistic dif? ference in terms of any 'development that seem[s] linguistically to go further than necessary' (p. 230). Clearly this conception of assertiveness, interesting though it is in the context of understanding the divergences that have led to the fragmented linguistic map of the Iberian Peninsula, is not readily redeployed in other fields. With the exception of Gordon Brotherston's intervention demonstrating the subtle means by which native scribes of Mexican codices unpicked and subverted Spanish claims to superior knowledge, most of these essays present themselves as solidly in? formative rather than politically or theoretically adventurous. Erica Segre's account of another indigenous Mexican, the poet and essayist Ignacio Manuel Altamirano, invokes a sophisticated theoretical vocabulary to show the ways in which Altami? rano, too, maintained an ironic yet 'irreducible and untranscribable' distance from the platitudes of both homogenizing mestizaje and racial denigration. But, perhaps in imitation, her own account is often farfrom clear, and it ends with the rather gnomic utterance that 'to write is to depict; to depict is to write' (p. 276). A sense of ambition frustrated or muted rather pervades the volume. This might even be allegorized in Gustavo San Roman's article, whose meticulous analysis of early drafts of Jose Enrique Rodo's Ariel is designed to show that the text's silencing of contemporary historical controversies is an instance of 'political tact' preferring conciliation over partisanship. His argument is rather undone, however, by the com? ment that 'most readers have had no hesitation in spelling out what he only left implicit in his final version' (p. 294): either the attempt at conciliatoriness failed, in that Rodo's readers draw such manifestly polarizing interpretations from Ariel, or MLRy 100.3, 2005 855 his tact is best seen as a successful stratagem, to produce precisely the sense of an irreconcilable dichotomy. San Roman's essay thus opens up a more interesting ques? tion about the rhetoric of tact, but draws back from furtherinvestigation. Likewise, Henry Ettinghausen's description of the way in which seventeenthcentury Spanish new sources extolled Spanish might, disparaged the Turkish infidel, and generally served as a mechanism of social control (no great revelations there, I feel) rather misses a trick when he passes almost silently over the observation that the Crown would use these pamphlets also as 'a semi-official kite-flying exercise...

R a d i c a l P h i l o s o p h y 1 0 5 ( J a n u a r y / F e b r u a r y 2 0 0 1 ) Augusto Pinochet s̓ defenders are not entirely wrong. They realized what was at stake in the judicial battle over the ex-dictator s̓ extradition to Spain, and as such they have been often less distracted than his accusers. At stake was not so much the guilt or innocence of one individual as, rather, the very constitution of Chilean society, perhaps even the constitution of society in general. The issue is simple: is the ground or origin of a postdictatorial society necessarily dictatorship itself? In other words, can there be postdictatorship without a dictator? The broader questions, also raised by the Pinochet case, are equally stark: does the state found society? Or, can there be society without a state? Here I limit myself to attempting, via an analysis of Pinochet s̓ legal defence in the context of recent Chilean history, an answer to the first of these broader questions: I suggest that it is the multitude that founds society. On this view, the multitude is the ʻ“defining conceptʼ of modernity, in that it grounds the constitution of popular citizenship ;̓1 it is also the emergent subject of postmodernity. The pressing political question remains, however, whether or not the multitude can found a society without a state. A careful reading both of the general s̓ judicial defence and of the statements made to the press by his supporters reveals much about the Chilean postdictatorship. The general has had nothing to hide, hence he hides nothing. Nelson Caucoto, introducing a book made up primarily of quotations from Pinochet and his supporters, argues that ʻto get to know Pinochet, all you have to do is read his declarations ... his own words say everything.̓ 2 More broadly, in the Pinochet case it is the Right who are the demystifiers; the Left have all too often remained stuck with outmoded and inappropriate analyses. In a reversal of Hegelianism, society s̓ masters (those who speak for the state) can claim epistemological superiority; though as they do so, they also reveal their increasingly frustrated impotence (the fear, perhaps, that the state is not in fact society s̓ master). Pinochet s̓ defence can best be described in terms of melancholic cynicism. It may be the particular fate of postdictatorial melancholy (rather than the postdictatorial mourning analysed by Alberto Moreiras)3 to take shape as a cynicism for which the mystifications of ideology are irrelevant. Slavoj Žižek defines contemporary cynicism in terms of the post-ideological formula ʻthey know very well what they are doing, but still, they are doing it.̓ 4 Timothy Bewes specifically links cynicism and melancholy in a definition of cynicism that emphasizes ʻa melancholic, self-pitying reaction to the apparent disintegration of political reality.̓ 5 Dictatorship is perhaps always cynical, both in the sense that dictatorial power is a calculating reliance on force rather than on consent, and in the sense that those subject to dictatorship (such as Vaclav Havel s̓ famous greengrocer) are led to cynicism as a mode of survival.6 It is with postdictatorship, however, that cynicism becomes melancholic. Peter Sloterdijk argues that cynicism leads to ʻthe obvious exhaustion of ideology critiqueʼ by simultaneously pre-empting and disregarding its conclusions: critique depends for its effectiveness upon a moment of triumphal revelation, a moment that is forestalled if there is no initial mystification.7 Critical thought needs then to be reconsidered under the conditions of postdictatorship. This is not to say that critique should be abandoned tout court. The end of ideology (if that is what cynicism entails) must provide also the conditions of possibility for post-ideological politics and The constitution of society