That ambiguous word. The discourses on the figure of the intellectual in Spain, 1889-1914

Abstract

The final years of the nineteenth century and the first decade of the twentieth were crucial in the appearance and consolidation of the figure of the modern intellectual in Spain, in a process which was analogous to those happening elsewhere in Europe around the same time. However, this did not mean that a clear and generally agreed–upon idea of what an intellectual «was» o «should be» appeared, nor was there agreement on what principles should guide his interventions in the public sphere. Quite the opposite: the term acquired a persistent semantic ambiguity which made it impossible to develop a clear idea of what was —or was not— an intellectual. This then encourages us to study the figure of the intellectual not as a category within which we can include certain individuals, but rather as a discursive phenomenon and even as a cultural fantasy. For, paradoxically, the term’s ambiguity did not prevent it from accruing a series of discursive uses, like those which linked the intellectual to a number of physical and social pathologies, those which projected it onto certain notions about masculinity and femininity, those which drew a comparative geography of European intellectuals —in which Spain always occupied a lesser and subaltern role—, or those which stigmatized the intellectual as a traitor to the working class, to the Spanish nation or to Catholic principles. Many of these discourses recycled tropes from earlier traditions, adapting them to a new vocabulary which would become consolidated in the first decades of the century.