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_{Examining the Heretical Thought. Opening remarks. Jesús Rodríguez-Velasco; co-director, SEMMYCOLON. February 2006.}

^I do not really know how to begin these opening remarks. They seem to be an exercise in style. Acknowledging this, should I comply, offering expressions of gratitude to the participants, the sponsors, and the graduate students who have agreed to work on this project? I most certainly will, but, please, allow me to delay this part until the end of my very short introduction.

The second possibility is to begin with a story: an inquisitorial story in which a Morisco, Román Ramírez de Deza, is the object of an investigation ending with a posthumous auto de fe. Ramírez died in prison right before the Holy Office was able to declare him guilty. Guilty of what? I am certain that some of you already know the answer to this question; others of you, who once knew, have replaced this particular story with other stories in your memory. Yet others among you, I can tell, are by now thrilled with anxiety and suspense. In this opening story, I would explain how his corpse was exhumed and publicly burnt in the town-centre of Toledo, with the special assistance of the Great Inquisitor, Cardinal Niño de Guevara, and His Absolute Majesty King Philip III.

Should I have begun with this amazing plot, I might have mentioned the Morisco’s terrible suffering leading up to his death, and the extreme cruelty used by those who had celebrated the auto de fe in 1600, one year after Ramírez passed away. I would have shown you the witnesses’ gestures pointing at the Morisco’s face, and, following the rules of an art of preaching, I would have imitated Román’s tremulous voice answering that perhaps his grandfather, a cristiano nuevo, who used to be an herbalist, gave him some kind of medication to improve his memory to an astonishing degree. Believe me when I assure you that, in such a case, I would have hidden from you the main charges exhibited by the inquisitors against him. I would have failed to match those charges of diabolical pact, necromancy, cripto-magical-islamicism and others with the fossilized questionnaires proposed by the regular inquisitor’s handbooks, thus showing how the vehicle of power functions through a fixed narrative oriented to demonstrate the guilt of the accused. I would have instead focused on one single charge: that the Morisco was able to recite books of chivalry by heart, with only the help of a white sheet of paper. His astounding memory would have been his heretical crime, the result of a pact with the devil.

Having arrived to this point, I would have tried to put the question of how the extension and even hypertrophy of the concept of heresy throughout the inquisitorial periods from the 13th century was used to buttress the many and diverse uses of authority, and how this hypertrophy became, eventually, one of the main devices of absolute authority and its agents from the counter-reformation to, say, Franco. Then, following the direction of this colloquium, I would have reminded you that the Mexican playwrite, Juan Ruiz de Alarcon, upon moving to Spain the very same year in which the auto de fe took place, in 1600, immediately wrote a comedy whose main character was none other than Román Ramírez in the very act of settling a pact with the devil himself. I would have also reminded, then, that, according to Alain Boureau, one of the first movements to extend the concept of heresy undertaken by the early Inquisition, from 1280, was to consider Satan as a heresiarch.

But I decided not to tell you this story.  So I won’t.

Still fascinated by this possibility and by the way in which the concept of heresy pervaded the Inquisition’s activities, and was actually expanded by canon, civil, and penal law, I thought it would be much more interesting to examine definitions, legal features, and uses. I thought that the foundational text of Spanish law and legal doctrine in the vernacular, the Siete Partidas would as a matter of fact be an excellent point of departure.

Like a good Medieval, we need to settle concepts and definitions, to understand the way in which these concepts and definitions encompass a social practice that I still fail to understand completely. The Alfonsine laws define heresy as the practice of commentating on evangelic word differently from the Holy Church, whose commentary is articulated by the Church Fathers; this is deemed the only possible exegetical program. That’s why Alfonso insists that heretics are those who think up and apply differently the exegetical procedures To express heresiarchal and heretical activities, Alfonso uses a complex word: they “escatiman” Christ’s words. “Escatimar” is not easily translatable. Samuel Parsons Scott translates it as “pervert”, but this is a tricky choice. “Escatimar” means, at the same time (note that I underlined in my manuscript the expression at the same time) “to shorten the meaning”, “to be excessive in pursuing an interpretation”, and “to distort”. I would ask you to provide me with a good English equivalent. I doubt there exists one in modern Spanish. So, the strategy argues that authorized interpretive and exegetical systems belong to the law, and they are fully expressed in the First Partida, beware, by the king in the king’s voice. Basically, he says that if you have doubts about what you need to believe, then you can turn to the kingly interpretation of the canon law at the code’s beginning.

There is, in the law, another very important point: every single person among the people (the law has also defined people in the Second Partida, the social-political section of the text) should be able to identify and, eventually, denounce a heretic. This is probably one of the main achievements of the law in general, and of the laws on heresy in particular: by making the people aware of the content and doctrines of the law (they cannot claim ignorance when caught in an illegal situation), the law promotes the people to an enforcing role. Law drowns society into the law, and, in this particular case, also into theology.

The definition and conceptualization of heresy actually narrows the beliefs and the social practices related to them, creating (or intending to create) a new Argos of social life, whose eyes are none other than the people’s eyes, everybody’s eyes, now filtered through the spectacles of theology and law.

But who knows, I say to myself. Maybe this is just a legal machine created by a libidinal machine going by the name of Alfonso. Although several legal sources have been proposed to understand the Partidas traditions, no one has yet been able to find an exact, literal one. Which means that all this hubbub about commentary can also be deemed one of Alfonso’s obsessions. Yet at the same time, the Partidas constitute a problem, one that is, for now, difficult to evaluate.

The voice of Thomas Gradgrind resounds in my ear

_{“Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts. Facts alone are wanted in life. Plant nothing else, and root out everything else. You can only form the minds of reasoning animals upon Facts: nothing else will ever be of any service to them. This is the principle on which I bring up my own children, and this is the principle on which I bring up these children. Stick to Facts, sir!”}

Fact: the Partidas did not come into force in Alfonso’s hard times. Fact: the Partidas frightened to death several kings coming after Alfonso.  Fact: the Partidas were not fully translated into any other language (save some fragments in Portuguese and Catalan). Fact: when they came into effect, it was only with important corrections. Fact: and, incredibly, the Partidas were edited by Gregorio López, member of the Consejo Real de Indias (Royal Council of American Indes), in 1555 not for their use inside the Peninsula, but for their exportations to the Americas.

But still, if not the definitions, what about the anxiety of definitions? Don’t we all search for, while remaining terrified of, definitions? I recall the amazing image of this very anxiety in the edition of the widely read and commentated Nicolau Eymeric’s Handbook of Inquisitors, undertaken by Francisco Peña for the Vatican right after the Council of Trent, in 1578. This edition reproduces and discusses Eymeric’s original from the 14th century. The two Dominicans engage in an untimely conversation on the concept and phenomenology of heresy. This is an untimely conversation, for, as Nietzsche said, how could philological activity be anything but untimely, even completely outside and independent from time? The extraordinary influence of Eymeric’s concepts needs to be, in the philological edition of Peña, carefully revisited, and this is exactly what Peñas's marginal commentaries do. Eymeric explores the different etymologies, discusses the concepts and the juridical distinctions arising from cases, just as medieval scholastics used to do in law, philosophy, and theology. This scholasticism is, according to Peña’s activity, a source of anxiety, for it opens many interpretative possibilities, whereas for Peña, as for many of those named Grand Inquisitors during the 16th century, heresy is a sharp concept, not subject to any kind of interpretation in the same way that Catholicism itself cannot be the object of any interpretation.

There is a book, according to one of my most loved masters (who is among us today, Enrique Gavilán), which can transform one’s life. In a brilliant moment of Dostoyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov, Ivan tells Aliosha the poem he has been composing. It takes place in Seville, and the main character is the old, tall, dry Great Inquisitor, Cardinal Torquemada. Something astonishing has happened: only one day after an auto de fe in which the Inquisition has burnt 100 heretics, Christ has decided to return to Earth, or more specifically, to Seville. Against all historical and exegetical odds, whereby Christ would be considered a false prophet, and then condemned and crucified, everybody in Seville welcomes him as the true Savior and real son of god. The Great Inquisitor imprisons him. He starts a conversation with him, in which only Torquemada talks

_{“Tomorrow I shall condemn Thee and burn Thee at the stake as the worst of heretics. And the very people who have today kissed Thy feet, tomorrow at the faintest sign from me will rush to heap up the embers of Thy fire”.}

Ivan Karamazov asks young and religious Aliosha to face an unbearable situation. Identifying the heretic voice, the heretic subject, is not a matter of Faith, but that of authority,and, to a great extent, it is independent from Faith itself: even Christ, if endangering ecclesiastical freedom, would be a heretic. Faith in Christ is, according to Ivan, displaced by faith in the Church and its repressive instutions, such as, for instance, the Inquisition.

All these remarks seem to point to a single problem. It is actually impossible to listen to the heretic voice, to perceive the heretical thought, and even to identify it from inside of its self-perception and self-representation. Unless, of course, we face it from a different angle: that of the reformist, the apostate, the gnostic, the “pure,” or even, occasionally, the mystic. We will always face the problem, on the other hand, of those who, practicing their own religion, like Judaism or Islam, were nevertheless considered as heretics of Christendom. From the moment in which the law sets Jews, Muslims, and Heretics (and suicides) in close chapters, to the moment in which all of them are deemed heretics, there is certainly a major change.

On the other hand, History and Time become space. When you travel across the south of France, there is a moment in which you no longer are in France, or even in Languedoc-Roussillon. You are now in the Pays Cathare, the Cathar Country, and historical issues on heresy, crusades, religion, central powers, imperialism, become flesh and bone, right in front of you. Or so it appears, for, in fact, what you are seeing is now a theme park. Local and central authorities have mapped the territory, selectively restoring certain castles (the cathar ones) and leaving others in ruin (mostly the crusaders’ ones) in order to invent this new Cathar Country in which historical facts can be reversed. The people living in this territory, in this newly conceived historical landmark, have begun to celebrate their constructed history, both reaping the economic benefits and suffering the ecological difficulties. Montaillou is no longer just Montaillou, it now holds the name of Emmanuel Le Roy Ladurie’s book on Montaillou, and its welcoming sign says, just like the book cover, “Montaillou, Village Occitan”. Medieval markets, jousts, the ideas of purity and perfection of the so-called Cathars, permeate the language and the new imaginary. Cultural tourists in search of authenticity have descended upon Cathar Country, directed by today’s economic and political power toward particular sites of genuine history and away from others constructed as less indisputably historical.

I feel like Serenus Zeitblom (Peaceful Time?), telling, at the same time, the past life of his friend Adrian Leverkühn, and the present of the World War, yet unable to understand neither. Or like Billy Pilgrim, jumping from historical time to historical time. Which one should I look at, in order to understand? Is there anything to understand?

In the end I thought that all these stories, all these facts and references were scarcely meaningful enough to constitute a set of opening remarks, and that’s why I did my best to avoid them. They would have been nothing but a bit of historicism, some semiotic remarks, a pinch of comparatism with a dash of cultural studies… and, perhaps, some general interpretations that would lead us yet further away. But the main problem subsists, it rebels itself against all these narratives, let alone the way that I express them.

What does it mean to construct and to conceptualize heresy from a theoretical point of view, beyond the ad hoc repressive institutions? What different means are articulated for repressing not only juridical, jurisdictional, and political, but also cultural heresy? Is there a heretical search of new forms of expression, new genres, new vocabularies, new cultural fashions? What kind of new investigation, if any, does heretical thought represent? Does heretical thought transform itself through this research? How can we represent, in fact, the heretical thought? Is there a way of talking about it? Is it even possible to name “heretical thought,” in the same way that it's named by the very institutions and discourses that created the concept itself of heresy? How does heretical thought and the speech acts surrounding it abandon the coordinates of time and space, the master narrative of history, or perhaps, even History itself. History, in whose order of discourse, providential narrative, and teleology does not, cannot, or does not want to fit? How does it escape this narrative? What would be the consequences of the theoretical establishment of this escape ? How might we approach this manifold perspectivism opened by the creation and categorization of the concept of heresy? How do the consideration and study of the concepts related to heresy, heretical thought, etc., represent for us a necessity of reconsidering cultural, historical, audiovisual, andmusical, theories — or even Theory itself?

My opening remarks became, magically, questions. I am the student here. These are my questions to you, and they explain why you all are here. In point of fact, we would love to hear from you, colleagues, researchers, professors, innovators, writers, and, maybe, heretics. What are the questions that you ask yourselves, and, obviously, what are the approaches that you have imagined to answer those questions

You have graciously traveled from México, the United Kingdom, France, Spain, and several places throughout the United States to meet with us and begin this conversation. And we are extremely grateful to you for giving us this excellent opportunity. During the last two years, which is also the current age of Semmycolon, other colleagues have also come to visit us, and this is the perfect occasion to thank them, as well, for their generosity. Some of them are probably following this event online, through the website and through the blog. We would also like to express our gratitude to our sponsors: The Department of Spanish & Portuguese, The UCHRI, Program of Medieval Studies, The Townsend Center for the Humanities, Doe Library, and the departments of French, Comparative Literature, and German. Some of our graduate students have made possible this meeting; without the generous collaboration of Israel Sanz, Heather Bamford, Martha Moran, Heather McMichael, Dan Nemser, Seth Kimmel, and Yuri Herrera, nothing would have been as accurate as it has turned out to be.

Let’s, simply, start. Thank you very much.