One question traverses this study: Can we find in the conjuncture of Olympic Barcelona any directives for some type of urban and historical change? Are the immaterial production of new ideologies and the material reconstruction of the city exhausted in their own realization, or do they offer us guidance for future transformative politics?

The ideologies of postmodern Barcelona have provided a singular occasion to articulate a critical encounter between Marxism and deconstruction that has, perhaps, resulted in three main propositions. First, the question of spectrality. In Barcelona, the simulacrum of the Olympic spectacle turned every political figure and every social agent into specters (or, to quote Derrida, into the “fantastic, ghostly, ’synthetic,’ ’prosthetic,’ virtual happenings” [Specters 63] of our contemporary media society). On the one hand, this spectralization cancelled the access to the past, and even the access to any sense of history; a phenomenon constitutive of postmodernity but particularly detectable in a post-Franco Spain that was striving to forget the dictatorship years. But, on the other hand, it opened up the possibility of historicizing the politics of the Olympic spectacle by bringing to light their inherent spectrality. Marxism understands this spectrality as a consequence of the full commodification of the social, and deconstruction conceives it as a “hauntology” (Specters 51) that replaces the very possibility of an ontology of the present. Our task alternates between these two critiques: the critique of capitalism and the critique of ontology.

Secondly, Barcelona's urban cosmopolitanism. The city's industrial production of cosmopolitan ideologies must be read as a clever marketing strategy to attract global capital in the form of multinational companies, tourists, conventions, cruises, study abroad programs, and other specialized services of the economy of knowledge. However, the content of these ideologies can be radicalized toward the redefinition, or even the full implosion, of the nation-state. Two conditions of possibility of cosmopolitanism are also its conditions of impossibility: its enclosure within state law (as seen in Kant's foundational definition of cosmopolitanism as “rights”) and its intrinsic connection with the logic of the capitalist market (Marx and Engels’ “cosmopolitan character” of the world market). These two limits – the restrictions of state law and the unbounded logic of the market – remain contradictory to each other and make true cosmopolitanism ultimately impossible. The figure of the undocumented immigrant painfully embodies this contradiction.