People often quote the sixth of Benjamin's Theses on the Philosophy of History, the one that warns that “even the dead will not be safe from the enemy if he wins,” without fathoming its actuality. The “if” in this sentence is rhetorical, for Benjamin famously added: “And this enemy has not ceased to be victorious” (255). And, although we love that phrase, we rarely remember the one immediately preceding it. The one that calls for something like a permanent epistemic revolution: “In every epoch, the attempt must be made to deliver tradition anew from the conformism which is on the point of overwhelming it.” The dead, by which Benjamin clearly does not mean those honored by the victor but those sacrificed for the sake of the tradition, will certainly not be safe if our revolt is merely an excuse to leave things as they are, or, worse yet, to deflect toward conservative goals the sympathetic insight that alone can redeem the past.

Modern Spanish identity has always been a postcolonial identity. The reason for this is that Spain constituted itself as a nation after being severed from its sprawling body across the seas. Decapitated, the crowned head of the empire, the capital addicted to command and an extractive economy, reconstituted itself as the head of a nation state. Not without difficulty or violence. The twin processes of decolonization and nationalization were visualized for the first time in the emergency constitutional assemblies of 1812, the so-called Cortes de Cádiz, which declared the inhabitants of Spain's American possessions free co-nationals of the Europeans, while according them unequal representation (Fradera 66–8). The full-fledged ideological outgrowth of that foundational moment for the nation was the literature of the Generation of '98 and the so-called “problem of Spain” around which it coalesced. Concomitant with this problem was the formulation of the ethnicist doctrine of Hispanidad (meaning, roughly, the Hispanic world, or the Hispanic condition), based on the spiritual superiority and defining character of the Castilian language. In Spain, this language was proclaimed the state language in 1902, shortly after the loss of the colonies, and renamed Spanish in 1923, when the Royal Spanish Academy joined conceptually what had already been legislatively attached, namely state and language. This is how cultural hegemony substituted for political hegemony when the latter was no longer feasible.