The critic’s vice: theory, criticism and polemics according to Alberto Cardín

Abstract

In face of a democratic transition characterized by the mutually dependent normalization of the cultural and political fields, Alberto Cardín emerges as an uncomfortable, marginal and relatively forgotten personality. Revisiting his polemical interventions in magazines like Revista de Literatura and Diwan allows us to integrally address his intellectual stakes, as well as to find still productive discussions with which to brush the transition against the grain. As a pioneer introducer of Lacanian psychoanalysis in Spain, the dialogue between Cardín and the Argentinean Oscar Masotta delineates a distinctively theoretical perspective in regards to the redefinition of the intellectual subject in the renewed post-Franco scene. While denouncing the transition’s rearrangement of the most celebrated Spanish intellectuals, Cardín puts forward an alternative critical stake in its own textual immanency. He invokes diatribes and polemics not only as confrontational tools in the cultural field, but he adopts them as properly formal means: with them, Cardín redefines and vindicates the discursive specificity of criticism as the radical assumption of irreducible conflicts and differences, opposed to any summon to consensus.