Exile as Political Concept in Juan Pablo Viscardo y Guzman’s Letter to the Spanish american people

Abstract

Exile is, in Viscardo Guzmán’s works, not only a biographical fact but an important concept to understand Spanish American history and colonial condition. In his Letter, Viscardo y Guzmán gives some historical examples of the King’s cruelty towards his colonial subjects, from the Andean nobles exiled after the rebellion of Tupac Amaru I, the last Inca from Vilcabamba, to the recent expulsion of his Jesuits brothers. He arrives at the conclusion that the Spanish Crown has only mistreated and unjustly punished the Spanish Americans in these two hundred years of colonial history. Viscardo y Guzmán’s discourse shows that Spanish American’s rights are not recognized by the Spanish crown and Spanish Americans live under the rule of a permanent state of exception. Exile is one of the most visible signs of the tyranny that Spanish Americans are subjected to during the two centuries of colonial history. In this text I study the relation between the figure of the sovereign and the state of exception in Viscardo y Guzmán’s Letter and exile as one of the main conditions of colonial subjects, an exile not only in geographical but also historical terms. According to Viscardo y Guzmán, Americans are exiled from their own history. To understand the notion of sovereignty and state of exception I take into account classical authors such as Jean Bodin and Hobbes as well as contemporanean ones such as Carl Schmitt, Giorgio Agamben, and Walter Mignolo.