The philosophical underwriting of a rebellion: Pedro de Ursúa and Lope de Aguirre’s expedition in search of El Dorado [1]

 

by
Hernán Neira

Universidad de Santiago de Chile
www.neira.cl

 

 

Published for the first time in
Chasqui; Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana

Vol XXXVII, Nº 2, 2008

Arizona State University

© Hernán Neira

 

 

 

 

Last correction: Jan 10, 2008

13.000 words

 

 

 

The philosophical underwriting of a rebellion: Pedro de Ursúa and Lope de Aguirre’s expedition in search of El Dorado

 

Table of Contents

 

1. The Chronicle of an Expedition in Search of El Dorado: Philosophical and Historical Issues                      2
2. a) Crisis of the Political Order on the River: A Rebellion in the Name of King Phillip II             3
3. b) A Weak Attempt to Restore the Political Order                                                                                        4
4. c) Political Transformation of the Facts: Electing a New King and Founding a New State          6

 

2. The Philosophical Origin of the State                                                                                                                                   8

 

3. A Catastrophe: the Foundation of a New Kingdom                                                                                          14

 

4. Failure of the Republic ofTierra Firmeand Restoration of the Previous Covenant with Phillip II 18

 

5. Philosophical Structure of theJornada 21

 

6. Politics of (the Menaced) Bodies                                                                                                                               25

 

7. A Cruel but Unsentimental Control of Bodies. Conclusions                                                                         30

 

8. Works Cited                                                                                                                                                                      34

 

 

Abstract

Our analysis of the Jornada de Omagua and Dorado, crónica de Lope de Aguirre, written in 1561, outlines the philosophical base that underlies a text narrating deeds which, apparently, only describe the facts related to Lope de Aguirre’s rebellion against the Spanish crown. Our analysis allows us to ask if the authors of the chronicle narrate what they see, or, conversely, are only able to see what they can philosophically conceive. The narration of the rebellion follows similar stages as those described by several 16th and 17th century political philosophers about the birth of the State: original freedom, incapability of assuring one’s own property and life against the attack of fellow humans, and finally the cession of personal power to one absolute entity under the condition that this entity will defend all property and life. We primarily consider Vitoria, Bodin and Hobbes. Understanding the philosophical history of the Jornada is also to understand a philosophical stage of the invention and self- construction of the individual. The philosophical reading of the Jornada is supported by concepts of Jean-Paul Sartre, Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida and Peter Mason.

 

Keywords: Lope de Aguirre, political philosophy, philosophical writing, American rebellions, El Dorado, political covenant, origin of the State, Sartre, Vitoria, Hobbes, Bodin, Derrida

 

 

 

1. THE CHRONICLE OF AN EXPEDITION IN SEARCH OF EL DORADO: PHILOSOPHICAL AND HISTORICAL ISSUES

The link between philosophy and language is such that they create a shared common base: the possibility of thinking. Consequently, no narration is possible without a philosophical underwriting of the narration, which makes speech understandable and creates the possibility for a meaning to be expressed through words. Contemporary philosophy has often treated this subject (Derrida, for instance), but it has scarcely been addressed in relation to the philosophical base of a Hispanic-American chronicle about breaking with the Spanish crown. Our analysis of the Jornada de Omagua y Dorado: crónica de Lope de Aguirre [2] (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986) (Journey of Omagua and Dorado: Chronicle of Lope de Aguirre, henceforth Jornada), outlines the philosophical narration that underlies a text narrating events which, apparently, have no philosophical nature. This analysis allows us, also, to ask if the authors of the chronicle narrate what they see, or, conversely, can only see what they philosophically conceive.

Written in 1561 by two Spanish soldiers (Francisco Vázquez and Almesto de Almesto), the Jornada is the text by which these soldiers attempt to free themselves from an accusation. In order to do this, they blame another soldier, Lope de Aguirre, for having committed a crime of lese-majesty, a crime against the King’s authority. Since the European invasion, there has been in Peru a “tradition” of rebellions and civil wars among some of King Phillip’s representatives. The chronicle is not a literary text. It is full of grammatical errors and one can find in it as many stylistic accomplishments as failures. (We have tried to keep this non-literary tone in our translations, even if that obliges us to “force” contemporary English).

The Jornada narrates anecdotes with a double aspect. On one hand, there is the mythical story about how an individual becomes independent of any power (Neira: 2006). On the other, the Jornada is one of the most outstanding descriptions of arbitrary power. Rather than contradict, these assessments support each other.

The Jornada exceeds the main colonial narrative genres. It combines the following elements while simultaneously surpassing them: “crónica” (chronicle), juridical statement, “relación verdadera” (true history) and “carta” (letter). The Jornada is also an exculpation and accusation, and includes several letters, one of them, addressed by Lope to Phillip II, of particular political significance. In the Jornada, guilt and innocence are related to the soldier’s right or lack thereof to dispossess the King’s officer, Pedro de Ursúa, of his mission. The authors of the Jornada, the soldiers Vázquez and Almesto, are accused by the Crown of having participated in this mutiny. Were they found guilty, they would be hanged. As an accusation, the Jornada is, more openly than other chronicles, a subsidiary of the political aim of the writer and of his interpretation of the origin of the Spanish American States. In order to be discharged of the accusation, the soldiers Almesto and Vázquez, through the Jornada, narrate anecdotes, mainly in a chronological and lineal way, but underlying this order there is another: the philosophical structure and myth of the origin of the State which allows them to create the concept of a crime of lese-majesty. The soldiers’ activities in their trip along the Amazon River are organized as a historical narration, in which we can distinguish three stages, but one must consider that it is impossible to separate these deeds from the philosophical structure that underlies the text. The three stages are:

 

a)  Crisis of the Political Order on the River: A Rebellion in the Name of King Phillip II

In 1559, Pedro de Ursúa is appointed governor of El Dorado in order to discover and conquer this land. Nevertheless, the political and military order necessary to succeed seems insufficient. Jornada’s writers say (a posteriori) that from the very beginning there were foretellings (“pronósticos”) that the expedition would not finish well, for it began with “blood” (Vázquez and Almesto, 1984: 17). The initial degradation of political order, which began with the affair of friar Portillo, who was obliged to give his money to finance the expedition, is later transformed into the fulfillment of a prophecy. According to the Jornada, all the expeditionaries who used violence died with a knife (Vázquez and Almesto, 1984: 17), what is confirmed later, when almost all men who participated in Ursúa’s death are, according to the authors, punished by God: “lo que de esto se crée es que comenzaba ya a venir el castigo del cielo sobre los matadores de Pedro de Orsúa” (Vázquez and Almesto, 1984: 17). This kind of magical and negative presage determines the rhetorical, cruel and sombre tone of the Jornada[3]. The text presents a kind of fate whose fulfillment occurs through and by means of the narration of the expedition’s anecdotes.

Ursúa and his group leave Peru, cross the Andes eastbound and navigate the Amazon River. Ursúa travels with Inés de Atienza, his lover, to whom, according to Almesto and Vázquez, he pays more attention than what the soldiers consider convenient. According to these soldiers, Ursúa abandoned his duties, including neglecting to punish Montoya, who attempted to desert at the beginning of the trip. To not punish a deserter endangers the goal of the expedition and the bodily security of the men, for in the conditions they travel they need a strong authority. The expeditionaries are unhappy because of Ursúa´s weakness. During the first months of the expedition, aside from Ursúa, no one is able to lead the trip, for the expeditionaries remain isolated, except a small portion of them, led, secretly, by Lope de Aguirre. In order to remove the obstacles which prevent them from achieving the goal of conquering El Dorado, this group kills Pedro de Ursúa (12/31/1559). Hours after having killed Ursúa, on January 1, 1560, there is already a first assembly, in which they declare their continued loyalty to the King and in which Fernando de Guzmán, one of the killers, acts as “general”.

 

b)  A Weak Attempt to Restore the Political Order

During the days immediately following the murder of Ursúa, General Guzmán exercises his power in the name of the King. In this time, the killers not only justify the assassination of Ursúa due to what they consider his negligence to fulfill his duties (which is a crime), they also claim that they are better able to carry out the King´s mission[4]. To make their position legal, they sign a declaration of fidelity to the King and to their mission: discovering and conquering El Dorado in the name of Phillip II (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 43). Saying that they have killed Ursúa in the name of King Phillip II of Spain is an attempt to transform a crime into a lawful act. Lope de Aguirre considers this to be impossible, for assassinating an official of the King could never be legal according to the Crown’s law and, moreover, never be forgiven. Beside his signature in the declaration, Lope adds the word traidor (traitor) and says to the soldiers: “what madness and stupidity had we all, that, having killed a Governor of the King, he whom carried the powers and represented the King, thought to eliminate their guilt through this means” (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 44)[5]. Nevertheless, Lope’s attitude remains isolated and the soldiers did not follow him.

Some days later, still in January 1560, under Lope´s instigation, a second assembly takes place:

“»Don Fernando de Guzmán wanted the whole camp to have him as their General, and for this, having warned his friends and allies, he ordered all the people to gather in the central square […] don Fernando de Guzmán gave them an explanation of the following form:

«Gentlemen […] I have this charge of General, as you know, and I do not know if [I have it] against some of your wishes, so that between us there could be more conformity, I, from now on, abandon the charge and I renounce it […] so that you can freely give it to whomever you see fit, that he be best fit and have the consensus of all […]»

Then, the friends of don Fernando de Guzmán, first, and following them the majority of the camp, said that they wanted as their General don Fernando de Guzmán, and don Fernando accepted” (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 49). [6]

 

 

c)   Political Transformation of the Facts: Electing a New King and Founding a New State

Lope’s attitude nullifies the attempt to transform the assassination of governor Ursúa into a legal action. The group of conquistadors could not continue trying to be absolved without risking their lives. They also know that in previous Peruvian rebellions, as in Gonzalo Pizarro’s, the King´s officers offered merced (mercy) to the mutineers, but the chiefs and selected soldiers were punished with death.

The marañones, as the soldiers are also called in the Jornada, have to change their political status in order to not perish when they next meet the King’s officials or army. As long as they remain subjects of the King, they will be considered traitors and be hanged. In March 1560, Lope gathers for the third time his fellow conquistadors before General Guzmán and convinces them to completely break with Spain. He then proposes to elect a new king: Fernando de Guzmán, founding, at the same time, a new Kingdom which could legally resist Phillip II’s officials, who they know they will meet in Venezuela. The Jornada quotes Lope’s speech:

“ ‘Gentlemen, as you know and saw the other day, by our general approval, we made D. Fernando of Guzmán General, and we signed with our names […] so the war would have a better foundation and more authority, it was convenient that you make and have as their Prince D. Fernando of Guzman, henceforth, to be crowned as King upon arrival to Peru; to achieve this it was necessary that you secede from the Kings of Spain and deny the vassalage that you owed to King D. Phillip, and from then on Guzman claimed he did not know, nor had he seen, nor did he want to have him as King and you chose as your Prince and natural King Fernando of Guzman’.» (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 50-51). [7]

 

Electing a new king simultaneously signifies the end of loyalty to King Phillip II and the birth of a new Kingdom: the Tierra Firme y Pirú (Firm Land and Peru). The chronicle narrates the ontogenesis of the new Kingdom, but it is narrated in terms of a philosophic-juridical explanation of the feudal commonwealth’s phylogenesis. The ontogenesis of the new kingdom happens through a conjuración.

Guzmán, then, is crowned King “por la gracia de Dios, Príncipe de Tierra Firme y Pirú, y Gobernador de Chile” (by the grace of God, Prince of Firm Land and Peru, and Governor of Chile) and he distributes public offices, rights and duties among his men, who have just become vassals. Therefore, Guzmán decides the destiny of the soldiers according to his sovereign will. This is the case when Lope tries to kill Gonzalo Duarte; the King intervenes and removes the soldier from Lope’s hands.

The new king, Fernando de Guzmán, fails to lead the expedition and bring justice, even more so than the former governor, Ursúa. This creates a void of power. Within this void arises a new power, one that does not respect the covenant or the assembly of soldiers. This power is Lope de Aguirre, who soon menaces Guzmán. On May 22, 1561, Lope de Aguirre orders Guzmán to be killed and the order is immediately executed. Lope does not go on to show, according to the chronicle, any intention to make a new election or to create a new Republic (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 64).

The former republic of Tierra Firme y Pirú is not abolished (neither confirmed) and continues its existence along a process of decadence. Under Lope’s power, the expeditionaries continue their trip through the Amazon River and the Atlantic Ocean towards Venezuela and Panama. Aguirre exercises the power of life and death over his men, without any relation to peace keeping within the society of Spanish conquerors. Nevertheless, he seems to lack the military efficiency he needs to achieve his aims: to return from Panama to seize Peru. Since Lope has all power and control on the Amazon River, the soldiers lived under the constant menace of his arbitrary rule.   Killing King Guzmán annihilates the short term republic of the jungle. Lope, as the new authority, does not respect the first political covenant which legitimizes the authority of a leader. Eight days after the crime of Guzmán, Lope orders the execution of Diego Trujillo, Cristóbal García and Juan Tello. He also orders the disarmament of anyone he considers suspicious. The new insecurity is vertical: from the “sovereign” to the “vassals”, and also horizontal: the soldiers suffer from an insecurity that originates in their fellow conquistadors. Lope remains still when Madrigal kills Juan López Cerrato. Days later, they abandon 100 Indians, many of them Christianized. Any sense of commonwealth is destroyed.

 

 

2. THE PHILOSOPHICAL ORIGIN OF THE STATE

Through conjuración, the conjurados change their political status. They live submitted to the King’s power, but they will live free; they live menaced by the Crown´s officials, but they will live without fear, for they will defend themselves, not with a lawyer, but with their own sword and army. The word “conjurar” has two meanings in Spanish: 1.) to establish a link with somebody by means of swearing loyalty; and 2.) to settle an agreement in order to act against an official or against the State. Mario Góngora, an expert on Spanish feudalism and its influence in America, writes:

“the base of the estates is the covenant, the formation of bonds based upon an oath of gentlemen, nobles, (and) cities in defense of their privileges […] From the covenant they form permanent institutions, that are made up of jurisdictional autonomy («the justice of peers») and, in addition, the representation before the King as members of the Kingdom. This last right implies, correlatively, the charge of helping the King” (Góngora, 1951: 24-25).[8]

Conjuración is usually translated as “conspiracy.” Nevertheless, this English word does not incorporate the Spanish meaning of legal agreement, especially when it is related to the explanation of the origin of the State. According to the historian Mario Góngora, a Roman doctrine of rights becomes the juridical center of the Spanish crown with the Catholic Kings and lasts until the beginning of the 18th century. Through a pacto de sumisión (submission covenant), this doctrine explained the dualism between consent and loyalty, as well as that between king and kingdom; and made legitimate the “derecho de resistencia” (right to resist) if the king or his officials didn’t fulfill the conditions of the covenant. Its point of departure was that power was initially rooted in the Republic and in all of its members. People’s cession of power to the king is only justified for the members of the republic who would be (according to feudal right) unable to govern themselves. Thus the king’s duty is to protect this commonwealth. Whenever the king or his officials fail or abandon their duty, in the name of this commonwealth or republic, the people can and must resist them and choose a new leader, to whom they will again cede their power and rights. This cession could be temporary or permanent, total or partial, giving way to the complex system of fueros, or local rights that some cities and regions kept and which had to be protected by the king (Góngora, 1951). [9] These fueros are grounded on the fact that the king receives his power neither from his own capabilities nor directly from God, as we will see in the next section. These theories of conjuración and of fueros were in place during the time of the expedition.

In a similar vein, the Spanish theologist Francisco de Vitoria (1483-1546), who had a great influence on the Crown’s decisions about Americans’ issues, writes that sovereignty comes from God but is received by the people, who in turn cede the power to the Prince. The Prince’s authority comes from God, but is channeled through the people (as a whole, as a republic) in order to assure the existence and wellbeing of this republic. Why? Human beings are weak and, because of that weakness, they need to live in a society (Vitoria: 1960, De potestate civili § 4 and 5) [10]. The aim of society is to allow burdens be shared in a reciprocal fashion, a task that requires a chief. According to Vitoria, because human beings, as a multitude, would be unable to govern themselves, they need to cede power to a few or to a single prince, but to cede power is not the equivalent of ceding sovereignty, which remains in the hands of the republic [11].

From another point of view, Jean Bodin, who according to Mario Góngora, had a strong influence on the Spanish Juridical System, in Les six livres de la république (The Six Books on Commonwealth), published in 1576, writes:

“The government of all commonwealths, colleges, corporate bodies, or households whatsoever, rests on the right to command on one side, and the obligation to obey on the other, which arises when the natural liberty which each man has to live as he chooses, is exercised subject to the power of another. The right to command another is either of a public or a private character; public when vested in a sovereign who declares the law, or in the magistrate who executes it, and issues orders binding on his subordinates and private citizens generally; private when vested in heads of households (Bodin, 1953: Book I, chapter 3-5)

 

According to Bodin, natural freedom consists of depending only on ones own capabilities: “that is to say, depending on reason, which is always according to God’s will” (Bodin, 1993: 74) (“c’est-à-dire, de la raison, qui est toujours conforme à la volonté de Dieu”). He considers that sovereignty is

“that absolute and perpetual power vested in a commonwealth which in Latin is termed majestas […] I have described it as perpetual because one can give absolute power to a person or group of persons for a period of time, but that time expired they become subjects once more. […] The true sovereign remains always seized of his power. […] If it were otherwise, and the absolute authority delegated by the prince to a lieutenant was regarded as itself sovereign power, the latter could use it against his prince who would thereby forfeit his eminence, and the subject could command his lord, the servant his master. This is a manifest absurdity […] Any authority exercised in virtue of an office or a commission can be revoked, or made tenable for as long or short a period as the sovereign wills” (Bodin, 1953: Book I, chapter 8).

 

The Six Books of Commonwealth, published 15 years after Lope’s death, is useful to understand the philosophical and legal situation of the expedition in a period in which feudal times were declining and modern political tendencies had just begun to arise. The sovereignty of Spain, in one case, or of the assembled soldiers, in the other, is absolute, only the cession of power is temporary, either to Ursúa or to Guzmán. Nevertheless: how did the soldiers conceive their situation? When the soldiers kill governor Ursúa (January 1, 1561), they are about 2500 kilometers away from the Viceroy’s control, on the eastern side of the Andes, without any possibility of establishing contact with the authorities except by arriving to the Atlantic Ocean and navigating to Venezuela or Panama. The expedition follows the trip to Venezuela through the Amazon River and the Atlantic Ocean for more than two years (September 1559 – October 1561). The trip also changes soldiers’ perspectives, which moves the conquistadors progressively away from the moral bonds and political duties of the Spanish society in America. The first of them to “forget” these ties is, according to the Jornada, governor Ursúa himself, who begins to pay more attention to his lover Inés than to the conquest of El Dorado: “parescía que las cosas de guerra y descubrimiento las tenía olvidadas” (“it seemed he forgot the things of war and discovering”, Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 32). The soldiers are also confronted with new situations, such as the need to depend on their own forces alone; they suffer from the difficulty of adaptation to the new conditions and, at the same time, find them tempting. The trip awakens their sense of independence, makes them conscious of their situation and of the political steps they need to take to cross the boundary that separates them from the foundation of a new commonwealth. This is, of course, not an erudite meditation, but a vivid and immediate way of thinking about their life on the river.

The reality of depending on their own forces leads them progressively closer to a situation of natural freedom [12] in which they realize that their sovereignty is permanent and they only cede power temporally. Moreover, as we have seen, natural freedom demands autonomy and the creation of a society, for humans are too weak to survive alone. In political philosophy, natural freedom is a fiction that allows the understanding of political bonds. For the soldiers, little by little, it becomes a possibility they can reach thanks to their life on the river, far from Spain. Expeditionaries’ freedom, the base of their sovereignty, reaches its peak when Fernando de Guzmán is appointed king through an election. Holding an election requires, from the formal point of view, the ability to make a decision using one’s own rational power, in order to take care of oneself. This was narrated by Vitoria, but also by Bodin’s notion of “sovereignty” in The Six Books of the Commonwealth and in the Jornada; the first two in a philosophical manner, and the third through the anecdotes of the expedition.

Lope, in turn, is a mixture of traditional and modern values: he is angry because his former feudal leader, governor Ursúa, has abandoned such a good host, but he behaves in an individualistic way and values his own life more than that of the republic. We can understand this half traditional and half modern political character of Lope taking into account Thomas Hobbes’ (1588-1679) philosophy, which represents a more individualistic and modern point of view on the same subject. Hobbes writes that the first law of nature is freedom:

“The right of nature, which Writers commonly call Jus Naturale, is the Liberty each man hath, to use his own power, as he will himself, for the preservation of his own Nature; that is to say, of his own Life” (Hobbes, 1980: Part I, chapter 14).

Some chapters later, Hobbes writes:

“Liberty, or Freedome, signifieth (properly) the absence of Opposition; (by Opposition, I mean externall Impediments of motion) […] A Free-Man, is he, that in those things, which by his strength and wit he is able to do, is not hindred to doe what he has a will to […] Fear and Liberty are consistent; as when a man throweth his goods into the Sea for feare the ship should sink, he doth it neverthelesse very willingly, and may refuse to doe if he will […] And generally all actions which men doe in Common-Wealths, for feare of the law, or actions, which the doers had liberty to omit” (Hobbes, 1980: Part I, chapter 14).

The natural law follows the precepts of reason, which forbids doing anything against self-conservation. When human beings feel obliged to act for fear they will be damaged, they do not renounce freedom, for it is rational to follow laws which require a man to protect himself. Following this argument, under fear, the expeditionaries have a duty to themselves. This duty is to defend themselves from danger, whenever it may come, including from Spanish authorities. During the first assembly of soldiers, some hours after killing Ursúa, Guzmán and the soldiers sign a declaration of fidelity to the King in order to make their position legal and that when Lope’s turn to sign arrives, he adds to his signature the word “traitor” (traidor). To sign a declaration of loyalty hours after having killed governor Ursúa means, from the philosophical point of view, to follow Vitoria’s viewpoint more than that of Hobbes, i.e., to follow the traditional point of view more than the individualistic and modern one. Nevertheless, as we have seen, Lope also says that killing the King’s representative will never be forgiven and they must “sell their lives before they would be taken away” (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 44), for they are all traitors. This act triggered a vivid discussion in the camp, whose philosophical nucleus is: is this declaration a means to be protected by Spanish justice or, conversely, a self-accusation that obliges them to break with Phillip II in order to survive? The matter is not so much electing a chief, but whether or not this chief will remain loyal to Phillip II. The conflict between both points of view is so strong that some expeditionaries would have died if general Guzmán hadn’t intervened: “su general y otros capitanes se pusieron por medio y los apaciguaron” (“their general and other captains stepped in and appeased them”; Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 44).

     How can we understand Guzmán’s intervention? According to Hobbes, the second law of nature, which is deduced from the former, is:

“that a man be willing, when others are so too, as farre-forth, as for Peace, and defense of himself he shall think it necessary, to lay down this right to all things; and be contented with so much liberty against other men, as he would allow other men against himself” (Hobbes, 1980: Part I, chapter 14, he underlines).

In order to obtain peace and justice, it is necessary to create a political union, which receives its power from everybody to be defended by it:

“The only way to erect such Common Power […] is, to conferre all their power and strenght upon one Man, or upon an Assembly of men, that may reduce all their Wills, by plurality of voices, unto one Will […] in such a manner, as if every man should say to every man, I authorise and give up my Right of Governing my self, to this Man, or to this Assembly of men, on this condition, that thou give up thy Right to him, and Authorise all his Actions in like manner. This done, the Multitude so united in one Person, is called a Common-Wealth, in latin civitas. This is the generation of the great Leviathan” (Hobbes, 1980: Part I, chapter 14, his emphasis).

Nevertheless, Guzmán does not succeed in becoming the legal Leviathan between two opposed bands within his men. On the contrary, in the meantime, the rivalry between the soldiers prepares the birth of the new State, for they need to name a superior power to keep the peace. Lope, and not Guzmán, is the only one who has that strength. As simple General, alone, Guzmán can hardly keep peace in the camp. He requires a formal cession of the highest level of power, but he does not have enough power to reach it and he is even frightened of doing so. Guzmán needs the help of Lope. Lope´s mediation, therefore, is indispensable.

 

 

 

3. A CATASTROPHE: THE FOUNDATION OF A NEW KINGDOM

From a position of mediator, two months after killing Ursúa, in March 1560, Lope gathers the soldiers in the third assembly and proposes they cease being Spanish vassals in order to create a new commonwealth and to cede power to a new king: Fernando de Guzmán. For Lope, the only way to not perish is to create a new political system, which must not inherit the qualities of the former. This is, technically speaking, a catastrophic change. A catastrophe is a discontinuous social or biological process, in which the two stages are linked, but the qualities, properties and structure of the first do not continue in the second. What might be legal in the first could be illegal in the second, and vice-versa. This catastrophic change is necessary to survive. The concept of catastrophe was used philosophically by Jacques Derrida in his commentary about Rousseau in La grammatologie, in order to explain the origin of writing and the passage from the state of nature to the state of civilization [13], and by Jean Petitot-Cocorda, in Identité et catastrophes, topologie de la différence [14] (in Lévi-Strauss, 1977: 116-118). More recently, the concept of catastrophe has been used to explain the evolution of social beings, as new generations require the disappearance of the former in order to find a place or the resources to survive. A catastrophe is a change in the manner of existing, a change of state or political allegiance in order to survive.

Aside from this mathematical and socio-biological concept of catastrophe, some Sartrean categories, developed in his analysis of the French Revolution, contribute to the interpretation of these anecdotes, as we will see. Sartre describes a rational history (opposed to factual history) of the creation of a political community in a revolutionary moment. Sartre distinguishes between a collective (collectif) and a group (groupe). The first is a gathering of men who act without a common goal and remain detached from their peers, keeping an external relation with them. Conversely, a group exists when “the synthetic event reveals the impossibility of changing as the impossibility to live” (Sartre, 1960: 385) [15]. Later, Sartre adds: “the group in fusion is still the series that denies itself, reinteriorizing the external negations” (Sartre, 1960: 412) (“le groupe en fusion c’est encore la série, qui se nie en réintériorisant les négations extérieures”). The exterior danger (to be hanged by Phillip II’s officials for a lese-majesty crime) shows that if they do not change, they will die. In a group, every single person receivis his aim and purposes from the decisions of the assembly, to which each one’s decisions are identified. The assembly of men tends to create something similar, but not identical, to a Sartrean group. An assembly, like that which took place when the soldiers elect Guzmán, tends to transform a collective (each soldier isolated) into a group (all united by one will, internal to all of them)[16]. The succession of assemblies of soldiers in the River is equivalent to gaining consciousness that the expeditionaries need to change political status if they do not want to die. Before the third assembly, Lope and his few friends were a collection of bandits. After it, they and the totality of the soldiers have created a political commonwealth. This narration coincides with what Sartre calls the oath (le serment). Making an oath to fulfill each one’s duty establishes the legitimate menace of being killed if this duty and loyalty to the group is abandoned. During this oath, Lope places himself in the center of the feudal, juridical and political fiction (loyalty oath). Nevertheless, Lope’s authority is expansive and arbitrary, and he becomes a second power between the people (the soldiers) and the King (Guzmán), who becomes the sovereign. This institution of the sovereign is coherent with divine right, for this right is based upon people’s natural recognition of the superiority of one man, who becomes king through an election, as Vitoria writes.

After having argued about the political situation, Lope walks towards Guzmán’s hut; then “everyone followed him, and the first one was Lope de Aguirre, then all the others, demanded his hand [to kiss it], and called him Excellency, and he hugged everyone but didn’t allow anyone to kiss his hand” [17] (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 51). Kissing the new king’s hand is a feudal loyalty oath, a conjuración. The physical participation of all the soldiers seems to be required, for they are a republic and, following their natural freedom, nobody votes for Fernando de Guzmán in the name of someone absent. Besides, the possibility that each one’s voice reaches the voices of others is the heart of a free community (those who are not free: women, Indians and slaves, don’t take part in the assembly and never speak in the Jornada). This way, the expeditionaries abandon their loyalty to Phillip II of Spain, elect Fernando de Guzmán king and swear fidelity to him and to each other. These actions have a very feudal “tone”, but Lope does not respect personal lives, even before killing Guzmán, and he behaves, from this point of view, more as a modern absolute power than as a feudal knight who respects the fueros. Lope acts, in some respects, in such a way that Spanish classical political philosophy of his time cannot describe and that will be understood only with the birth of modern politics, as it is represented by Hobbes and partly by Bodin.

That’s why Vitoria´s philosophy only allows the understanding of the first part of the soldiers´ decisions, i.e., choosing a new leader. The additional creation of a new commonwealth can be better understood under Bodin’s concept of sovereignty, which is absolute, or Hobbes’ more individualistic and modern concept of natural freedom. Both philosophers try to elaborate a doctrine of a strong political power; but Hobbes increases, at the same time, the political strength of the State and a defense of private life and property, even when it is justly menaced by public power. Hobbes guarantees the right to protect ones own life even when somebody is fairly punished to death. The commonwealth may have the right to take a life that it has previously saved with political power, but, at the same time, it would be against natural law that the criminal does not try to protect himself against such a menace. In order to enhance the individual over the commonwealth, Hobbes writes:

“First therefore, seeing sovereignty by institution is by covenant of every one to every one; and sovereignty by acquisition, by covenants of the vanquished to the victor, or child to the parent; it is manifest that every subject has liberty in all those things the right whereof cannot by covenant be transferred. I have shown before, in the fourteenth Chapter, that covenants not to defend a man’s own body are void. Therefore, if the sovereign command a man, though justly condemned, to kill, wound, or maim himself; or not to resist those that assault him; or to abstain from the use of food, air, medicine, or any other thing without which he cannot live; yet hath that man the liberty to disobey. If a man be interrogated by the sovereign, or his authority, concerning a crime done by himself, he is not bound (without assurance of pardon) to confess it; because no man, as I have shown in the same chapter, can be obliged by covenant to accuse himself” (Hobbes, 1980: Part II, chapter 21).

 

Ninety years before the publication of The Leviathan (1651), the Jornada narrates how a group of expeditionaries, facing the troubles of natural freedom, under Lope’s leadership, create, freely, a public power through a general covenant, and how this power intervenes in order to secure freedom when the previous legitimate commonwealth become a menace. When the Jornada describes Lope, it creates a personage who is both feudal and modern; the contemporary research needs both late Spanish classical thought and modern philosophy to understand his adventure on the river.

 

 

 

4. FAILURE OF THE REPUBLIC OF TIERRA FIRME AND RESTORATION OF THE PREVIOUS COVENANT WITH PHILLIP II

 

During the existence of the republic of Tierra Firme y Pirú (May 1560 – 27th October 1561), the goals of a commonwealth are not achieved, neither in the Roman sense described by Góngora, nor in Vitoria’s feudal political philosophy, nor in the absolute sense, as described later by Bodin or Hobbes. Throughout the process of creating a new political body, Lope’s own body and his regard for the expeditionaries are always present. The central political position of Lope in the meeting is paralleled by his central physical position between Guzmán and the soldiers. The precedent-setting phrase “Everyone followed him [Lope]” describes Lope’s central position between Guzmán and the soldiers and places him in the political center at the very moment that he creates a political body whose head and sovereign are shifted to a new king. Nevertheless, the creation of this political body also transfers power towards Lope, who became the axis of the new political situation and, at the same time, always keeps a distance from it. Lope is an off-centered center, but his awareness reaches all the camp, in spite of the fact that the “legal” sovereignty is grounded in King Guzmán. The vassal link is created by the physical act of kissing the King’s hand, but this act is undermined by Lope’s ability to be in the center and, at the same time, everywhere, including above and under the new King’s hierarchy.

There is an enormous ambiguity in Lope’s exertion of power in the middle of the Amazon River. From one point of view, he has called together an assembly of bodies to obtain the unanimity of voices that Guzmán requires in order to become their new absolute King. This proceeding is a condition without which there would be no commonwealth. The narrative of this proceeding follows the same structure as that of the birth of a political community that many philosophers narrate: original freedom, incapability of assuring one’s own property and life against the attack of fellow human beings and cession of personal power to one person under the condition that this person will defend all property and life, but this condition is not fulfilled by Lope.

This new commonwealth fails to achieve the goals of a commonwealth according to the main traditional Spanish philosophers, as well as to the first modern ones. The failure has two causes. The first is that the new absolute King, don Fernando de Guzmán, is surpassed by Lope’s authority because Lope physically places himself between the soldiers and the sovereign in the very moment that the new power is transferred from each soldier to the King. In its first stage, the commonwealth is divided and there are two powers: on the one side, Guzmán, the visible and “legal” one (a “legal” transfer of power has been made to him); on the other side, Lope, who keeps almost as much power as Guzmán even though he has not received it from the soldiers, and who does not need this formal transfer of power. He acts as a modern and terrific Leviathan, not regulated by natural law, in the middle of a feudal situation, and he personally profits from both mentalities, but this acting “as” shows the distance between a derisory kingdom and a proper commonwealth.

The second cause of the failure of the new commonwealth is that King Guzmán is not able to protect his men’s property and life. Lope is a constant danger to the men. Even king Guzmán is unable to prevent Lope from sacrificing some men, which are necessary to the very goal that Lope wants to reach: seizing Peru. The expeditionaries fear they will perish even having changed their political status, due to Lope de Aguirre’s practice of terror, which becomes more intense as of May 22, 1561, when he orders Guzmán´s execution. In an absolute commonwealth, it is accepted that the sovereign can execute someone in order to assure the survival of the commonwealth, that is to say, assure everyone’s property and life. The scandal for political philosophy and for the writers of the Jornada is not that Lope uses terror —a common practice of the Crown— but that terror is not used to defend the life and property of the members of the Commonwealth, as proposes Hobbes[18]. According to Sartre’s definition, inspired by the French Revolution, terror (terreur) is the common agreement among a group to fulfill the requirements of an oath under penalty of death[19]. Nevertheless, in the case of the expeditionaries, there is only one who exercises terror: Lope de Aguirre, and under him it retains very little of the initial common agreement.

Lope’s crimes are unnecessary from a military and political point of view. His crimes are gradually less and less related to achieving the very goals for which the soldiers have made the transfer of their power. The ambiguity of Lope is that he creates the very commonwealth that he destroys through an always strong, distant and emotionless relationship with the bodies of the soldiers or with the people they meet in the different towns they go by. This absence of emotions allows him to easily destroy the bodies of the expeditionaries or the inhabitants of the villages in which they stop. According to the Jornada, when he realized he would die, he would have said: “if I have to die destroyed in this state of Venezuela, I do not trust in the faith of God, neither in Mohammed’s sect, neither in Luther, nor in pagans, and I assert that there is nothing more than to be born and to die” (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 147).

Given that Lope never defines what is good or bad according to his judgment, uncertainty is the constant situation of the expeditionaries, even the constant situation of Elvira, his daughter. This uncertainty is similar to that which men experienced in primitive freedom, before a covenant creates a commonwealth. From this point of view, neither Guzmán, as we have already seen, nor Lope can be considered a proper absolute sovereign. As long as they do not assure the safety of the expeditionaries’ bodies, there is no feudal, absolute or liberal commonwealth in the camp, regardless of how cruel the River King and later the tyrant may be. Lope, in spite of announcing to King Phillip II their political independence from Spain and his absolute leadership over the expedition, does not fulfill the conditions that are necessary to create a commonwealth, as absolute as this may be, which prevents the consideration of him as a hero of American independence.

In June 1561, the expeditionaries arrive at Margarita Island, off the Venezuelan coast. Given that, again, soldiers’ bodies and properties are not safe, men use their natural freedom (which is never lost) to preserve themselves by the best means. This requires the formation of a commonwealth in which everyone carries the burdens of the others in a reciprocal way or to embrace an already existing one. Some weeks later they leave La Margarita and land in the continent, in Venezuela, where some skirmishes take place between this decaying group of soldiers and the old but solid commonwealth of Spain, represented by King Phillip II’s civil representatives and colonial troops. This makes the expeditionaries realize that they can only save their lives by abandoning Lope and coming back to their original republic. The commonwealth of Tierra Firme y Pirú is deserted by its members and defeated by King Phillip’s forces. The new and derisory State, recently born on the River, is annihilated. It lasted from March 1561 until October 27, 1561.

 

 

 

5.PHILOSOPHICAL STRUCTURE OF THE JORNADA

 

The philosophical underwriting of the Jornada narrates the theory of vassals or an assembly’s submission to a master in order to found a new kingdom. This is a juridical and philosophical fiction, and also a myth, which coincides with historian Mario Gongora´s description of Spanish law in the 16th century. Nevertheless, the structure of some aspects of Lope´s attitude can not be fully understood under this scholastic philosophy, for they are closer to what is described by Jean Bodin or Thomas Hobbes’ philosophy. Previous traditional philosophy could only describe it as a perversion of political loyalty, in a negative moral sense. But is there something else?

Because of the connection between traditional political philosophy and the main aspects of the Jornada, one can ask if the authors of the chronicle are really describing the facts of the trip or just mounting pieces on a philosophical narration necessary to create the meanings of “loyalty” and “Lope de Aguirre’s mutiny.” According to Vitoria, Bodin, Hobbes and Mario Gongora’s interpretation, any relationship between a prince and his vassals is based upon a fictional but solid theory of a first covenant between these parties. A mutiny means the breaking of this covenant and the resistance of legal power. The authors of the Jornada narrate a philosophical structure in two stages. In the first, they narrate a mutiny, not necessarily as the deeds occurred, but as they could have been conceived by 16th century political philosophy. In the second, they create, through narration, the figure of one philosophically understood to be guilty. “Understandable” to whom? To the judges of the Audiencia de Santo Domingo (the colonial tribunals), who had to be convinced that there was a mutiny and a mutineer. The soldiers had to narrate a philosophical story of breaking the first covenant and founding a rebellious State against Phillip II. Without noticing it, as they build the personage called Lope, they insinuate a behavior that can be better tolerated by modern than by traditional Spanish philosophy.

Our question about what the soldiers are really describing is not only based on empirical grounds. There are also some epistemological principles that allow us to pose it. Peter Mason, in Representations of the Other (Mason: 1990), a text heavily influenced by Derrida’s concept of “archi-écriture”, shows how many of the European representations of America and of American Indians closely followed Plinian descriptions of human races. Even some Spanish friars, such as Diego Durán, who in 1581 asked Indians to paint their ancestors, collected images of men with one eye or one foot, very similar to some Plinian descriptions of human races. Mason shows that something similar happened in the case of Walter Raleigh’s narration of Guiana and he gives many other examples in which the Europeans saw, described and even painted America in the only way they could see, describe and paint it: as the result of “productive imagination.” Without “productive imagination” they would not have been able to write at all. Productive imagination has a double root: Kantian, for it is not empirically motivated; and Derridian, for it is inspired by Derrida’s concept of archi-écriture. Mason says:

“This archi-écriture is the pure form of the concept of writing prior to its realisation in a signifying substance. It precedes speech and writing since it precedes the very division of the regions of sensibility. It makes impossible any kind of hierarchy between the registration of acoustic phenomena and visual or graphic records” (Mason, 1990: 146).

According to Mason, Columbus’ vision of Indians’ nudity helps him to create his vision of paradise thanks to productive imagination. We can transpose a similar interpretation to Jornada’s description of Lope. He is described as sleeping very little during his tyranny and always wearing heavy weapons (two coats, a salet, a sword, a dagger, and in his hand, a pike or a harquebus) (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 148). In spite of always being armed, throughout the whole journey from Peru to Venezuela along the Amazon River and the Atlantic Ocean, in which more than a hundred killings are narrated, Lope commits only one crime with his own weapons. The fact that he is described as always wearing weapons prepares and sets the narrative and philosophical structure of crimes and rebellion. He might have been armed by the narration in order to create the narrative mutineer, the guilty soldier and the guiltiest of all the conquistadors, the one who must hold all the blame and receive all the punishment. Wearing weapons transforms Lope into the individual rebel more than committing crimes. But the Jornada is not a mere chronicle. It is also a juridical piece written by two soldiers in order to veil their probable participation in several crimes, when the Spanish authorities have already seized the mutineers. Therefore, the Jornada had a performative aspect: not only does it describe a fact, but it pretends to create an effect on the court, a juridical effect: the declaration of innocence. In this trial, Lope (already dead) was condemned and the two soldiers, authors of the Jornada, were absolved. Like Oedipus, a mythical criminal, the Lope of the Jornada has a physical defect—lameness (Vázquez and Almesto, 1984: 117). The physical and the moral defects are melded in Lope de Aguirre: these anecdotes about himself are not only aspects of his personality, but part of the traditional philosophical account and the conceptual structure that allows the narration of a mutiny to have a legal effect. This mutiny is a double sided myth, that of a group of men in the Amazon River who rebel against the King and that of the philosophical significance of breaking the covenant, which grounds the legitimacy of political power. According to this perspective, the Jornada is the representation of a philosophical fiction created to produce a juridical decision.

The basis of the Jornada, full of historical facts, is not only the reality that the authors were witnesses of the crimes, but the primacy of a productive imagination that allows the literary and logical building of these facts and makes possible empirical images about what happened during the expedition. Just as Plinean images were able to create the pictures and descriptions that some of the main witnesses “perceived” in America, the two authors of the Jornada could have made something similar. This is not a matter of empirical copying, but of mounting the narration of events (Lope’s rebellion) and making it understandable according to, and by virtue of, a philosophical narration, which anticipates some of the modern aspects of the individual. This takes us away from a simplified (but common) affirmation, on one side, that the condemning tone of the Jornada was only due to the authors’ will to blame Lope and to save themselves; and, on the other, that Lope is a kind of hero of American consciousness (Pastor, 1983) or independence (Posse, 1981). Neither an insolated theory, according to which Lope’s ideological or class interests could have lead him to rebel (Otero, 1985), nor the juridical interest of the Jornada authors alone, explains the nature and content of the narration at hand. The condemning tone is related to the authors’ will to blame Lope, but not limited to this. It is also related to the narrative armature, to the historical facts and to its philosophical structure: under scholastic Spanish philosophy and legal tradition there was no place for something different than blaming Lope. There is no rhetorical or historical armature without a philosophical one. This philosophical aspect underwrites the whole armature and all aspects of the Jornada. We are not talking of the soldiers’ intentions, nor of their influence on the content of the chronicle; we are talking of the fact that the writing of the Jornada was only possible within some conceptual bases which were not chosen nor created by its authors. A philosophical critique about writing and perception is needed to understand this historical chronicle which shares, with some of the first pictures and narrations about America, the fact that almost all the information has only a narrative base, which is both philosophical and empirical. Facts are a philosophical construction whose first aim is to define what a fact is, even for such simple people as the soldiers who sign the Jornada.

 

 

 

6.POLITICS OF (THE MENACED) BODIES

Vitoria, Bodin and Hobbes are unable to separate the origin of the State from the conservation of bodies. Before a republic exists, the body is represented, respectively, in Vitoria’s On Civil Power (De potestate civili), Bodin’s The Six Books of Commonwealth and Hobbes’ The Leviathan, under menace from nature and from other men. This menace transforms the body into something fragile. In spite of the fact that bodily safety has a key role in the mentioned authors, philosophy didn’t pay enough attention to the fact that the human body is itself one of the objects of politics. How is it possible to speak of power without taking into account how this power is exerted through the physical domination of the body? Even the democratic political theory, in its most egalitarian form, as exposed by Rousseau, inherits a “centered” and “vertical” conception of the foundation of the political body, in which an initial general agreement is considered the base and the center on which all other relations can be settled. What would happen if we invert this link and we base the political law and sovereignty on the control of micro-relations?

Political philosophy has not paid enough attention to the fact that the relationship between the political power and body is mediated through the control of daily activities. If the political power does not affect daily life, it does not affect the body. One of the main aspects of the Jornada is that it shows that Lope’s tyranny affects daily activities. This is the case when he prevents Montoya from shipping a mattress. This links the analysis of the philosophical structure of Jornada to a contemporary analysis of power, which is not only centered on sovereignty and law, but also on the trivial activities of life.

This fact was pointed out by Michel Foucault’s work Surveiller et punir (Foucault: 2003). In relation to the birth of the modern individual, Foucault asserts: “The body is also directly submerged in a political field; power relations work by seizing it immediately; they invest it, they mark it, they tame it, they torture it, they submit it to tasks” [20] (Foucault, 2003: 34).

In the Jornada, there is a general and systematic description of Lope’s control of trivial attitudes of the soldiers as a central element of political power. More than discussing sovereignty, more than representing his power by protocol, Lope seeks direct control. After killing King Fernando de Guzmán, Lope de Aguirre exercises his power directly, with no ceremony, in a horizontal and brutal way. Lope’s control of others’ bodies and of the relationship between the bodies is a means for keeping political control. In fact, it is just as important of a political goal as seceding from Spain. Human bodies, as they are described in the Jornada, either on the rafts or later in the camp, are a matter of politics, which take place at the horizontal level among the soldiers. Lope is one of them, he does not pretend to be legally superior to anyone, and this is a central part of his non-centralized and direct power, for he does not need legality.

After Foucault’s analysis of micro-power, and more generally, after post-critical theories, philosophy does not need to consider that the foundation of the political commonwealth is the base of political relations. We have already seen that Lope’s control of his fellow soldiers works before he acquires the open leadership of the expedition. In fact, it is possible to invert this relationship: micro-power links, micro-dependencies and micro-bonds between people can also be the ground upon which the whole political system is based. Lope de Aguirre gains his power through the absolute control of the trivial attitudes of the soldiers; he does not need any representation of sovereignty.

Our analysis of the development of human relations is based upon Foucault’s previously quoted assertion. Along the Amazon River, bodily relations on the rafts or in the camp are more permanent than the succession of the expedition’s leaders. The institution of the sovereign, of the commonwealth or of the Leviathan does not change the political nature of bodily relations during the journey. It is also possible, in a more general way that the same occurs with the foundation of the State. Does the foundation of the State change bodily power relations? The fact that the Jornada narrates Lope’s gradual increase of control over fellow bodies from the time when they leave Peru in September 1559, until his death in October 1651, is one of the most outstanding political phenomena of the expedition. When, already in Venezuela, in September 1561, he loses horizontal control of others’ bodies, he begins to talk, for the first time, about the soldiers’ duty. His decision to talk and represent his power to the expeditionaries coincides with the moment when they begin to abandon him to join King Phillip’s army. During the expedition, the loss of control of the bodies coincides with, and is the loss of political power. Unlike governor Ursúa and later King Guzmán, Lope’s power does not depend on his institutional and formal position as it is generally described in the political philosophy of absolute power of that time. His power becomes total, in spite of the fact that there is neither a vertical foundation of his capacities nor a center from which they emanate. His power is distributed in every corner of the camp. The absoluteness of his political control is related to the control of daily attitudes of the bodies. Lope decides where to place a mattress, who can rest if he is ill, and many other trivial and daily situations which, from a more classical point of view, are politically irrelevant. Some trivial attitudes toward life, which under other political systems are irrelevant, become important for Lope. There is no private life under Lope’s horizontal control. This makes Lope’s a more terrifying and absolute than a vertical but distant power system, as it is described in the traditional theory of absolute power, for it annihilates even the individual life and property that Hobbes tries to save with the legal Leviathan. Lope becomes a kind of an a-legal Leviathan. Lope’s side-by-side presence and closeness to his peers can be a kind of pre-modern and extreme example of what can happen in a society in which the traditional vertical control is substituted by a tight and horizontal one. The new horizontal (but nevertheless tyrannical) bond created in the camp can be understood, at least partially, with the Foucaultian notion of “panopticon”. Panopticon is simultaneously a kind of prison, an architectonic representation and a metaphor of a central power under which men are always visible to a controller who, in destroying intimacy, helps interiorize discipline[21].

The more the expeditionaries move away from the bureaucratic control of the Peruvian Viceroy, who lives in Lima, the more the vertical Leviathan weakens itself and new political phenomena arise. The more the vertical Leviathan weakens itself, the more the horizontal links strengthen and gain importance. Lope’s power does not care about any voluntary foundation or first covenant; Lope’s power is self-founded in the knowledge of the trivial desires of each one of the soldiers: satisfying their hunger, satisfying their desire for Inés (Ursúa’s lover), robbing when they seize Peru, etc.. He does not care about any principle of loyalty or religion; he cares only for soldiers’ horizontal loyalty to him. He does not need ceremonies or any protocol of acknowledgement to verify his power over the soldiers; nor does he need a representation of his own power. His power is not representable, it is only and always direct. A representation of power is a need of the classical and vertical Leviathan. The horizontal power is so direct that there is no mediation between those who are submitted and the power which submits them. This absence of mediation and representation in the horizontal level of power is, perhaps, the reason why political philosophy has not paid enough attention to it until Foucault’s work. Lope’s power over the conquistadors’ bodies was usually direct, close, without mediation and without representation, exercised by small officers and without protocol. This may have hidden its political nature, but there is no reason to exclude this absence of mediation from the philosophical field. Outlining this fact is significant in the field of political philosophy, which is too frequently aware of representation and sovereignty and not of more direct political phenomena related to daily relations. The horizontal power created during the journey is neither a continuation of a state of nature nor the creation of a commonwealth. In this horizontal system the relationships among its members are under the scrutiny of one of them, who is at the same level as the other group members. This scrutiny occurs without any initial covenant or transfer of power or rights. The horizontal power is a fact, but a fact that breaks the state of nature and creates a system of power without a covenant, which is not a commonwealth in the classical sense of the philosophy of absolute power.

After the death of King Guzmán, control of others’ bodies is not a part of political power, it is political power. Lope does not need to be “above” his men in a hierarchic sense; his power consists of his capacity to be with them, so close that he perceives their intimate attitudes. This immediate relationship leads to a guilt-punishment bond in which there is no gap between one and the other. There is no trial or speech, no justice or law, not even an accusation. None of the previous are necessary, because Lope does not need to be king or governor. If Lope had set up a hierarchical bureaucracy he would have reestablished the vertical Leviathan he destroyed and he would have reintroduced it into the philosophical account of the origin of the State from which he had been expelled when he was described as the guilty one.

Lope is at the center of everything in the camp, for he is the center of decision and action. The absence of restraint in this strength and closeness becomes a destructive force, whose visible aspect is terror, in the sense that we have already described. Lope’s relationship with the expeditionaries is marked by an excess, which can be explained by some concepts of George Bataille. According to Bataille, “there is in nature and it remains in man a movement which always exceeds his limits and it is only possible to reduce it partially” [22] (Bataille, 1958: 46). In a Freudian way, Bataille thinks that this repression makes work possible, for work is a delay of satisfaction. With Lope, there is no delay: he decides to eliminate whomever he considers suspicious, even risking the failure of his military goals. Lope, by killing such a large amount of these soldiers for even minor suspicions of disloyalty, weakens the forces of the expedition and endangers the goal of returning to seize Peru. The uncertainty of the bodies’ integrity contrasts with the intensity of the formal feudal or even premodern bureaucratic control, under which the enterprise (as it is described) was settled up until King Guzmán was killed. In fact, even the assembly that elects Guzmán king tries to reintroduce political and legal order in the expedition. Unlike the attempt of the assembly and of King Guzmán, the Jornada represents Lope as not trying to establish a political order, in spite of the fact that he exerts direct control over the expedition. Do the Jornada’s authors depict Lope as lacking political institutionalization because it is a fact or because it is the fruit of their productive imagination? Does political order consist in directly controlling the expeditionaries? Can political order exist only accompanied by protocol and law? Could it have been described differently in that time?

Less than a king, less than a governor, Lope claims to be a peregrino (pilgrim). This is the word he uses when he signs a defying letter to King Phillip II (Vázquez and Almesto, 1984: 123), which is used by the authors of the Jornada as part of the lese-majesty accusation. A pilgrim is someone who is on his way to a place, he doesn’t place himself in a hierarchic position in relation to other men, for he remains always far from sedentary control, but he progresses towards a goal. Lope’s relation to his fellow soldiers and to King Phillip II is that of a nomad. He does not inhabit nor does he want to inhabit the Amazon or El Dorado and he opposes those who want to settle in these lands. There is in Lope’s self-definition an egalitarian and de-territorialized root, which also contains the traces of a pre-State, pre-sedentary situation. Lope’s situation is beyond the legality or the illegality of the commonwealth. He has been morally banned from the traditional Spanish narration of the absolute State of the 16th century, yet has not been received by the first modern political philosophy. This does not mean that the situation cannot be treated politically. In fact, to the contrary, the Jornada opens the door and obliges us to make a philosophical analysis of the political situation that was inaugurated during the El Dorado expedition in 1559. As a preliminary conclusion, we can say that the Jornada shows that a political reality also exists where there is no commonwealth and in such a labile situation as that which exists between Guzmán’s crowning and Lope’s death.

 

 

 

7. A CRUEL BUT UNSENTIMENTAL CONTROL OF BODIES. CONCLUSIONS

In the Jornada, Lope shows no pleasure or passion in being especially cruel to his men. Lope’s excessive cruelty reminds us of Bataille’s interpretation of Marquis de Sade. According to the French philosopher, Sade: “proposes to his readers a kind of sovereign humanity, whose privileges would no longer be proposed to the agreement of the crowd” [23] (Bataille, 1958: 185). First Lope wanted the assembly to agree upon proclaiming the knight Fernando de Guzmán King; then, he led the group of men who kills Guzmán; but in the end, he no longer looked for any kind of approval from his men. He takes for himself privileges which are more like those of an arbitrary military chief than those of a feudal legal knight, whose power is grounded on the juridical fiction of the primitive covenant between the master and the vassals. Sade’s morals are grounded on an absolute loneliness. Sade’s morals are, for Bataille, a demanding sovereignty which settles itself through an enormous negation. It is a limitless freedom thrown towards a void, neglecting all secondary pretensions: “a kind of cynical heroism which frees us of considerations to others and of tenderness, without which normally we can not bear ourselves” (Bataille, 1958: 191). This passion concentrates itself in a criminal act that, while excessive, does not show or exteriorize any individual emotion. Sade’s relationship with another would not be of a sentimental nature. In this extreme situation crimes are committed in cold blood, without personal pleasure. Cruelty, according to Bataille, is a negation of oneself, which leads to an explosion that doesn’t take into account its self-destructiveness.

This is exactly the case in Lope de Aguirre’s relationship with others, and also with his own body. Since becoming the master of the expedition, his exercising of power, closeness and strength in relation to the other soldiers is mainly destructive. However, his detachment is such that he orders executions with no personal emotion or reason: “this tyrant was so cruel and bad, that he killed, without any cause, those who hadn’t harmed him” (Vázquez and Almesto, 1984: 96). Not only does Lope order many of his fellow soldiers to be killed, he also orders to destroy their bodies with the poniards or other violent methods, as when he orders the execution of Guiral, Castillo or Villatoro “without confession”, which is especially cruel according to their faith (Vázquez and Almesto, 1984: 74 and 82), or the killing of Ana Rojas, an inhabitant of Margarita Island, who is hanged and then shot several times with harquebuses (Vázquez and Almesto, 1984: 95). In spite of the numerous crimes ordered by him, throughout the Jornada there is no trace of personal pleasure in destroying the life or the body of the other. He is at the center of everything, he knows everything, especially the small details of daily life, but this is a cold knowledge. As they are described by Hegel, the feudal values require a covenant and sentimental fidelity (Hegel, 1964: Zweiter Teil, Dritter Absschnitt, Zweites Kapitel, 1); Lope de Aguirre requires both from the expeditionaries, but he does not offer these values in return. It is important to point out that in the Jornada, Aguirre does not directly kill anyone with his hands or sword (with one exception, which we will soon consider). He exercises a direct control over the expeditionaries, but this strong and close bodily relation remains direct only for ordering crimes. To kill somebody, he always needs an intermediary; the lusty or disagreeable task of murdering is performed by his men, not by him. Why? There is no explanation in the Jornada, but it could be because he experienced no pleasure in killing, although this does not prevent him from being cruel. Nevertheless, he is described as always armed and wearing his armor. This kind of description reveals the philosophical underwriting which allows the two soldiers to depict the historical character of Lope as insensitive or even inhuman.

According to the Jornada, Lope maintains only one positive emotional relationship during the expedition: with his daughter Elvira, a mestizo. She is only mentioned twice. The first time, when Governor Guzmán promises that, after returning to Peru, he will marry her to his own brother (Vázquez and Almesto, 1984: 47). The second reference is on October 27, 1561, when, surrounded by King Phillip II’s troops and abandoned by almost all his men, Lope stabs his daughter. Nevertheless, the Jornada says that “mostraba quererla más que a sí” (“he showed he loved her more than himself”) (Vázquez and Almesto, 1984: 144). The literary interpretation of this crime has been very controversial. However, the most important thing to consider is that the love he feels for his daughter does not prevent him from killing her. In the narration there is no hint that this killing was related to a military strategy (he is already defeated), the fear of being denounced or political control. He didn’t need to murder in order to achieve his goals, nor to save himself. Whether in a situation marked by the absence of emotions (for instance, in relation to Inés) or in another of love (for instance, in relation to Elvira), the bond remains strong, excessive, distant and physically destructive. Control of others’ bodies and the menacing of these bodies relate to Lope’s attitude toward the members of the expedition and also toward the people they meet throughout the journey. There is no intermediate measure between disturbing Lope and being executed by him.

The nature of Lope de Aguirre’s bodily relation with other members of the expedition is a permanent attitude of emotional coldness, even in those cases in which the relationship is strong and close. This absence of emotional engagement transforms him into an impersonal chief. The impersonality of his command is both the heart of his individuality and of his political capacity; impersonality is also one of the main features of the modern State. As an aside, while he may have been described as a criminal, he was also deemed an “honest” man. There is no reference to any attempt of Lope to obtain privileges, money or even Inés, “moza y muy hermosa” (“young and very beautiful”) (Vázquez y Almesto. 1986: 17), who fall into Banderas’ hands after Ursúa’s death. Lope’s individuality lacks the emotions which could keep him from strengthening this very individuality, which builds itself up using some of the main characteristics of modernity, an era that began in 1492. There is a constant ambiguity in Lope’s individuality; he requires feudal values in his equals and superiors, but he does not apply these values to himself, behaving in many respects more as a modern than a feudal individual (Grillo: 2004).

The characteristics of modern individuality are not grounded on a personal situation, but on a political condition, which offers a widening space for individual autonomy and for strong bodily relations, but not necessarily sentimental engagement. From this point of view, classical individualism, represented by John Stuart Mill, has rightly asserted that the individual is an invention of history, which has required a long fight against authority[24]. Nevertheless, the philosophical invention of the individual has not taken into account that the building of the individual went through a stage in which it could affirm itself by means of impersonal bodily relations, as it happened with Lope. Understanding the philosophical history of the Jornada is also to understand a philosophical stage of the invention and self-construction of the individual. Lope de Aguirre represents an example of an individual in transition between the feudal and modern times. He cuts ties with the authority (the Spanish Crown) and then appeals to a representation of himself as a limitless but emotionless power, which makes him closer to a modern representation of political bonds. Its political aspect can hardly be understood strictly by the philosophical imagination of the 16th century Spanish philosophical and juridical thought, for it requires to be analyzed with more “modern” instruments. Because of this, the soldiers that try to describe it in the Jornada had to ban Lope from the political and moral history they narrate: the rise and punishment of a traitor.

 

Valdivia, 2007

 

 

 

8. WORKS CITED

Bataille, Georges (1958); L’érotisme, Éditions du minuit, Paris.

Bodin, Jean (1955); Six Books of the Commonwealth, Abridged and translated by M. J. TOOLEY. Published 1955. BASIL BLACKWELL OXFORD, Oxford, AT THE ALDEN PRESS. http://www.constitution.org/bodin/bodin_1.htm

Les six livres de la république (1993), abregé du texte de l´édition de Paris de 1583, Edition et présentation de Gérard Mairet; Librairie Génerale française, Paris.

Derrida, Jacques (1997); L’écriture et la différence. Editions du Seuil, collection Points, Paris (s/d).
De la grammatologie, Editions du Minuit, coll. Critique, Paris.

Foucault, Michel (2003); Surveiller et punir. Naissance de la prison. Gallimard, colléction TEL, Paris 2003.

Galster, Ingrid (1996); Aguirre oder Die Willkür der Nachwelt Vervuert Verlag, Frankfurt am Main.

Girard, Réné (2002); El chivo expiatorio. Anagrama, Barcelona.

Góngora, Mario; (1951) El Estado en el Derecho Indiano (1492-1570); Instituto de Investigaciones Histórico-Culturales, Universidad de Chile, Santiago.

Grillo, Rosa María (2004); La veridica storia di Lope de Aguirre nel teatro e nel cinema,in El pesonagio in letteratura, Edizione Scientifiche Italiane, Napoli, 2004.

Hegel, George Wilhem Friedrich (1964); Vorlesungen über die Aesthetik, Friedrich Fromann Verlag, Sämtliche Werke, vol 12; Stuttgart-Bad Sanstatt.

Herzog, Werner (1973); Aguirre, der Zorn Gottes, DVD version: ArtHausim, Kinowelt Home Entertainment, Germany, 2003.

Hobbes, Thomas (1980); Leviathan, The Pelican Classics, Great Britain.

Lévi-Straus, Claude (1977); L’identité, Séminaire dirigé par Claude Lévi-Satruss, Grasset, Paris.
1968, Estructura de los mitos, en Antropología estructural, Eudeba, Buenos Aires.

Mason, Peter; 1990, Representations of the Other Routledge, London.

Neira, Hernán; Fierro, Juan Manuel; et al.; (2006); Lope de Aguirre: elementos para la teoría del mito de la Conquista, Revista Estudios Filológicos # 41, Valdivia, Chile, pp. 145-163.

Otero Silva, Miguel (1985); Lope de Aguirre, príncipe de la libertad. Biblioteca Ayacucho, Caracas , 1985, 382 p.. Prólogo de José Ramón Medina, 345 p..

Pastor, Beatriz (1983); Discurso narrativo de la conquista de América, Ediciones Casa de las Américas, La Habana.

Posse, Abel; Daimon (1981); Ed. Argos Vergara, Barcelona.

Rousseau, Jean-Jacques (1970); Discours sur l’origin et les fondements de l’inegalité, in Oeuvres complètes III, Du Contrat social, écrits politiques. Editions Gallimard, collection La pléiade, Dijon, 1970.
The Social Contract (1952); Traslated by H. Cole. The Great Books of the Western World (1952), The University of Chicago Press, London and New York.

Sartre, Jean-Paul (1960); Critique de la raision dialectique, volume I; Gallimard, Paris, 1960.

Vázquez, Francisco, y de Almesto, Pedrarias (1986); Jornada de Omagua y Dorado; Crónica de Lope de Aguirre. Miraguano Ediciones, colección Los Malos Tiempos, Madrid 1986.

Vitoria, Francisco de (1960); De potestate civili, in Obras de Francisco de Vitoria, Biblioteca de Autores Cristianos, Madrid

 

 

© Hernán Neira

www.neira.cl

[1] With the support of Fondo Nacional de Desarrollo Científico y Tecnológico (Fondecyt), Chile, Research Project 1050300.

[2] Vázquez, Francisco, and de Almesto, Pedrarias; Jornada de Omagua y Dorado: Crónica de Lope de Aguirre. Miraguano Ediciones, colección Los Malos Tiempos, Madrid 1986. It was first published in “Nueva biblioteca de autores españoles”, Volume XV, Madrid 1909; then, by Espasa-Calpe, Argentina, Colección Austral Nº 512; en Lope de Aguirre. Crónicas 1559-1561; and later, by Elena Mampel y Neus Escandell, Barcelona 1981; Aguirre o la fiebre de la independencia”. Finally, by Manuel Serrano y Sans, San Sebastian, 1986, entitled La aventura del amazonas, with texts of Gaspar de Carvajal, Pedrarias de Almesto and Alonso de Rojas.

[3] According to the tone and content of the Jornada, we do not consider as a negative presage García de Arce’s order to kill several Indians, for throughout the Jornada cruelness is only a scandal when it is exercised against the Spanish men. Killing Indians might even have been considered a manifestation of political strength.

[4] “Como Pedro de Orsóa iba remiso y descuidado en buscar la tierra, y que no la pretendía buscar ni poblar” (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 43).

[5] “que locura y necedad era aquella de todos que, habiendo muerto un Gobernador del Rey, que llevaba sus poderes y representaba su persona, pensaban por aquella vía quitarse de culpa?” (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 44).

[6] “quiso D. Fernando de Guzmán que todo el campo le tuviese por General, y para esto, teniendo prevenidos sus amigos y aliados, mandó juntar toda la gente del campo en una plaza […] el don Fernando de Guzmán les hizo un razonamiento de la forma siguiente:
‘Señores: […] yo tengo este cargo de General, como vuestras mercedes saben, y no sé si contra la voluntad de algunos, para lo cual, y para que entre nosotros haya más conformidad, yo, desde agora, dejo el cargo y me desisto dél […] para que vuestras mercedes libremente lo den a quien mejor les parecesciere, que sea en provecho y conformidad de todos […] Luego, los amigos del dicho D. Fernando, primero, y tras ellos la mayor parte del campo, dijeron que querían por su General a D. Fernando de Guzmán, y el D. Fernando lo aceptó” (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 49).

[7] “ ‘Señores, ya vuestras mercedes saben y vieron cómo el otro día, por general consentimiento, hicimos a D. Fernando de Guzmán, General y lo firmamos de nuestros nombres […] que para que la guerra llevase mejor fundamento y más autoridad, convenía que hiciesen y tuviesen por su Príncipe a D. Fernando de Guzmán desde entonces, para le coronar por Rey en llegando al Pirú, que para hacer esto era menester que se desnaturasen de los reinos de España, y negasen el vasallaje que debían al rey D. Felipe, y que él desde allí decía que no le conoscía ni le había visto, ni quería ni le tenía por Rey, y elegía y tenía por su Príncipe y Rey natural a D. Fernando de Guzmán’ ” (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 50-51).

[8] el principio del estamento es la “conjuración”, la formación de ligas juramentadas de señores, hidalgos, ciudades, en defensa de sus privilegios […] De la conjuración emanan instituciones permanentes, que constituyen propiamente estamentos cuando reciben, no solamente el privilegio de la jurisdicción autónoma (la “justicia de los pares”), sino además la representación ante el rey como miembros del Reino. Este último derecho implica, correlativamente, la carga de ayudar al Rey” (Góngora, 1951: 24-25).

[9] In consequence, the King´s authority was legitimate only as long as he respected this people’s fueros and his duty towards the republic. Nevertheless, Lope’s era was one in transition towards a modern State, based on a central and absolute power, without local fueros as well as without local feudal powers.

[10] “Cum itaque humanae societates propter hunc finem constitutae sint, scilicet ut alter alterius onera portaret, et inter omnes societates societas civilis ea sit in qua commudius homines necessitatibus subveniant, sequitur communitatem esse (ut ita dixerim) naturalissimam communicationnem naturae convenientissiman […] societas nulla consistere potest sine vi aliqua et potestate gubernante et providante, idem omnino usus utilitasque est et publicae potestatis et communitatis societatisque. Namm si omnes aequales essent et nulli potestati subditi, unoquoque ex sua sententia et arbitrio in diversitatem tendente, necessario distraheretur respublica, dissolveretur civitas, nisi aliqua esset providentia quae iin communi curaret consuleretque communi bono” (Vitoria: 1960, De potestate civili § 4 and 5).

[11] “Quia cum respublica potestatem habeat in reipublicae partes, haec autem potestas per ipsa, multitudinem exerceri non potest (non enim commode posset leges condere atque edicta proponere, lites dirimere et transgressores punire), necesse ergo fuit ut potestatis administratio alicui aut aliquibus commendaretur, qui huiusmodi curam gererent” (Vitoria, De potestate civili, § 8).

[12] From Saint Thomas until Vitoria, there is a great continuity in Christian political philosophy about the idea that “natural freedom” consists of the capability to decide what is good for oneself using ones own reason and will. This is the base of political sovereignty in a republic.

[13] “La question d’origin n’est ni événementielle ni structurelle; elle échappe à l’alternative simple du fait et du droit,de l’histoire et de l’essence. Le passage d’une structure à l’autre […] ne peut être expliquée par aucune analyse structurelle: un factum extérieur, irrationnel, catastrophique doit faire irruption. Le hasard ne fait pas partie du système.” (Derrida: 1997: 365).

[14] “La notion de catastrophe provient d’une région théorique (hautement sophistiquée) développant généalogiquement l’analyse des équations différentielles […] Son importance et sa pertinence proviennent de ce qui’il pƒropose -en élucidant le phénomène général et primitf de discontinuité– la première possibilité de rendre raison des structures en justifiant dynamiquement leur apparition et leur stabilité” (Lévi-Strauss, 1977: 116-118).

[15] We translate. “l’événement synthétique révèle l’impossibilité de changer comme impossibilité de vivre” (Sartre, 1960: 385)

[16] Nevertheless, the group splits itself. The officers swear to remain together and to protect each other, but the soldiers do not swear any similar oath and remain isolated to face the rebel officers and face the Spanish crown. This fact prevents the consideration of them as a “groupe”, in the Sartrean sense.

[17] “y todos tras él, y primero Lope de Aguirre, y luego todos los demás, le pidieron la mano [para besársela] y le llamaron Excelencia, y él abrazaba a todos y no daba a nadie la mano”. (Vázquez and Almesto, 1986: 51).

[18] The word “terror” has a long tradition in political philosophy and was used by Hobbes: “Therefore before the names of just and unjust can have place, there must be some coercive power to compel men equally to the performance of their covenants, by the terror of some punishment greater than the benefit they expect by the breach of their covenant, and to make good that propriety which by mutual contract men acquire in recompense of the universal right they abandon: and such power there is none before the erection of a Commonwealth” (Hobbes, 1958: Part I, chapter 15).

[19][19] « L’invention de la Terreur comme contre-violence engendrée par le groupe lui-même et appliquée par les individus communs sur chaque agent particulier (en tant qu’il comporte en lui-même un danger de sérialité) est donc l’utilisation de la force commune, jusque-là engagée contre l’adversaire, pour le remaniement du groupe lui-même. Et toutes les conduites intérieures des individus communs (fraternité, amour, amitié aussi bien que colère et lynchage) tirent leur terrible puissance de la Terreur même.» (Sartre, 1969: 455).

[20] “Le corps est aussi directement plongé dans un champ politique; les rapports de pouvoir opèrent sur lui une prise immédiate; ils l’investissent, le marquent, le dressent, le supplicient, l’astreignent à des travaux” (Foucault, 2003: 34).

[21] Panopticon’s goal is to “induire chez le détenu un état conscient et permanent de visibilité qui assure le fonctionnement du pouvoir” (Foucault, 2003: 234)

[22] “Il y a dans la nature et il subsiste dans l’homme un mouvement qui toujours excède ses limites, et qui jamais ne peut être réduit que partiellement”. Georges Bataille, L’érotisme, Éditions du minuit, Paris, 1958, p. 46.

[23] “Il proposa à ses lecteurs une sorte d’humanité souveraine dont les privilèges cessearaient de se proposer à l’accord de la foule.” (Bataille, 1958: 185).

[24] Mill, John Stuart; Utilitarianism; On Liberty; Representative Government; Edited by H. B. Acton, J. M. Dent & Sons Ltd., London, 1972.