is a necessary means of achieving justice. The authors of the colonial relaciones—and indeed Aguirre himself, in his letter to Philip II—are of a similar mind as they connect the marañones’ revolt against the king of Spain to their exclusion from the distribution of the New World’s riches. Even having served the crown with all of the sacrifices that it entailed, these soldiers were not unable to identify their own right to recompense—and their right to claim their due from the sovereign they had previously served. This seems an apt example of anger as it is theorized by Aristotle and Nussbaum.
Nussbaum warns of the dangers of anger, as it involves not only the pain of being hurt but also the pleasure of thoughts of revenge. She recognizes that anger relies, most of the time, on a kind of magical thinking; for however much the person who has hurt me may suffer the consequences, this is almost never enough to undo an irreparable damage or regain an irrecoverable loss.[33] The satisfaction of anger depends upon an imaginary equilibrium—often dependent on a quasi-divine or metaphysical perfection of cosmic justice—and not a realistic one.
In theory, one might propose that anger is essentially a reaction to the loss of honor, and that retaliation can, in fact, restore the avenger’s social standing or integrity. Yet for Nussbaum, this possibility is also dangerous, since it is based on a scarcity mentality and a distributive, egocentric, and limited vision of our relationships with others; it is capable of unleashing an endless chain of resentments, bubbling over into a cycle of violence, battles, and civil wars.[34] According to the relaciones, Aguirre was determined to return to Peru to recover the loot that was supposedly owed to his men, and to make everyone there pay for the conquistadors’ suffering. In fact, one of Aguirre’s biggest differences with Fernando de Guzmán, named new king by the marañones, was that Guzmán wanted to continue searching for El Dorado, and was not determined to conquer Peru. It is Aguirre who is remembered as a vengeful man ready to turn to torture and death in response to having been hung out to dry, himself.
In 1998, a book called Anger’s Past[35] caused a boom in the study of the history of emotions. Abandoning the attempt to explain the nature of anger and the confidence of authors like Nussbaum in lasting definitions, the contributors to this work devoted themselves to the study of the social uses of anger, specifically in the Middle Ages. Most of the essays are based on the theory proposed by Norbert Elias[36] in 1939 that the passage from the Middle Ages to modernity meant the sublimation of violent emotions into norms of courtly behavior. According to Elias, medieval manifestations of anger were permitted to a certain extent, especially when it came to honor. Soon, however, the idea of being civilized came to mean repressing that emotion.[37] Elias notices a particularly significant turning point in the sixteenth century, with the development of the absolute monarchical state in Europe.
Some of the contributors to Anger’s Past disagree on the best date to assign as the inflection point, placing it centuries before Elias does. Others do not agree on the causes. Nevertheless, all are unanimous that the shift from the Middle Ages to the modern, especially in the sixteenth century, involved an interrogation of anger, which was gradually monopolized by royalty; villagers had to repress it in order to be “civilized.”
Charles Taylor agrees on this point. For him, the promotion of a “civilized” model of life began in the fourteenth century as a task of the feudal lords and of the princely courts. But in the sixteenth century, this model expanded into the other social spheres; for example, through religious reforms[38] and centralized monarchical policies. Among the characteristics of this new model of civilization, which Taylor calls the Modern Moral Order, was its opposition to a supposed primitive state of “raw, savage nature” and the promotion of a neo-stoicism that could control emotions in order to avoid a violent and disorderly society. In the social imaginary, warrior-knights in search of honor gave way to humanists, educated in the art of persuasion and conversation, who served a monarch and the rules of the court.
As was said before, the relaciones depict Aguirre as an incarnation of anger who feels affected by real decisions and therefore seeks both monetary and physical revenge. But the arguments of Elias and Taylor reveal an additional dimension of the picture. Aguirre led his rebellion in a context in which the European monarchies, like Spain’s, sought precisely to repress anger and to associate it with all that is savage and uncivilized.
To the idea that “modernity” is constituted within a European colonizing project we can now add the imperial desire to police anger, since it can trigger violence and rebellion. Aguirre, on the other hand, incarnates the wildness of that anger, with its power even to overthrow the monarchy. That is why it is legitimate to ask: do modern anti-imperial projects, which emerged in the sixteenth century, build on anger in order to break with the “Modern Moral Order” driven by European monarchies? If so, it would be all the more justifiable to present Aguirre as a gateway to the modern anti-imperial project. The detailed analysis of the texts selected in the following chapters may reveal new dimensions that go beyond the liberating/oppressive and anti-imperial/colonizing binaries. The inclusion of the study of emotions in the postcolonial/decolonial debate can enrich it and blaze new theoretical paths.
Overcoming Logocentrism
While in most cases one reacts angrily to a real and concrete assault, Aristotle emphasizes the importance of imagination in the experience of this emotion. Jan Plamper explains, “The power of imagination is also an element of anger: revenge is sweet, and the sweetness of revenge is something imagined; here, expectation blossoms in the domain of imagination.”[39] Meanwhile, anti-imperialism itself clearly has much to do with the imagination, as well. In 2015, the Latin American Council of Social Sciences (CLACSO) published a cultural study titled The Anti-imperialist Imagination in Latin America, which examined, among others, such books as Ariel and The Open Veins of Latin America; such political figures such as Sandino and Chávez; and various depictions of revolution in the visual arts and cinema. For the authors of these individual essays, anti-imperialism in Latin America is not a single doctrinal body or ideological system, but a social imaginary that widely permeates the continent’s varied cultural and political expressions of thought.[40]
Since Cornelius Castoriadis popularized the concept of the social imaginary, different definitions have been assigned to it, some mutually exclusive. The one most suitable for our work is Charles Taylor’s. Taking emblematic works such as Benedict Anderson’s Imagined Communities as a point of reference, Taylor writes:
By social imaginary . . . I am thinking . . . of the ways people imagine their social existence, how they fit together with others, how things go on between them and their fellows, the expectations that are normally met, and the deeper normative notions and images that underline these expectations . . . ordinary people “imagine” their social surroundings, and this is often not expressed in theoretical terms, but is carried in images, stories, and legends. . . . The social imaginary is that common understanding that makes possible common practices and a widely shared sense of legitimacy.[41]
The anti-imperialist social imaginary is both foundational and omnipresent in the history of Latin America. The idea of Latin American unity has taken hold even on a continent of almost irreconcilable cultural diversity whenever the specter of an external, imperialist threat has appeared. This suggests that anti-imperialism could represent the primordial experience of what Latin America is, seeking its uniqueness in the face of such menacing Western assailants as modernity, capitalism, and so on.
What The Anti-imperialist Imagination does not contemplate or address is the connection that exists in the social imaginary between this anti-imperialist dimension and anger. The pain of imperial exploitation and genocide on the Latin American continent—repeated at different historical moments and at the hands of different empires—has engendered the desire (lived out through political rhetoric that appeals to the imagination) not only for independence
