Don Quijote and the Scandal of Telling

• In Event: Literature and Political Philosophy

Abstract

In this essay, I explore a set of agonistic principles of political engagement that democratic citizens ought to adapt in contexts wherein the interiority of one’s subjective experience is overdetermined such that one is withdrawn from the common world that democracies constellate around. In contexts of radical skepticism—such as our current times of so-called post-truth, fake news, and alternative facts—where our perceptions become our reality, how can we collectively tell, make sense if you will, what any given phenomenon is? I distill this set of principles by reading the first modern Western novel, "Don Quijote de la Mancha by Miguel de Cervantes" (1605; 1615). In el "Quijote," Cervantes is concerned with bridging seemingly “subjective” perceptions such that we can orient to the world that we have in common. Cervantes’s approach to the problem of radical skepticism does not hinge on a context in common that endows every single object with its particular meaning. Quite the contrary, the propulsion of the novel comes precisely from the friction that stems from the fact that Don Quijote inhabits a radically different context than the rest of the cast of characters. It is this clash of contexts that brings about a scandal of telling. Where others see windmills, Don Quijote sees giants; he tells his squire Sancho Panza that the ordinary flocks of sheep he sees grazing in the Manchegan countryside are the extraordinary battling armies of the Muslim Emperor Alifanfarón and his arch-nemesis, the Christian King Pentapolín.

The scandal of telling that Don Quijote brings to all of his 'adventures' is not quite that he cannot tell the difference between windmills and giants, sheep and armies, inns and castles, but that in the face of a telling that is vastly different from ours, we reach an impasse, and we are unsure how to go on. Besides giving us a figure of overtly subjectivized perception—-what I call, following Hannah Arendt, “world alienation”—-in the character of Don Quijote, throughout the novel Cervantes offers various modes of response—how-to-go-ons—to quixotism. What are the possibilities and risks of responding to Don Quijote? In what follows, I first develop an account of Don Quijote as a figure of world alienation. I then outline the three types of response that Cervantes brings in "el Quijote," what I call the repressive, mimetic, and agonistic responses. Whereas the first two are the result of a sort of seduction on the part of Don Quijote and directly engage quixotism with the ironic outcome of replicating it, the agonistic response approaches quixotism obliquely and offers the possibility of building a common world with Quijotes.

Author

• Alberto Alcaraz, Brown University