La gallina ciega de Max Aub. Procesos de subjetivación y estrategias biopolíticas en la España del tardofranquismo

Abstract

This article explores Spain’s consumerist and depoliticized society established in the 1960s, the so-called “developmentalist” or “technocratic” decade of Franco’s state, through the prism of Max Aub’s novel La gallina ciega (1972), as well as its subjective effects on the Spanish people: conformism, individualism, depoliticization. Theoretically drawing on Michel Foucault’s notion of “biopolitics” and the reinterpretation of this notion by Gilles Deleuze (“society of control”), the article focuses on the new strategies of subjectivation and socialization (i.e., “mesocratic” consumerism, culture of entertainment, cultural patriotism, the discourse of “social peace,” the obliteration of memory), all enabled by the so-called economic “miracle” of the 60s and their broader implications for the social body of Spain.