Using the example of Republican exile Josep Solanes, this article argues how the category of exile and the reality of the Republican exile of 1939 can be mobilized for a political questioning of the meanings of "Spanish" in twentieth-century Spanish culture as defining and framing disciplinary areas. Still a very little known author, the article reconstructs the disciplinary fields, historical conflicts, personal encounters, border and language crossings necessary to assess Solanes' work, the conditions of his radical intervention in the field of psychiatry, first in Catalonia and later in France and Venezuela, and how they framed his conceptualization of the experience of exile. The last part of the article, through a consideration of Solanes' explorations of the exilic as a post-national condition, reflects on what could be the political and ethical conditions to recuperate a legacy that resists being inscribed in, or identified with, the nation. In an important way, this article should be read as an introduction to the very little known Josep Solanes that lays out the importance of his work and signals its potential for further research on new directions in the study of exile.
KEYWORDSJosep Solanes; Spanish Republican exile; Psychiatry; Madness; Francesc Tosquelles Within Spanish cultural studies, debates problematizing the category of "Spanish" as naming nationally defined and framed disciplinary areas have taken two main forms. One scrutinizes the legacy of hispanism as a form of cultural imperialism in Latin America, while visualizing these relations anew through the framework of a transatlantic geopolitical context. The other challenges the supremacy of Spanish as the category of choice to refer to the plurinational reality of the Spanish state and, as an alternative, activates "Iberian" as a framework capable of addressing this plurinationality, including Portugal, more horizontally. I have proposed elsewhere that the category of exile and the reality of the Republican exile of 1939 together open up a fertile alternative approach to a political questioning and critical interrogation of the meanings of "Spanish" in twentieth-century Spanish culture and Spanish cultural studies more