Ortega, Trauma and Narrative in Early Modernity

Inca Garcilaso and Contemporary World-Making
Castro-Klarén, Sara, Fernández, Christian
Published by University of Pittsburgh Press
Castro-Klarén, S. & Fernández, C..

Inca Garcilaso and Contemporary World-Making.
Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2015.
Project MUSE., https://muse.jhu.edu/.
For additional information about this book

https://muse.jhu.edu/book/47445
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7
WRITING THE HISTORY OF

AN ANDEAN GHOST
Francisco A. Ortega Martínez
What is a ghost? Stephen said with tingling energy. One who has faded
into impalpability through death, through absence, through change of
manners.
—James Joyce, Ulysses (1922)
Garcilaso de la Vega’s The Royal Commentaries (1609) has enjoyed an ever-

wider appeal since the early seventeenth century.1 Such rising popularity has
taken place despite fundamental changes in readers’ criteria of evaluation
and appreciation of this work. Up to the late nineteenth century, Garcilaso’s
account had been taken as the most accomplished historical depiction of
the Inca, but the discovery of new written and archeological sources and
the emergence of modern historiography source criticism led historians and
anthropologists to challenge its truthfulness. As a result, Garcilaso’s history
lost credibility. At the same time, the narrative was hailed as possessing the
rhetorical and literary masteries of a classic text and the ideological under-
pinnings of nationalism, which earned it a foundational place in the pan-
theon of national and regional literary canons.
Much scholarship has sought to explain the appeal of the Royal
Commentaries to newer generations of readers. In a previous essay, I sug-
gested that such appeal might be related to its traumatic dimension, the
fact that the Royal Commentaries can be read as a “mediated and accumu-
lative reflection of the experience of catastrophe,” both resulting from and
powerfully responding to the traumatized settings of postconquest Andes
(“Trauma and Narrative,” 397). At that time my concern was to identify a
229
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number of rhetorical strategies that addressed the demands of trauma and
executed an intervention that carried within it a powerful logic of negation,
negotiation, affirmation, and accommodation.2
I described the Royal Commentaries as highly ambivalent, vacillat-
ing between various modes of emplotting catastrophe. On the one hand,
Garcilaso organizes Inca history as the preparation for the arrival of
Christianity, proposes the Spanish conquest as the result of prophesy by the
Inca Huaina Cápac (Book IX, Chapter XV, 595–98), and justifies it on the
grounds of Atahualpa’s tyranny. These features coincide and work toward
legitimating Garcilaso’s own idealized political projects—in the 1560s
of establishing a Holy Inca Empire in the viceroyalty of Peru, and in the
1600s of seeking to create autonomous communities led by educated Incas
under the tutelage of the Jesuits. Therefore, for earlier generations the Royal
Commentaries constituted an immediate specific response to concrete histor-
ical losses. To the degree that these resolutions were ultimately impossible,
the language of the Royal Commentaries sustained the work of melancholia.
Such earlier response, I suggested, is constitutive of latter receptions.
Perhaps our repeated return over the centuries to Garcilaso’s texts, our
worn-out desire to read in them a coherent essence capable of grouping us
into collective projects (such as nationalism, mestizaje or, more recently, mul-
ticulturalism), or simply our need to read the text as a productive opposi-
tion (as in indigenismo, for instance), suggests a wound that remains intact
and silent. Perhaps what we repeatedly see in Garcilaso—much to our
chagrin—is not that which proposes harmonious reconciliation, but that
which—despite the gestures toward coherence—remains discontinuous,
painful, nonproductive, and irremediably fragmented.
THE QUESTION OF SPECTERS

It is only consistent that such disembodied memory is inhabited by
ghosts, both structurally and thematically. Phantoms and traumatic mem-
ories are, after all, structures of simultaneous negation and affirmation.
Viracocha, a purported phantom in Garcilaso’s account, bears out this trou-
bling ontology. Investigating his advent in the Royal Commentaries helps us
understand Garcilaso’s account as a language of mediation, carrying on
at once the work of mourning and melancholia. And in doing so, it raises
the question, once again, as to the relevance of Garcilaso for the present.
Before we proceed to Garcilaso’s historical account, however, we must
consider phantoms. Historically, phantoms have been a serious matter, not
only because they effectively frightened those to whom they appeared but
because they posed serious philosophical and theological questions. That is
not the case today; they are no longer taken seriously. And yet, what we may
230 | FRANCISCO A. ORTEGA MARTÍNEZ

call phantoms at the beginning of the twenty-first century—those amusing
even fascinating evanescences—still retain the capacity to disturb, even if
only in very rare occasions.
I suggest that such dual status is directly related to two phenomena: the
consolidation at the end of the eighteenth century of modern reason at the
expense of other modes of knowing and reasoning, and other possible rela-
tions between knowledge and power. The old opposition between revelation
and heresy was reelaborated into true knowledge and superstition, myth or
ignorance. History, argued Michel de Certeau, became a modern discipline
precisely at the very moment in which it construed myth and superstition
as the obverse of historical fact. Similarly, psychiatry and the social sci-
ences strove to distinguish phantoms from real phenomena and needed to
explain phantoms as incarnating everything that was not science (Brierre
de Boismont, 38). Ghosts became, as Herbert Spenser observed in A System
of Synthetic Philosophy: First Principles, “assignable causes for strange occur-
rences” (21).3
However, a rapidly expanding entertainment sphere eventually resit-
uated such disquieting forces and found other media for them. Phantoms
became the engine of our cultural industry: shadow theaters, phantasmago-
ric boxes, and the early motion picture gleefully staged supernatural beings
and, one might argue, were embodied by them. Etienne Gaspard Robert
and Georges Méliès, among many other early twentieth-century artists,
exceptionally understood that theater gimmick, montage combined excel-
lently with stories of apparitions, revenants, and other illusions to create
fear and fascination at the same time. As Slavoj Zizek and Jacques Derrida
have already remarked, our twentieth-century cultural industry has contin-
ued such exploitation of the spectral as the source of its energy and success
(see McMullen’s documentary about Derrida’s work; Zizek). Not surpris-
ing, it is in the movies, arts, and literature—particularly when most terribly
lucid—where ghosts have found a new dwelling place. Such paradoxical
convergence—the expulsion of phantoms by reason and a cultural industry
that produces ghosts for consumption—constitutes a foundational phenom-
enon of our modernity and accounts for the difficulty in speaking about
phantoms with earnest. However, it also suggests that phantoms are much
more than curious anomalies. Indeed, I submit that the phantom is the phil-
osophical problem of the present, particularly if we take into account its
connection with terror.
There have been some valiant attempts to address their theoretical
import. Early in the nineteenth century, Walter Scott admitted in his Letters
on Demonology and Witchcraft that he had spent many hours traveling “in the
twilights regions of superstitious disquisitions” (14). Originally intended to
WRITING THE HISTORY OF AN ANDEAN GHOST | 231

scientifically discern the attributes of human nature that account for our
predisposition—or weakness—to believe in supernatural occurrences,
Scott strays from the goal, gleefully recounts legendary apparitions, and
frequently comes up short in dismissing them as mere superstitions. A few
years later, Arthur Schopenhauer began his brief “Essay on Spirit Seeing
and Everything Connected Therewith” by similarly inviting the reader to
follow him to the realm of gloom. There Schopenhauer purported to under-
stand the truth contained in phantoms and apparitions while arguing that
they provide knowledge produced by means other than reason. As kinds of
dreams, they work as intuitions of manifested reality and “become the con-
necting link, the bridge, between somnambulistic and waking conscious-
ness” (225–310; quote from page 254). Thus, concluded Schopenhauer,
investigating phantoms reveal important manifestations of the will by means
of intuitive perception and lead us to “the path that does not pass through
time and space on the leading string of causality. It is the path through the
thing-in-itself” (303).
Many years later Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno insisted in a
small fragment at the end of the Dialectics of Enlightenment on the urgent
necessity to develop a theory of phantoms (178–79). According to them,
they are ominous signs of that which remains deformed and incomplete,
the burden of life that emerges when we deny the violence of the past. More
recently, Derrida wrote along the same lines: “There has never been a
scholar who really, and as a scholar, deals with ghosts. A traditional scholar
does not believe in ghosts—nor in all that could be called the virtual space
of spectrality” (Specters of Marx, 11). Let’s abide, if only briefly, by such sum-
mon and return once again to the question of phantoms, those nonsensorial
sensual beings that stand in stark contrast to Platonic ideas, religious reve-
lation, or the Spirit (all of them repositories of truth). And in following the
call, let’s not rush to the assumption that phantoms are identical to chime-
ras, demons, idols, and illusions—though they do share a great deal with
them—lest we run the risk of foreclosing the question and squandering our
analytic capacity to discern the nature of specific visitations.
What I call phantoms possess at least three dimensions: To begin with,
there is the logic of the phantom that writes elsewhere the script of what
takes place here or, as Freud writes, “the phantom is he who writes the
imaginary script through which we stage the realization of an unconscious
desire” (Laplanche and Pontalis). Lacan develops this idea by claiming that
the phantom “is that by which the subject sustains himself at the level of
his vanishing desire, vanishing in so far as the very satisfaction of demand
hides his object from him” (Ecrits, chapter 1, §10, 272). The phantom is
both in the social scene (as effectively unfolding logic) and absent from it

(as that historicity that must remain outside in order for history to take
place). A critical reading of the social scene must be a hauntology rather than
ontology—a recognition that being is never fully present, that spectrality is
a necessary attribute of contemporary social existence (Derrida, Specters of
Marx, 10, 161).
But phantoms have not been a matter of historical research or reflec-
tion. Except, perhaps, as a way of disposing of them. Historians, wrote Jules
Michelet, should take care of the dead, honor them, and bury them. In fact,
their intimacy with the nocturnal world of the dead is exactly what gives
them peace of mind and produces their truth. In such ceremonial service,
spirits should accompany the disposed bodies; their returns will not be rec-
ognized as science or knowledge but will be identified as superstition, igno-
rance, idolatry, or hallucination (Michelet, 31).4 However, phantoms refuse
to disappear. They constitute, structure, and inhabit the present: they haunt
it. Michel de Certeau (2) perceptively wrote that “the other is the phantasm
of historiography, the object that it seeks, honors and buries.” Such other,
that which is not historical, silently inhabits history and makes it speak
otherwise.
Nonetheless, as a modern discipline, history domesticates difference, is
a homology, a producer of the self-same, which, as Hanna Arendt suggests,
connects modernity with terror (301–2, 438). For, more than eliminating the
other, the essence of modern terror seeks to eliminate the difference within
each one of us. Such linkage between modernity and terror directs us to
a second dimension of the phantom complex—that which is the result of
the foreclosure of history. Conquests, wars, terrible social violence amount-
ing to what social anthropologist Veena Das has called “critical events”
results in profound symbolic destructuring that instills the Real—that is the
unnamable, what is irreducible: fright—in the midst of experience.5 The vio-
lent expulsion from history—the traumatic—explains why ghosts, accord-
ing to Horkheimer and Adorno (178), are the burden of life. In fact, they
emerge when we deny the violence of the past. They are ominous signs of
that which remains deformed and incomplete, a social interpellation that
demands an ethical response: “Only when the horror of annihilation is
raised fully into consciousness are we placed in the proper relationship to
the dead: that of unity with them, since we, like them, are victims of the
same conditions and of the same disappointed hope” (178).6 So far, phan-
toms posit a double challenge: that which comes from the “pure historicity”
excluded from historical accounts and that which comes from the subjects
who have been violently expelled from history. But if, as Heidegger and
Derrida insist, “pure historicity” is surely what remains outside history and
if, with Lacan, we agree that trauma (or the violent expulsion of history) is

precisely that which dissolves the social bond and breaks through the chain
of signifiers revealing the failure of the imaginary and symbolic to hold or
contain the real, how then to speak of such double exclusion, spectral logic
and fright at once?
There is a third spectral dimension. The force of a phantom lies in its
capacity to anticipate the possible—that is, by in the way in which it deploys
a temporality of the future that unlocks the present. It is a temporality that
resembles Aristotelian phantasmata (i.e., sensory representations of exter-
nal objects) in its capacity to induce a calculation, but whose messianic
force—in intimation of a different future—lies in a generalized state of bad
consciousness; let us remember once again the specter that haunted Europe in 1848.
These phantoms return once and again and elaborate collective dreams and
aspirations by setting them against the bleakness of the present. Thus they
demand a new kind of politics: “If I am getting ready to speak at length
about ghosts, inheritance, and generations, generations of ghosts, which is
to say about certain others who are not present, nor presently living, either
to us, in us, or outside us, it is in the name of justice” (Derrida, Specters of
Marx, xix). The phantom therefore is what occupies the place of the promise
and announces the arrival of the unexpected, the messianic: the place of a
possible utopia (168). Three dimensions of one spectral process that Walter
Benjamin locates on the figure of the Angelus Novus: facing the past, muted
by the enormous catastrophe in front of him, the angel is imprisoned by the
storm blowing him into the future.
Every theory about phantoms needs to take into account these three
orders. Now, it is only possible to separate these dimensions analytically,
since the nature of the phantom is to confound and remain opaque to the
critical eye. Our task cannot be to decipher them in order to render them
docile and manageable. Our task, the task of a critical history that looks
for the path beyond the impasses of history, is to make them irrupt into this
obtuse present that trusts too much its own certainties.
ANDEAN PHANTOMS
We know that those who suffered the conquest and colonization of the
Americas experienced these processes as brutal interruptions of their social
routines that irrevocably altered their sense of community. The enormity of
the traumatic episode brought forth a symbolic collapse best evidenced in
the inability to use local symbolic resources to mourn within the frame of
existing political and cultural institutions—a situation further aggravated
by the colonial policy of eliminating and banning local deities, the force-
ful imposition of new religious, judicial, and administrative orders, and the
dismantling of military and priestly castes. It is not surprising that cultural

frames of reference and representation were inadequate to render the events
intelligible so that, as Nathan Wachtel (54) has argued, the “traumatism of
the conquest is best defined by a kind of ‘dispossession,’ a plummeting of the
traditional universe,” a state of melancholia in which phantoms abound.7
Native American postconquest chronicles abound with divine and semi-
divine characters who leave but promise to return in the guise of strange
men (such as Quetzalcoatl in Mexico and Viracocha in the Andes) and
other ghostly interpellations announcing the imminent arrival of Spaniards.
The Natives scribes that composed the Florentine Codex—the Nahuatl text
Bernardino de Sahagun used to compose his monumental General History of
New Spain (circa 1590s)—mentions omens predating Spanish arrival by ten
years: “a flaming ear of corn . . . like a wound in the sky” (as in Portilla, 4),
spontaneous fires, lighting, howling winds, strange animals, and monstrous
beings (Portilla, 3–12). As if such signs could retrospectively disclose the ety-
mology and genealogy of the dis-aster (as events proceeding from the stars),
nature is said to rise up once and again to warn Mexicans of the impending
European advent. In such a belated manner, the conquest is incorporated
into local moral economy whereby it is nothing but the actualization of past
prophecies. Such spectral haunting is one of the most common forms of col-
lective repetition, a continual reliving of the wounding experience in order
to master it, to semiotize it, to mourn it. As iterations these phantomatic
appearances are the signs of grave social dislocation.8
For their part, Europeans tended to represent the devastation through
the Renaissance theory of humors and particularly the figure of the melan-
cholic Indian. Thus Juan de Matienzo, legal adviser to the Peruvian Viceroy
Toledo (1569–80) and preeminent jurists in Peru, writes in his 1567 treaty
Of the Government of Peru that “Indians . . . are faint-hearted and timid, which
is a consequence of a melancholic nature, because in these Indians abound
the cold and dry black bile” (Matienzo, 16–19; my emphasis). According
to the theory, melancholics were more vulnerable than others to “harbor
and imprint these annoying (molestisimas) ideas in their imagination/fancy
( fantasia) that . . . are inductive of madness: it is the fault of their blood and
of those who—instead of diverting black thoughts while finding cheerful
ones—withdraw from society and devotes energy to contemplate and give
body to such dreadful phantoms, which later on would wage war on them
with renewed impetus” (Muratori).9 The reasoning is perverse: the concept
of the “melancholic Indian” is further proof, according to Matienzo (19), of
the legitimacy of the conquest; undermined by his own ghosts, the Indian
“were naturally born and bred to serve, and it is more profitable for them to
serve than to order.”10
We begin to see why phantoms are not so easily dismissed, nor will they

be merely reduced to unconscious processes. Instead, sociologist Avery
Gordon suggests we take their eerie existence as the way loss lives in the
present, “not simply [as] a dead or missing person, but [as] a social figure.”
For Gordon, “investigating [phantoms] can lead to that dense site where
history and subjectivity make social life” (8; 50–58).11 Accordingly, an appa-
rition constitutes the paradoxical announcement of something that is miss-
ing and its return in the guise of a disembodied historical memory. Like the
uncanny, haunting is where the “organized forces and systemic structures
that appear removed from us make their impact felt in everyday life in a way
that confounds our analytic separations and confounds the social separa-
tions themselves” (Gordon, 19).12
And yet the questions are inevitable: How do we apprehend these spec-
ters historically? Do we honor them or confine Native omens and phan-
toms to naïve, perhaps desperate inventions? Can we understand them as
other than whims of fantasy or rationalizations of past defeats? How “do
we reckon with what modern history has rendered ghostly? How do we
develop a critical language to describe and analyze the affective, historical,
and mnemonic structures of such hauntings?” (Gordon, 18). Indeed, how do
we approach the phantasmagoric dimension of history? Viracocha, a ghost
that forecasts the arrival of Spaniards in various Andean chronicles, will
help us begin to explore these questions. Garcilaso’s account in the Royal
Commentaries is striking because of its unorthodox nature and popularity
among Native and non-Native readers. While I am not interested in reading
Garcilaso’s account as a source of factual information, I want to insist on a
historical reading of the phantom as a disembodied memory.
Catherine Julien has performed an exhaustive reading of Inca sources
to conclude that the prevailing modes of Andean historical consciousness
strongly shaped the chronicles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries.
Andean historical consciousness was connected with various oral genres—
some of which had physical support—and was concerned with dynastic
genealogy and life histories of Sapa Incas. These memories were originally
the result of ideological interests to express—or deny—imperial Inca expan-
sion and dynastic consolidation. Once integrated in Spanish chronicles, they
were reproduced within the context of colonial conflicts. Finally, they bene-
fited a Native colonial class, the survivors of the Andean nobility that were
able to rearticulate the colonial regime to their advantage (Julien, 293–95).
My work builds from those conclusions—even if it advances in a entirely
different direction—to look at the ways in which Viracocha inscribes at the
heart of disembodied memory the unresolved claims and demands Native
and mestizo elites.
According to Garcilaso, Viracocha is the son of the Sun and brother of

the Inca Manco Capac and Coya Mama Ocllo Huaco (the founding Incas,
brothers to all of the Incas). Viracocha appeared before Hatun Tupac, the
son of Yahuar Huacac (the reigning Inca circa 1450s), a prince who had
fallen in disgrace with his father and had been banned from Cusco because
of his “harsh character.” The phantom—Garcilaso’s own words—warns the
prince that the Chanca provinces of Chinchasuyu were in danger of rising
up against the Incas. He went to his father’s palace and tried to warn him,
but the father did not believe him and angrily sent him back into exile. The
provinces did rise and Inca Yahuar Huacac cowardly ran away from Cusco,
abandoning the sacred city to the enemy (Book IV, Chapters XXI–XXIV,
242–49). The prince disobeyed his father and returned to Cusco at the
command of an army to subdue the rebellious provinces. The defeat of the
Chancas—a powerful non-Quechua confederation—allowed for the consol-
idation of the Inca state. The prince Hatun Tupac became the Sapan Inca
and took the name of Viracocha to honor the divine phantasm. Later on, he
built a beautiful temple, with a splendid statue of the apparition (Book V,
Chapter XXII, 303–5), and repeated the story of the ghost to induce other
nations to accept Inca rule. At the end of his life, the wise and revered Inca
forecasted a period of Pachakuti (sudden catastrophic change), in which the
arrival of a new people (presumably the Spaniards) would take away their
empire and religion (Book V, Chapter XXVIII, 319).
Readers familiar with Andean and Inca history will realize this passage
involves a fundamental rewriting of official divine and royal genealogies. To
begin with, varied and complex, official Inca cosmogony was the result of a
long process of assimilation of diverse Andean deities as they expanded; the
negotiation of religious practices as they incorporated various non-Quechua
groups into the realm; and the imposition of the Inti (Sun) worship through-
out their dominions as they sought to solidify their rule.13 Andean religions
recognized in Viracocha the fundamental role of creator and organizer of
the universe—and not just a semidivine apparition of the son of the sun and
brother of the first Inca as Garcilaso argues—it was in fact a supreme deity
also called Ticci Viracocha, the Supreme Maker.14 After Viracocha emerged
from the sacred Lake Titicaca, he created Earth and humans and sent them
to people the world. He then traveled westward trailing the sun through the
Tahuantinsuyu (the Inca realm), teaching the fundamentals of civilization.
At the end of his journey, he disappeared into the Pacific Ocean with the
promise of returning again in the future. Almost all of sixteenth-century
Peruvian chroniclers coincide with this description of Viracocha as a solar
divinity.
Similarly, many of Garcilaso’s sources and contemporaries observe the
continuities between Viracocha and Pachacamac, a divinity from the coast

that governed the underground and hosted one of the most important ora-
cles in the region.15 However, in the Royal Commentaries Viracocha’s cen-
trality is curiously displaced by Pachacamac, who becomes “the one who
does with the universe that which the soul does with the body” (Book II,
Chapter XXVII, 133). Furthermore, Garcilaso insists that Andeans viewed
Pachacamac as the creator and nourisher of the world (“daba vida al uni-
verso y le sustentaba,” Book II, Chapter II, 70), an invisible god they did
not know and thus did not dare to worship in temples. Though Garcilaso’s
reasoning for diminishing the role of Viracocha is unclear, the privileging of
Pachacamac advanced the argument that Andeans discerned the true God
by means of scintilla conscientiae, the natural luminous trace with which all
rational creatures were endowed (“rastrearon con lumbre natural al ver-
dadero sumo Dios y Señor nuestro,” Book II, Chapter II, 70).
If the existence of Pachacamac allows Garcilaso to argue that Andeans
apprehended the idea of the true God before the arrival of Europeans,
Viracocha, the phantom, became the apostle who initiated the praeparatio
evangelica, while the prince Hatun Túpac (later Inca Viracocha) was the
first Inca to receive the word of Christ. Indeed, Garcilaso mentions that
in postconquest Peru chroniclers saw the image of Saint Bartholomew in
the splendid statue the prince Hatun Tupac built in honor of the phantom,
who allegedly had come to America to spread the Gospel before the arrival
of the conquistadors (Book V, Chapter XXII, 304–5). The story, popular
among chroniclers and missionaries during the sixteenth century, allows
him to further identify pre-Hispanic Inca culture with Christian ideology
(such as the alleged instauration of monotheistic religion by the Incas) and
to question the legitimacy of Spanish domination. For if Christ had already
sent to Peru an apostle to preach the Gospel, effectively making Christian
neophytes out of Andeans, then the justification for Spanish military pres-
ence in Peru (reasonable only in light of the missionary undertaking) was
fundamentally challenged.
The inscription of Viracocha gives way to multiple valorizations. To
begin with, it resonates with Andean figurations of semidivine entities,
visions, and practices that mediate between the upper (hanan) and the lower
(hurin) realms.16 More can be said about it from the Andean perspective—
such as that the difference between spiritual or divine and phantoms makes
no sense in the Andean world—but for the time being I focus on a particular
mnemonic configuration. However, the phantasmatic resonances only take
place and make sense in the context of colonial violence.
Neoplatonic Christian thought, to which Garcilaso was deeply indebted,
assigned phantoms a definite negative value.17 For Saint Augustine, for
instance, signs that do not correspond to corporeal realities are either the

manifestation of the true presence—God—or vain phantoms. Phantoms,
he argued in Confessions, use their resemblance of God to carry the work of
the devil and deceive the truth-seeker (Book III, Chapter VI, 10).18 When
discussing the true nature of Christ, Thomas Aquinas echoes Saint Agustin
and writes that “if the body of Christ was a phantom, Christ deceived us,
and if He deceived us, He is not the Truth. But Christ is the Truth. Therefore
His body was not a phantom” (vol. 2, 736).
By the mid-seventeenth century, Cardinal Giovanni Bona, a contempo-
rary of Garcilaso, returned to Saint Agustin in a post-Tridentine context to
propose a distinction between visions and apparitions. The new objective
was to set rigorous doctrine so that the church could decisively face not just
the remnants of Middle Age pagan beliefs, but the private raptures of mystic
and iluminados that threatened to break the Church, as well as the so-called
idolatry that challenged Catholic and European expansion in American ter-
ritories.19 For Bona there is a vision when the perceived figure can be con-
nected to a real Being; however, there is an apparition when there is no rela-
tion with a truthful being. Such distinction makes possible to differentiate
between mystics—who see the truthful body of Christ in their visions—and
heretics, pagans, and idolaters who were deceived by false images produced
by the devil and thus driven to spread anarchy and evil.
Hence, if we take Ticci Viracocha to be Saint Bartholomew, he would
not be a phantom but a divine presence. Notably, Garcilaso remains uncom-
mitted. He repeatedly calls Ticci Viracocha a phantom and hesitantly sug-
gests that it was the devil that appeared to the Inca prince in his dreams to
deceive Andeans and further the proliferation of pagan idolatries (Book V,
Chapter XXI, 302). According to such an argument, the devil cunningly
understood that by helping the Incas vanquish the Chancas and consolidate
the Tahuantinsuyu, he was able to enthrone his dominion over the Indies.20
These were not minor theological debates or peculiar curiosities of an
age long gone; instead, they gave rise to intense theological disputations in
the context of the conquest and colonization of America. For Bartholomew
de las Casas these visions were historical proof that Native Americans had
been visited by God, that they were a chosen people, and that their idolatries
were mere deviations produced by the forgetting of those early teachings;
for Jesuit José de Acosta, however, these phantoms were diabolic manifesta-
tions that evinced the devil had been hard at work in the damnation of the
Indies. If for Las Casas the church had to find the true divine manifestation
behind historical deviation, for Acosta the church had to lead the extirpa-
tion of all practices and memories that did not fit ecclesiastical orthodoxy
(Duviols, La destrucción de las religiones andinas).
Whatever its theological value, Viracocha—the apparition—had a long

beard and a strange dress, which explains—according to many Andean
chronicles—why Spaniards were called viracochas when they first arrived:
Andeans, says Garcilaso, believed Europeans were sent from heaven to
assist them in their struggle against the tyrant Atahualpa. According
to Garcilaso, such confusion alone explains the Europeans’ easy victory
(Book V, Chapter XXI, 300–2).21 Evidently this resemblance (Spaniards =
Viracochas) is highly ambiguous as Ticci Viracocha treads the liminal space
that lies between divine manifestation and evil phantom. More revealingly,
Spaniards unquestionably acquire a definite and sinister spectral dimension
by not honoring Andean’s view of Spaniards as God sent. Indeed, Garcilaso
laments that “if Spaniards had corresponded to the Indians’ vain belief [that
they were sent by God] and would have preached the Holy Gospel with the
example that Christian doctrine demands, there is no doubt that much ben-
efit would have come. But it all happened so differently” (Book V, Chapter
XXI, 301).22 According to Saint Augustine, phantoms lurk in the absence
of God and are deceptive representations (“partly true and partly false”)
that produce confusion and deviate from the truth (cf. “Sermon XXV,”
Augustine of Hippo, Confessions, Book IV, Chapter VII, 12). Spanish resem-
blance of the pagan phantom Viracocha, itself a product of the devil, and
their disregard for those Christian truths they invoke, renders them infernal
ghostly beings. Fittingly, Garcilaso finishes this daring passage by stating
the impossibility of speaking about it: “It is not licit for me to speak of such
things; they [the Spaniards] would say that I speak passionately because I
am an Indian” (Book V, Chapter XXI, 301).23 Notice the interdiction that
arises before spectrality, an interdiction constituted on Garcilaso’s Andean-
ness. But it is exactly the trespassing of such limit, by speaking, that the invad-
ers’ sinister spectrality is constituted.
This passage also involves a rewriting of royal panacas (royal lineage) and
imagery that diminishes the role of the ninth and greatest Inca, Pachacutec
(circa 1438–1471), in Andean history. Indeed, Garcilaso’s version mark-
edly differs from his written sources and other chroniclers and informants
(with the possible exception of the account given by quipucamayos in 1542
to Vaca de Castro in Peru), which credit the great Pachacutec with many of
the achievements he attributes to Viracocha—the conquest of the Chancas,
the expansion of the empire, and the reforms of the law and religious cults,
including the imposition of the solar cult and the veneration of mummified
ancestors.24 Andean historians unanimously agree that it was Viracocha Inca
who exiled his son Pachacutec from Cusco and who later had to flee from
the city because of the Chanca attack. Similarly, sixteenth-century chroni-
cles, such as Juan Diez de Betanzos’s Narrative of the Incas (1551), assert that

Ticci Viracocha appeared to the prince Pachacutec—and not to Viracocha
Inca—before marching on to Cusco to defend the empire (Betanzos, vol.
1, 8).25 The diminishment of Pachacutec’s standing in Garcilaso’s history
continues with the apparition of the apocryphal Inca Yupanqui, an enig-
matic tenth Inca (arguably the son of Pachacutec and the father of Tupac
Yupanqui) whose existence has not been verified by any other historian or
source of the period.26
This rewrite of dynastic history—in which Pachacutec fades from
view—is all the more dramatic when considering the crucial symbolic asso-
ciations that converge in Garcilaso’s name. The expression “Pacha” simul-
taneously designates world and time; more concretely, it names a worlding
embedded in a cyclical temporality in which rituals maintain a cosmic bal-
ance. This embeddedness designates by extension a relational logic with the
sacred, the surrounding world, and others in which the mediation between
realms (hurin-hanan) was constant and necessary.27 But “Kuti” means trans-
formation through the encounter of opposites. Hence Pachakuti, a funda-
mental concept in Andean cosmogony, means at once a sudden and trans-
forming change and a restoring to the primordial origin. This change closes
the temporality and spatiality of an era and inaugurates a new cycle (see
González Holguín).28 Due to his standing in Andean history, the Inca to
whom Viracocha Ticci appeared was called Pachacutec, the “one who trans-
formed the world.” The fading of Pachacutec in Garcilaso’s account sug-
gests that what is being staged by such vanishing is greater than a particular
reference to a historical character; that the apparition of Viracocha does not
just coincide but is structurally linked to the fading of the Pachacutec; that
the phantom complex is much greater than their names—Pachacutec and
Viracocha—can name.
As if there wasn’t enough spectrality in this passage, Garcilaso tucks
at the end of book five (of the nine), the story of Viracocha’s death and of
the day in 1560, just before departing his beloved Peru, when he saw the
sacred mummy of Viracocha Inca in Cusco. The mummy, originally in a
sacred temple and then hurried away at the time of Spanish arrival, was
later sequestered by Polo de Ondegardo, a corregidor (Spanish magistrate).
Garcilaso describes the mummies—there were four other royal bodies—as
dressed with their clothes, the llautus (royal insignia worn round the head),
sitting as noble Natives do, with their arms crossed over the chest, and the
eyes lowered as if looking toward the ground. They still had hair and their
skin was so well preserved that they seemed alive, needing only to speak
to corroborate their liveliness (“sólo les faltaba hablar,” Book V, Chapter
XXIX, 321–22).29 This spectral scene—of recognition and misrecognition

executed by Garcilaso’s trembling hand—is also one of the most intensely
poignant and vivid moments of the Royal Commentaries. Bearing the vivid
fixity that characterizes fantasies, it must have been experienced as the
uncanny—that is, as the return of the familiar in a slightly modified fash-
ion (Lacan, Seminario IV, 121–22; Freud). The disclosing and touching of
the mummies is performed, says the Corregidor, so that Garcilaso takes
something with him to tell in Spain (“para que llevéis qué contar por
allá,” 320). What such something could be is not clear, but if we attend to
seventeenth-century natural philosophers “phantoms [are] the images of
things we imagine or perceive” (Covarrubias), we are startled to discover
a Royal Commentaries haunted and possessed by the apparition of Viracocha
Ticci and the fading of Pachacutec Inca.30
What to do? How to deal with so many phantoms? How do we approach
this phantasmagoria? How to unfasten a present that insists on disavowing
them? How to recognize that they can take us to the dense site where his-
tory and subjectification constitute social life (Gordon, 8)?31 How to identify
their irreducible singularity? How to write the history of this haunting? It
is important to recognize that until the beginning of the twentieth century,
the Royal Commentaries were taken as a historically accurate work, doubt-
lessly the most important of the Andean world. For instance, Inca Justo
Sahuaraura, a well-known nineteenth-century Peruvian patriot and an Inca
noble claiming descendant from Huayna Capac, heavily relies on Garcilaso
to compose his Recuerdos de la Monarquía peruana o bosquejo de la historia de los
Incas. Con 16 retratos de la Dinastía imperial de Manco Ccapac.
However, based on Garcilaso’s peculiar treatment of these two figures,
most contemporary historians and anthropologists write off the Royal
Commentaries as deeply problematic—if not just a highly imaginative
account. They attribute the variants to either him being a mestizo, his sup-
posed ignorance of Andean history, his remoteness from it, a strong desire
to diminish the role of Pachacutec, or to his use of European rhetoric to
render intelligible Andean cultural frames.32 While it is practically impos-
sible to assume that Garcilaso did not know the stories of Ticci Viracocha
and Pachacutec Inca, the other two hypotheses should be considered. The
notion of a strong bias against Pachacutec has some merit as Atahualpa, the
reigning Inca at the time of Spanish arrival, belonged to Pachacutec’s royal
panaca (see Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, Pachacútec y la leyenda, 26–32).
Let us recall that in 1532, the Inca empire was engaged in a fierce war of
secession between Huascar (Cusco-based) and Atahualpa (Quito-based).
When Pizarro arrived in Cajamarca, Atahualpa had already captured
Huascar and ransacked Cusco, killing in the wake many of Garcilaso’s
forebears. Pizarro captured Atahualpa and went to Cusco where, Garcilaso

argues, he was received as a liberator (Book V, Chapter XXI, 300). The ani-
mosity against Atahualpa—and the desire to delegitimize everything asso-
ciated with him, including his panaca—might help explain Garcilaso’s need
for a rewrite and provides a concrete understanding of why it manifested
itself as the partial deletion of this most important historical figure.
Similarly, scholars have dismissed the Royal Commentaries based on the
assumption that Garcilaso was more preoccupied with creating a narra-
tive that was both legitimate and comprehensible to European audiences
than writing true history, a fact that allegedly led him to write “historias
noveladas” (Levillier, vol. 2, 73; Rostworowski de Diez Canseco, “Análisis
crítico,” 211).33 Though the reproach is formulated as if such preoccupation
was exclusively Garcilaso’s (as if somehow writing in other cases was able
to escape the desire of intelligibility that necessarily sustains it and con-
stitutes it in its condition of possibility), what concerns me here the most
is that in both cases (resentment and desire for intelligibility), the spectral
dimension of history is explained away by references to Garcilaso’s private
obsessions. But what if we take the(se) ghost(s) as empirical evidence that a
haunting is taking place, a repository of experienced not easily disposed by
means of references to a psychic economy? What if this dense and complex
site of subject-formation announces that which is missing and its return in
the guise of a disembodied historical memory? And, yet, how do we move
beyond Garcilaso’s own vivid experience and enter the realm of the collec-
tive imaginary? How do we make of this phantom something more than an
introjection, a private fantasy?
Phantoms will never be just the object of curiosity. When interrogated,
they don’t divulge information. One may contemplate them, but when we try
to elucidate them we face great difficulties and aversion (Lacan, Seminario
IV, esp. “Pegan a un niño y la joven homosexual,” 115–23). Though phan-
toms operate on the register of the image, such profound revulsion indicates
that their power arises from their place in the symbolic, as the result of an
“image set to work in a signifying structure” (Lacan, Ecrits, 272; Seminario
IV, 116–17). The displacement involved in their emergence signals a com-
promise formation that paradoxically functions as “the support of desire”
and that by which the “subject sustains himself at the level of his vanishing
desire,” vanishing insofar the very satisfaction of the demand purloins its
object (Lacan, Four Fundamental Concepts, 185; Ecrits, 272). Another, more
simple way of saying that is that phantoms are, above all, a peculiar mani-
festation of a relation with an absent other, impossible to be had otherwise.
Thus phantoms are never the expression of a private self; they elaborate the
demands of “a certain object, qua lost object,” an Other before which the
self fades without ever disappearing. They remind us that our destinies are

inextricably linked to Others (Rapaport, 6; also Derrida, Specters of Marx,
7).34 There is in the intersubjective topography of the phantom something
radically alien, forever other.
Nicolas Abraham and Maria Torok argue that phantoms are not the
result of an inability to mourn a loved object, but the consequence of some-
body else’s secret that unknowingly has been encrypted within us: “What
haunts are not the dead, but the gaps left within us by the secrets of others”
(Abraham and Torok, 171). Though unaware of such horrible secrets, they
still disturb us as silent presences that periodically come to life in the guise
of a phantom. In Abraham’s formulation the ghost fastens the self to an else-
where and thus does not announce the return of the self’s repressed. Rather,
“it works like a ventriloquist, like a stranger within the subject’s own . . .
topography. The imagining issuing from the presence of a stranger has noth-
ing to do with fantasy strictly speaking” (173). Transgenerational haunt-
ing—the model of transmission is from parents to sons and daughters—rep-
resents a loss without resolution in which that which we don’t know remains
entombed in the symbolic. It marks the historical impossibility to undertake
the work of mourning.
Thus a ghost might more profitably be understood as the social figure
that simultaneously (1) registers an eviction from history, (2) makes man-
ifest the meaning of the supplement proper of any structure of meaning,
and (3) inscribes the stubborn refusal of a historical loss to disappear, even
when the origins and nature of such specific loss might have already been
forgotten. But phantom are also—let us recall their disquieting presence in
the Communist Manifesto (1848)—those who anticipate what is to come and
announce the destruction of an unjust present. They are therefore the start-
ing point for a critical history.35
In the Royal Commentaries the phantom operates by means of conver-
gence, simultaneously inscribing Andean foundational, supplementary,
traumatic, and messianic memories. The fading has to do with Viracocha
Ticci and Pachacutec, the most important Inca deity and Inca Sapan; the
phantomatic quality may be understood as the excess that remains from
such dramatic vanishing. It is a spectrality that partly responds to historical
animosity with a rival panaca and to the need to reduce Andean culture
to European codes, but cannot be explained alone by such factors. For in
these two proper names converge beginning and end: on the one hand, cre-
ation stories (Viracocha’s myth) and on the other the Andean catastrophic
notion of Pachakuti; the founding myth of Inca expansion and its collapse
at the time of Spanish arrival; the peace and harmony that reigned during
Inca Viracocha’s (or alternatively during Pachacutec’s) government, and
the fratricide struggle between Atahualpa and Huascar; the ideal of good

government and the tyranny of Atahualpa; Andean spiritual practices, the
imposition of Christianity (and the extirpation campaigns), and the stub-
born persistence of Native religiosity; Inca defeat and future renewals;
Garcilaso’s moving love for Peru and his personal exile, the ephemeral rise
of the encomendero and mestizo class in the 1560s and its quick dismissal. In
fact, one may summarize the synthesizing capacity of the ghost complex by
saying that it appears (1) as the result of an unknown loss, both in the sense
that much of what is lost is historically irretrievable and in the sense that
the loss is too great to be known, but also, as (2) the repository of historicity,
the reminder of historical possibilities—that is to say, tacitly the locus for
renewal and reconstitution.
This is particularly evident in another convergence that takes place
under the aegis of the phantom. This convergence—contrasting European
writing with Andean modes of remembrance—constitutes a major motif
throughout Andean chronicles and is made explicit as Garcilaso surveys the
Andean landscape in search of reliable signs of the past. Instead of writing
that preserves the true nature of the past, he finds two Andean modes of
inscribing the past: monuments and other commemorative structures and
oral memory. Buildings, like the beautiful temple built to honor the phan-
tom Viracocha, are vivid testimony of a civilization that achieved greatness.
However, they remain silent and lack in the self-assertion that character-
izes the linguistic sign. Unaware of their grandeur, instead of preserving
them, Spaniards threw stones at them and abused them (Book V, Chapter
XXII, 305). Resistant to the logic governing Spanish behavior, Garcilaso
remarks that the structure survives as ruins, an illegible script that entombs
lost knowledge.
But oral memory—and with it the mnemonic system of recording
known as quipus—is untrustworthy. The actual name of the prince that later
became Inca Viracocha, bitterly laments Garcilaso, is not known because
the lack of writing caused them to forget all that which they did not trust to
memory (Book IV, Chapter XXI, 242).36 In addition, that which was not for-
gotten was corrupted. Garcilaso tells us that he asked his Andean relatives
about the origins of the Incas and they responded by telling historical fables,
fábulas historiales. Such oxymoron (and it was an oxymoron already in the
seventeenth century) designates Andean discourse that was not recogniz-
able as factual but that Incas used to explain their origins. It is deficient and
perverse, since if Andeans had writing they would have preserved their true
history. Consequently, the apparition of Viracocha and the displacement of
Pachacutec can be understood as the product and the sign of a lack—the lack
of written history. Furthermore, since history, as Garcilaso himself writes,
command us to write the truth at the risk of mocking the world and being

reputed for infamous, these fables are flimsy grounds on which to erect the
magnificent history of the Incas (Historia, vol. 1, Chapter XVIII, 56).37
The language of lack and absence is Garcilaso’s and undeniably frames
his understanding of the multiple devastations suffered by the Andeans.
According to Garcilaso, historical losses are explained by a fundamental
lack, the absence of certain basic features or technologies—such as writing.
The substitution of loss (of Native notation systems, of memory, of politi-
cal autonomy) by lack allows Garcilaso to restore the pleasure principle by
conceiving the possibility of order once again, but it also—as Dominick
LaCapra warns us—substitutes historical trauma for structural trauma, a
historically contingent reasoning for a genetic one. As a consequence, it pro-
pitiates narrative fetishism: “[When] loss is converted into (or encrypted in
an indiscriminately generalized rhetoric of) absence, one faces the impasse
of endless melancholia, impossible mourning, and interminable aporia in
which any process of working through the past and its historical losses is
foreclosed or prematurely aborted” (LaCapra, 46).
Impossible mourning and interminable aporia are plausible, supplemen-
tary, and necessary modes of reading Garcilaso’s account as well as other
Andean chronicles (Ortega Martínez, “Trauma and Narrative,” esp. 404–6;
see also “La opacidad”). His account of the symbolic destruction suffered
throughout the Andes during the sixteenth century is filtered by a particular
collective imaginary: that of prominent mestizos and members of the Native
colonial elite who saw themselves as the rightful inheritors of the original
Spanish conquistadors and the Inca nobility. They sought to gain greater
autonomy and control of the colony but were eventually brought under con-
trol by the Crown in the early 1570s (see Rodríguez Crespo). At the time
of Garcilaso’s writing (1609), such political aspirations belonged to a dis-
tant past, and the once powerful mestizos were now vanquished, exiled,
and impoverished.38 History, especially the history of the victors, does not
explain such immense historical losses.
However, any historian—as good as Garcilaso—knows that melancholic
phantoms also advance mourning and point to the possible irruption of the
Other. Due to the lack of writing, these fábulas historiales become essential to
any history of the Incas: they are the “fundaments . . . for the best and most
important these Incas tell about their empire” (Royal Commentaries, 50).39
In fact, the superiority of Garcilaso’s account over other European chroni-
cles lies in their inclusion.40 Instead of the theological purity demanded by
Neoplatonism, phantoms set in motion a contaminating logic, a language of
mediation of which the fábulas historiales are the most daring but not the only
examples in the Royal Commentaries. Thus the fábulas historiales are the phan-
tom within the chronicles: they mediate between presence and absence, res-

titution and loss, existence and nonexistence. In this sense one may say the
Royal Commentaries mediates between the tangible and the intangible, simul-
taneously signaling a loss, the loss of a language to speak of such loss, and a
reconstituting impulse that spectrally preserves the loss.
This phantomatic mediation approximates writing as pharmakon, poison
and medicine at once. In “Plato’s Pharmacy,” Jacques Derrida writes:
And if one got to thinking that something like the pharmakon—or writ-
ing—far from being governed by . . . oppositions, opens up their very
possibility without letting itself be comprehended by them; if one got to
thinking that it can only be out of something like writing—or the pharma-
kon—that the strange difference between inside and outside can spring, if,
consequently, one got to thinking that writing as a pharmakon cannot sim-
ply be assigned a site within what it situates, cannot be subsumed under
concepts whose contours it draws, leaves only its ghost to a logic that can
only seek to govern it insofar as logic arises from it—one then would have
to bend into strange contortions what could no longer even simply be
called logic or discourse. All the more so if what we have just imprudently
called a ghost can no longer be distinguished, with the same assurance,
from truth, reality, living flesh, etc. One must accept the fact that here,
for once, to leave a ghost behind will in a sense be to salvage nothing.
(Derrida, Dissemination, 103–4)
As pharmakon, Garcilaso’s Royal Commentaries—and a great number of

Andean chronicles—perform the kind of intense memory I call phantas-
matic: a writing that writes from traumatic loss; a transitional object inevi-
tably marked by Saint Augustine’s condemnation of it being “half real, half
unreal” but which finds exactly there its reason for being. It is a fábula histo-
rial that cannot be easily distinguished from truth (even when it cannot be
reduced to it) and which cannot be assigned a site within what it situates.
Phantoms and history—if understood as mediations—transform jouis-
sance into pleasure and therefore touch the realm of desire in order to res-
titute a minimum of enjoyment. The phantom is not just concerned with
restaging historical losses that have been forgotten, but it is also—and most
important for any critical history—a reactualization of those historical
possibilities that were rendered impossible in the traumatic loss. It is thus
an announcement of what might come, an ethical demand inherent in the
potentialities of that which was not but still returns. In that sense, phan-
toms—sites of nonsymbolization—are paradoxically also always the repos-
itory of historical possibilities, an intimation of that which may come again.
We know well collective memories address both the past and the present.
They are always a life form constructed with the textures, smells, flavors,

and images of the present. Thus Garcilaso’s ghosts, four centuries ago, can-
not be identical to ours. However, I suspect that the Andean chronicles, and
the Royal Commentaries in particular, carry on their haunting in the present
largely because they were the inescapable material with which we made our
postcolonial national fantasies, fantasies that are now unraveling in this glo-
balized era, in this dispossessed America.41 As Claude Lecouteux (207–21)
has put it, phantoms are “morts recalcitrants” connected with obsessions.
I have already remarked how the lost of credibility of the Royal
Commentaries at the end of the nineteenth century is related to the rejec-
tion by historians and anthropologists. Paradoxically, the narrative became
consecrated as one of the master works in the literary canon and occupies
a very special place in the American canon.42 Since then, nationalist praise
has enshrined Garcilaso as a “símbolo de lo americano,” “el primer mestizo
de América,” “el primer criollo,” “el primer escritor clásico de América,”
“el primer mestizo biológico y espiritual de América,” and “el príncipe
de los escritores del nuevo mundo”—the last two repeated so many times
it is impossible to determine who uttered them first (see Yépez Miranda;
Instituto Cambio y Desarrollo; Sánchez; Leonard). In such reverent “ghost-
ing” there seems to be a touch of recognition and much exorcism of our own
phantoms, concealed within such fábulas historiales.
We should then ask if Viracocha is still errant as a ghost, among us,
straddling this disjointed present, if he is still a migrant among us, a cele-
brated, sacred, damned, and clandestine wanderer, just as he was during
Garcilaso’s life; that is, if his wandering continues five centuries after the
conquistorial violence was unleashed, perhaps we can discover in this itin-
erary, as Derrida writes, “what remains infinite in this wound” (quoted in
Borradori, 141).
As traces, melancholia, supplement, mourning, a refusal to disappear, a
messianic sign—what have you—phantoms are not an inappropriate matter
of study for historians. To seriously engage them does not mean to renounce
or neglect the disciplinary requirements for truth and knowledge, to investi-
gate historical minutes and perceive the long durée. To the contrary, the spec-
tral dimension in and of history allows us to better understand the symbolic
resources associated with our work, conceived as mediation, to reinvest the
present with the potentialities of the past. For writing history is not just con-
cerned with what was lost; it is also, and most important, a negotiation with
the living, becoming itself a phantasmatic mediation between what is, what
no longer is, and what remains possible.

NOTES
1. I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the symposium

“There Is Only One World: Garcilaso in Dialogue with Today’s World-Making,”
held at the Johns Hopkins University on May 22–23, 2009, for a couple of joyful
days of intense and stimulating scholarly exchange. I’d also like to recognize the
intellectual generosity of Sara Castro-Klarén, Bruno Mazzoldi, Rory O’Brien,
James Fuerst, and José Antonio Mazzotti.
2. Thus, instead of addressing the Royal Commentaries as the trials of a pri-
vate wounded self, I suggested we regard them as an intervention into “an ethos—a
group culture—that is different from (and more than) the sum of the private
wounds that make it up.” See Erikson. I defined the structure of traumatic writing
as exhibiting three features: the inscription of unresolved loss; the agonic play of
temporalities (that is, the interplay of the demands of past losses and the needs of
the present); and the struggle to produce meaning and coherence in the face of
brutal violence and disruption. The result of such writing is a symbolic structure
wherein productive (mourning) and nonproductive (melancholia) impulses consti-
tute the fundamental driving narrative impulse. See Ortega Martínez, “Trauma
and Narrative,” 400–42.
3. The idea is developed in his later work, including Herbert Spenser, The Prin-
ciples of Sociology [1874–75] (New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction Publishers, 2003),
vol. 1. See, in particular, the chapter “The Ideas of Souls, Ghosts, Spirits, De-
mons, etc.,” 171–84, in that work.
4. Michelet wrote frequently on the obligation of historians toward the dead.
See his “Préface de 1869” to Histoire de France, vol. 1 (Paris: Lacroix, 1880), i–xliv.
5. For a critical reflection on the event, see Ortega Martínez, “Rehabitar la
cotidianidad.”
6. A few lines later they write: “The disturbed relationship to the dead—who
are forgotten and embalmed—is one of the symptoms of the sickness of experience
today.”
7. Garibay K. and Berdan also refer to the trauma of conquest.
8. In a powerful essay, Harris warns us against privileging these omens—and
especially against our desire to read them indexically as evidence of a definite clo-
sure of indigenous time. In such readings she notices a tendency to mythologize
history by narcissistically inscribing the Other’s view of the European self—the
coming of the white people—as the necessary, inevitable, and culminating moment of
Native history. For a shrewd view of such omens, see Tovar Pinzón.
9. Muratori’s De la fuerza de la fantasía humana circulated widely in Spanish
America, and this particular work was the first book translated and published
in Colombia. In an earlier article I explored the figure of the melancholic Indi-

an as an ideological construct elaborated by early American historiography that
allowed Europeans to legitimize the conquest because of a perceived lack of de-
sire and virility on the part of Native communities. However, the melancholic is
primarily a metaphor produced by the colonizers’ bad conscience and indicates
a particular way in which cultures operate by which social suffering leaves us a
significant legacy. See Ortega Martínez, “Humor negro e historia.”
10. My translation of the original: “da a entender que naturalmente fueron
nacidos y criados para servir, y les es más provechoso el servir que el mandar.”
11. Such conceptualization makes of phantoms “a constituent element of mod-
ern social life” (Gordon, 7).
12. See also the introduction in Buse and Stott, 1–20.
13. Rostworowski observes that Andean creational myths help us under-
stand the process of Inca state creation and expansion. For instance, Viracocha
was a central deity in the pre-Incaic culture of Tiwanaku (circa 500–900 AD).
Though the Incas viewed themselves as heirs of pre-Inca Andean cultures, they
also sought ways to individualize and legitimize their rule. Thus the ninth Inca
Pachacutec promoted Inti (the Sun) over Viracocha and built the famous temple of
the Sun, Coricancha, in Cusco. The cult of Viracocha was never abandoned and in
fact was often assimilated to Inti (as in Coricancha), but what passed for creation
stories were visibly tailored for ideological purposes. See Rostworowski de Diez
Canseco, Estructuras andinas del poder, 31–34. See also Urton.
14. See, for instance, Las Casas, Chapter 121; Betanzos, 1:I–II, 1:X; Acosta,
5:I, 6:XIX–XXII; Cieza de León, Chapters XLIII, CI; and Guamán Poma, Chap-
ters LI and LVI. See also the definitions for “Ticci” and “Viracocha” in González
Holguín. For a discussion of Garcilaso’s reelaboration of the myth, see Rost-
worowski de Diez Canseco, “Análisis crítico,” especially 222–36; Duviols, “Los
cultos incaicos”; and MacCormack, Religion in the Andes, 349–64.
15. See Las Casas, 121; Oviedo y Valdés, 46: X–XII (vol. 5, 64–72); López de
Gómara, see the chapter titled “Opinión que tienen acerca del Diluvio” (Chapter
233); Acosta, 5:III; Cieza de León, Chapter LXXII; and Betanzos, 1:XI. González
Holguin defines Pachacamac (Pacha camak) as “El templo que el Inca dedico a
Dios criador junto a Lima, para hazer altos a sus exercitos, y el Demonio de em-
bidia se entro y se hizo poner un idolo que porque hablava en el mucho llamaron
rimak.” For a contemporary assessment of the figure of Pachacamac, see Rost-
worowski de Diez Canseco, Estructuras andinas, 42–49.
16. Some of these intermediaries are Illapa (lightning and thunder), certain
birds (such as falcons and hummingbirds), snakes, malquis (ancestors), K’uychí
(the rainbow), mountains spirits or Apus, minor spirits or Aukis, huacas (divine
aparitions), and so on. There are several entries for “Phantasma” in González
Holguín´s Quechua dictionary: “Phantasma o duende: Tuta ccacchak caccachak
manchachicuk llaksak,” “Phantasma por el demonio que se aparecia con pechos

largos de mujer. Hapiy ñuñu,” “Phantasma como cabeza humana que andava por
el ayre. Huma purik quepque,” “Phantasma por el coco, o espanta niños. Huaca,
o aya,” “Phantasma [under espantajo] Tutamanchachicuk, o Quepque, o huma
purik, o hapiy ñuñu o huaca.” González Holguín defines espantar as “huaca.” See
also the entries for espantarse and espantado ser de otro. For more, see Rostworowski
de Diez Canseco, Estructuras andinas, and Urton, 7–24.
17. Garcilaso published in 1590 his Spanish translation of León Hebreo’s Dia-
loghi d’amore (1535), a tract on Platonic love of knowledge. For more on Garcilaso’s
debt to Platonism, see the now classic study by Arocena. Also see the recent work
by Sommer.
18. Throughout the Confessions and other works, Augustine maintained a rig-
orous theological difference between divine presence and phantoms. This differ-
ence would strongly influence sixteenth-century Neoplatonic thought.
19. Lecouteux (50–53) has established that phantoms were connected to issues
of idolatry during the Middle Ages, particularly in relation to the return of the
dead ones.
20. This is the official line provided by Lopez de Gómara in Historia general de
las Indias (second part Conquista de Méjico: “Como se aparece el diablo,” 318–19).
Cieza de León (CXVII, 393–96) tells the story of cacique who, wanting to become
Christian, had the demons appear to him and try to dissuage him from convert-
ing. Contrast these versions with those in the Manuscrpt of Huiracocha where a kura-
ka (native chief) has stopped worshipping his Andean huaca because of Spanish
pressure; he becomes victim of Andean deities for refusing them. See Taylor, chap-
ters 20–22.
21. Garcilaso calls it a Native belief but laments that Spaniards did not live
up to expectations (Book V, Chapter XXI, 301). In Betanzos, Atahualpa’s captain
Ciquinchara skeptically says: “Yo no los llamo Viracocha sino supai cuna” (II: 20).
22. From the original: “Si a esta vana creencia de los indios correspondieran
los españoles . . . y les predicaran el santo Evangelio con el ejemplo que la doctrina
pide, no hay duda de que hiciera grandísimo fruto. Pero pasó todo tan diferente”
(Book V, Chapter XXI, 301).
23. From the original: “Que a mi no me es lícito decirlo: dirán que por ser
indio hablo apasionadamente” (Book V, Chapter XXI, 301).
24. See, for instance, the extensive references to Pachacutec in Las Casas,
Betanzos, Fernández de Palencia, Acosta, and Guamán Poma.
25. Pachacutec plays such a central role in Betanzos’s account that his heroic
deeds occupy over one third; Guamán Poma. However, it is important to note
that the account given by the four quipucamayos (or safekeepers and interpreters of
quipus) to Vaca de Castro, governor of Peru, in 1542 indicates that “Este Viraco-
cha Inga, fue el más valeroso y poderoso inga que ninguno de sus antepasados ni
sus descendientes” (Betanzos, 38) and attributes to him many of the accomplish-

ments generally ascribed to Pachacutec. Like Garcilaso, the quipucamayos were
part of the old Cuzco elite and were members of Viracocha´s royal lineage, which
might explain their antagonistic version. See Collapiña and Otros Quipucamayos;
Mazzotti, Incan Insights, 47–55 of the text. For a similar account, see Las Casas;
Fernández de Palencia; Acosta.
26. In fact, the Spanish Mercedarian friar and chronicler Martín de Murúa
notes in Historia general del Perú that Inca Yupanqui and Pachacútec are the same
(see Book I, Chapter XIX).
27. This relational logic achieves a sophisticated expression in the worship
and regard for Pachamama. See the classic work by Imbelloni. See also Manga
Quespi; and Francisco Bayá et al., “Entre la cosmovisión andina y Herácclita,”
Yachay 13, no. 24 (1996).
28. Andeans designated the arrival of the Spaniards as a pachacuti. For more
on the concept of Pachacuti, see Bouysse-Cassagne; Salomon; Adorno.
29. Rostworowski argues that the mummy could not have been Viracocha be-
cause it already had been found by Gonzalo Pizarro in Xaquixaguana; see Rost-
worowski de Diez Canseco, Pachacútec, 26–28. Hernández (92–93) connects this
scene to Garcilaso’s rupture and subsequent identification with the Andean world.
In this scene Polo de Ondegardo occupies the position of his father—who had just
died and was also a corregidor in Cusco—and introduces Garcilaso to “una visión
detenida de su genealogía imperial.” The mummified maternal past—both gone
and present—in turn becomes the point of departure for a mournful elaboration
of the loss.
30. From the original: “[L]os físicos llaman fantasmas las imágenes de las co-
sas que imaginamos o percebimos.” Covarrubias’s quote is a slight reelaboration
of Aristotle’s philosophy of the mind as developed in his On the Soul (Book III,
7–10).
31. Such formulation makes of phantoms “a constituent element of modern
social life” (Gordon, 7).
32. For Garcilaso’s use of classical codes as a form of intelligibility, see Mac-
Cormack, “Incas and Rome,” 8–13; and Efraín Cristal, “Fábulas clásicas y neo-
platónicas en los Comentarios reales,” in Homenaje a José Durand, edited by Luis
Cortest (Madrid: Verbum, 1993).
33. Menéndez Pelayo (75) once indicated that Garcilaso’s account was really a
utopian novel lacking any historical worth.
34. Fittingly, Lacan’s matheme for neurotic fantasy ($ ◊ a) grounds the phan-
tom on the desire of the other (Che vuoi?); see Lacan, Ecrits.
35. Benjamin casts on the figure of the Angelus novus the qualities I assign to
phantoms: shadowy straddling the present, the Angel faces the past and witnesses
an unbroken chain of catastrophes, it is unable to redeem the parts as it remains
caught by the storm that shakes paradise and pushes toward the future.

36. From the original: “[C]omo no tuvieron letras se les olvidaba para siempre
todo lo que por su tradición dejaban de encomendar a la memoria.”
37. From the original: “[M]anda escrevir la verdad, so pena de ser burladores
de todo el mundo, y por ende infames.”
38. For Garcilaso’s dramatic account of such destitution, see the last five chap-
ters of the second part of the Royal Commentaries, Garcilaso’s Historia general del
Perú. Garcilaso formulates these collective aspirations through the Jesuits’ po-
litical and religious lens. For the Jesuit political frame, see Fuerst. Manuscript
facilitated by the author.
39. From the original: “[F]undamentos . . . para las cosas mayores y mejores
que de su imperio cuentan.”
40. As I observed in “Trauma and Narrative,” there is a tight formal inter-
dependence between the fábulas historiales and the Royal Commentaries. Garcilaso
claimed in the “Advertencias” that he should be allowed “que en esta historia yo
escriba como indio con las mismas letras que aquellas tales dicciones se deben es-
cribir” (5). This is an argument for the specificity of his discourse. In addition, the
chapter in which he explains the fábulas historiales is the one before his ars poetica
(Book I, Chapter XIX: “Protestación del autor sobre la Historia”), which begins
by calling the fables “La primera piedra de nuestro edificio” (48).
41. Pilar Riaño considers the proliferation of ghosts and other unearthly be-
ings among gang members in Medellín a continuation of the supernatural stories
frequent during earlier times. In contexts saturated by the dead young, phantoms
operate as “formaciones simbólicas [que] median la experiencia cotidiana de una
violencia que se ve, se oye, se siente y se teme,” in such a way that they evince
“un miedo colectivo muy profundo a la ruptura de los reguladores sociales nece-
sarios para mantener un grado de estabilidad en las vidas sociales de los habi-
tantes de la ciudad.” Pilar Riaño Alcalá, Jóvenes, memoria y violencia en Medellín:
Una antropología del recuerdo y el olvido (Medellín: Editorial de la Universidad de
Antioquia-ICANH, 2006), 146, 151.
42. Garcilaso’s Royal Commentaries was and continues to be a site of subject
formation. This is evident by the avid readership it has enjoyed during the colo-
nial and postcolonial periods. For an informative essay on Garcilaso’s readers
during the seventeenth century, see Guíbovich. For the eighteenth century and
the neo-Inca Renaissance, see Rowe. In addition, see Mazzotti, “Garcilaso and
the Origins.”
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As pharmakon, Garcilaso’s Royal Commentaries—and a great number of

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1. I would like to thank the organizers and participants of the symposium

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