The early modern was a time of early capitalist development, national consolidation, and colonialism. Thus it was also a time of enormous violence. How might we theorize this violence on a more discrete level to read canonical texts of the “Golden Age”? How might we relate this violence to the emergent subjectivity of the early modern?

I propose to examine the trajectory of violence and subjection in a small group of canonical texts of the Spanish early modern period: the anonymously written Lazarillo de Tormes (c. 1554), Lope de Vega's play, Fuenteovejuna (c. 1612–1614), and Luis de Góngora's long lyric poem, the Soledades (c. 1613–1626). I will define “subjection” as the creation of the subject characterized by “interiorized self-recognition” in both an historical and a political sense, along the lines suggested by Francis Barker in his classic work of British materialist criticism, The Tremulous Private Body (31). Barker locates the features of modern subjectivity as they evolved out of the medieval concept of the body as a political and social entity.

In Barker's words, “pre-bourgeois subjection does not properly involve subjectivity at all, but a condition of dependent membership in which place and articulation are defined not by an interiorized self-recognition […] , but by incorporation in the body politic which is the king's body in its social form” (31). In contrast, he asserts, modern subjectivity entails the birth of the private sphere, although this bourgeois interiority is controlled from its inception through the assertion of mind over body, self-discipline and self-censorship, and a clinical, mechanistic and patriarchal mode of corporeal experience. The medieval sacramental body, subject to displays of spectacular punishment, is thus reduced to the modern, functional body of the worker and ultimately to a pseudo-organic, artificial, warlike body (“Preface” v–x).

The process Barker describes should not be understood as simply teleological; both medieval and modern concepts of subjection vied for dominance in the early modern period, existing in a conflation of temporalities. Similarly mixed phenomena exist today, as in the example of the use of torture, a primitive mode, which is nonetheless employed in contemporary military prisons and improved by modern techniques of medicine and mechanization.