About the Book
Queer Events studies the representations of queer subjectivities during the Spanish Transition era (1960s to 1990s), drawing on some of the most influential critical theorists and philosophers of our times (Gilles Deleuze, Giorgio Agamben, Alain Badiou). The book focuses on well-known Spanish authors and film-makers (Terenci Moix, Vicente Aranda) as well as on others who have merited far less critical attention so far (including Antonio Roig, Alberto Cardín, and the directors of the short-lived avant-garde film movement known as ‘Escuela de Barcelona’).
Table of Contents:
Preface page
Acknowledgements
List of Film Stills
Introduction
Queer Events: Locating the Universal in the Spanish Transition
1. Of Rats and Men: The Homosexual’s ‘Becoming-Animal’ in Antonio Roig’s Autobiographical Trilogy
2. Antigone in Hyde Park: Homosexuality and the Ethics of the Event in Antonio Roig’s Autobiographical Trilogy
3. How Does One Escape One’s Own Simulacrum? Time, Repetition and the ‘Asceticism’ of Being in Terenci Moix’s Autobiography
4. Deleuze no es únicamente severo: Time and Memory in the Films of the Escola de Barcelona
5. Saint Cardín: Sacredness, ‘Sinthomosexuality’ and the (Non-)Place of the Queer in the Spain of the Transition
Conclusion
A Queer ‘Passion for the Real’
Bibliography
Index
Contents
About the Author :
David Vilaseca was Professor of Hispanic Studies and Critical Theory at Royal Holloway, University of London, and author of Hindsight and the Real: Subjectivity in Gay Hispanic Autobiography (Peter Lang, 2003) and L’aprenentatge de la soledat (Edicions 3i4, 2008; winner of the 2007 Octubre Prize for Catalan fiction). He was killed in a traffic accident in London on 9 February 2010.
Review :
This is a challenging, compelling, and very well written book which builds on the author's brilliant Hindsight and the Real in the double sense of taking further a highly significant exploration of representations of (roughly) the self in Spanish culture and of honing already startling skills of exposition of complex philosophical and cultural critical ideas. Queer Events, David Vilaseca's third book, was published posthumously, after the tragic and untimely death of the author in a traffic accident in London on February 9, 2010. It is in part indebted to Paul Julian Smith, who graciously corrected the proofs. The volume contains an introduction and conclusion that frame the study theoretically and five chapters on the autobiographical writings of Antonio Roig and Terenci Moix, the films of the Escola de Barcelona, and the fictional and non-fictional writings of Alberto Cardin. Vilaseca contends that these works challenge established knowledge and that in the context of the Spanish transition to democracy they are all in some way revolutionary. Although the subject matter is dense and difficult to summarize in the short space of a review, Vilaseca's command of theory and his ability to probe and illuminate the texts he analyzes is impressive. With this book Vilaseca achieved the summit of his scholarly vocation, and he would certainly have continued to produce equally important works in the future. His loss to the fields of lesbian and gay studies, queer theory, and Hispanism will thus be great. Chapter one, "Of Rats and Men: The Homosexual's 'Becoming-Animal' in Antonio Roig's Autobiographical Trilogy," focuses on Roig's three autobiographical volumes: Todos los parques no son un paraiso (Memorias de un sacerdote), Variaciones sobre un tema de Orestes (Diario, 1975-1977), and Vidente en rebeldia: Un proceso en la Iglesia. Vilaseca departs from previous studies to argue that Roig does not replicate dominant Judeo-Christian perceptions of homosexuality but instead is deeply anti-homophobic and, as Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari propose in their study of Franz Kafka, manages to subvert the structures of Oedipalization despite the abundance of Oedipal motifs in his writing. According to Vilaseca, Roig undermines the Oedipal paradigm not through his relationships with his mother or sisters but rather his exaggerated libidinal attachment to his father and in particular the parodic excess with which he depicts one particular lover, whom he regards as a father-figure. Vilaseca suggests that Roig seeks precisely to free himself from the Oedipal yoke and, by extension, the patriarchal power from which homophobia derives its authority. Vilaseca describes chapter two, "Antigone in Hyde Park: Homosexuality and the Ethics of the Event in Antonio Roig's Autobiographical Trilogy," as the theoretical centerpiece of his book. Drawing on Alain Badiou's conception of the "event," he argues that Roig's coming-out, as recounted in his autobiographical volumes, marks a foundational break with the established order incommensurable with the situation in which it occurred. As an event it undoes existing systems of knowledge, and through it what was unthinkable suddenly becomes possible. Significant in the context of autobiography is the assertion that the subject of the event does not precede it but rather is induced by the logic or truth (here understood as a subjective truth) of the event itself. What is more, the event changes the situation in which it occurs at the site of what Badiou calls the "central void," the socio-symbolic location of the most marginalized, whose lack of value vis-a-vis the larger group allows them to become the locus of the principle of universality. Vilaseca highlights a passage in Roig's autobiographical writing when he is confronted by a potential blackmailer. In responding to his tormentor, he begins to redefine the coordinates of his situation and ultimately emerges as a champion of anti-homophobia. According to Vilaseca, his action reveals the "eventual" nature of his autobiographical project not only with regard to his oppressor but also the Catholic Church and Spanish society as a whole. Despite the negative reception of Roig's writing by many in the Spanish gay community, Vilaseca thus concludes that its effect on Spanish society has been positive and lasting. In chapter three, "How Does One Escape One's Own Simulacrum? Time, Repetition and the 'Asceticism' of Being in Terenci Moix's Autobiography," Vilaseca examines Moix's three-volume autobiographical narrative, El peso de la paja. Whereas most critics highlight what they regard as the postmodernist and camp aspects of Moix's writing, Vilaseca discerns in it classic and ascetic dimensions. Based on Deleuze, he argues that despite the emphasis on simulacra in Moix's writing, Moix is also concerned with being. But for Moix the being of the simulacrum (or phenomenal reality) is in fact difference, so that the return to the self traced through the autobiographical gesture is a return not to an essential sameness but to repetition, differentiation, and becoming. For Moix the "ground" of the simulacrum (and his being) is cinema, the paradigmatic simulacrum as "shadow reality." According to Vilaseca this does not imply the existence of a being superior to the simulacrum but rather that the simulacrum is always a copy of a copy. Vilaseca, following Deleuze (and in particular his reading of Marcel Proust) and Henri Bergson, similarly theorizes Moix's treatment of temporality. Like the Proustian narrator, Moix undergoes an apprenticeship as an artist that leads to a new understanding of the nature of time. Moix's autobiography aims to recover not the chronological moments of the past but a pure time, which, as he discovers, is not independent of the actual moment but is instead the very dynamic of differentiation. The eternal or essential past of the autobiographer exists (or rather insists) only in the present moment, just as any inherent self for Moix is ultimately always and only a simulacrum of a simulacrum. Vilaseca turns his critical lens to cinema in chapter four, "Deleuze no es unicamente severo: Time and Memory in the Films of the Escola de Barcelona." Taking as his point of departure Deleuze's studies of movement and time in film, Vilaseca examines three films, Noche de vino tinto (Jose Maria Nunes), Fata Morgana (Vicente Aranda), and Dante no es unicamente severo (Jacinto Esteva-Grewe and Joaquin Jorda). He argues that although the experimentalist works of the Escola de Barcelona have often been regarded as politically unengaged, these films are in fact revolutionary in their representation of temporal movement. In his analysis of Noche de vino tinto he invokes Deleuze's notion of "any-space-whatever" (a space that is undetermined and non-situational) to show how the film deterritorializes identity and thereby, despite its ostensibly closed ending, affirms human freedom. In his discussion of Fata Morgana he draws on Deleuze's notion of "time crystals" or "hyalosigns"-"mirrors of time" often rendered in cinema through mirror reflections-that function, in keeping with Bergson's understanding of temporality, to express the indiscernability of the virtual and the actual. In his reading of Dante no es unicamente severo, the most well known film of the Escola de Barcelona, Vilaseca cites the Nietzschean concept of "the power of the false" (which Deleuze relates to the manipulation of time in postmodern cinema) to show how the film engages in the production of an alternative present that shatters the illusion of a commonsense world. In chapter five, "Saint Cardin: Sacredness, 'Sinthomosexuality' and the (Non-) Place of the Queer in the Spain of the Transition," Vilaseca begins by relating Giorgio Agamben's theory of statehood in Homo Sacer to Lee Edelman's theory of queer sexuality in No Future. He then elucidates Edelman's reading of Jacques Lacan's concept of the "sinthome" (as opposed to "symptom"), through which the subject experiences an irreducible and meaningless jouissance. By rejecting heteronormativity the homosexual, or in Edelman's neologism, the "sinthomosexual," experiences a similar jouissance and undoing of meaning. According to Edelman, although this pleasure is connected to the death drive, it also entails an ethical embrace of the negativity associated with non-reproductive sexuality, which in a political culture dedicated to procreation and futurity functions to dislodge the epistemological foundations of language and identity. For Vilaseca both the life and writings of Cardin exemplify "sinthomosexuality" (194-212). Cardin refused assimilation within the ostensibly liberal intellectual milieu of the early years of the Transition, and in his short stories and one novel, Sin mas ni mas, he depicts characters whose erotic and violent actions destroy conventional notions of humanity and whose lives, like the "diabolical saint" described by Jean-Paul Sartre in his analysis of Jean Genet, pose a continuous and uncontainable challenge to contemporary Spanish society. Throughout Queer Events Vilaseca highlights texts, including those of Roig, Cardin, and the Escola de Barcelona, that have received little critical attention from Hispanists. Although he might occasionally overstate the societal repercussions of some of these texts, readers will gain from his rigorous theoretical analyses an enriched and nuanced understanding of post-Francoist writing and film, and Spanish queer aesthetics and praxis. The book will surely be cited by scholars of these subjects for a long time to come, and will stand as a testament to the brilliant but all-too-short intellectual career of the author. ... readers will gain from his rigorous theoretical analyses an enriched and nuanced understanding of post-Francoist writing and film, and Spanish queer aesthetics and praxis. The book will surely be cited by scholars of these subjects for a long time to come, and will stand as a testament to the brilliant but all-too-short intellectual career of the author. Published posthumously following a tragic accident, Queer Events is fitting testimony to David Vilaseca's contribution to Hispanic Studies. Frequently hailing the importance of 'punching a hole' in existing knowledge, of undermining dominant thinking and prevailing expectations through queer's potential to destabilize, Vilaseca's work here aims to expose and, most crucially, fracture that which seems monolithic and secure in identity and society, Hispanic and elsewhere. 'Punching a hole' is not, however, an act of mere defiance, a counter-attack by the repressed against the oppressors. For Vilaseca, queer is not simply a position from which to speak; in critical dialogue with recent debates in queer theory, particularly Lee Edelman's No Future: Queer Theory and the Death Drive (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2004), and with the writings of Deleuze, Badiou, and Agamben, Vilaseca draws on a number of complex theories to underpin a thesis which puts forward a devastatingly subtle possibility for radical queerness. As the book's title suggests, each of Vilaseca's objects of study pertains to a 'queer event', that is, a moment that breaks with the status quo, but arises from within the field's own inner void. In their own ways, each chapter theorizes an aspect of that void and explores text or film as a symptomatic enunciation of a fracture in motion. Following an introduction which establishes the theoretical frameworks and concerns, the first chapter examines Antonio Roig's provocative autobiographies of the 1970s. Rejecting the commonly held view that Roig's writings uphold dominant heteronormativity, Vilaseca instead focuses on the complexity of the autobiographical writing of the father-son relationship. Through the development of a Deleuzian reading, Vilaseca deftly exposes discourses of animality and queerness as 'salubriously perverse and rather healthy' (p.58). Roig is also the focus of the second chapter, where the emphasis shifts to the autobiographies as 'events' which in hindsight are recognized as redefining the limits of acceptable visibility in a transitional Spain that was at once turbulent and clinging to traditional values. If Roig, the gay priest, may seem the embodiment of sexual polemics in 1970s Spain, Chapter 3 examines a socially accepted homosexuality found in the quintessential writer of 'camp', Terenci Moix. Here Vilaseca draws our attention to the underlying atemporality of that which appears chronological, and to the plurality of memories-real and constructed-that blur the distinctions between the 'person' and narrative 'subject', a creative impulse which transcends the self. Chapter 4 is at once a continuation of the previous chapter, yet also takes a (queer) turn since it explores the cinema of the Escola de Barcelona and in particular the mid-1960s works Fata morgana and Dante no es unicamente severo. Unlike Roig, Moix, and their writings, these films are not ostensibly queer within a framework of identitarian politics. Instead, Vilaseca appeals to film's potential to disrupt commonplace understanding of the actual and virtual, drawing on the Escola's aesthetics of emptiness and alternative ways of seeing as equivalents to the 'punching a hole' that defines a queer poetics. This ichapter may initially seem a sidestep from a close engagement with 'queer', Vilaseca not even making the links in the chapter's conclusion, yet in many ways it is Queer Events' best example of its own hypothesis. The final chapter centres upon the writer and activist Alberto Cardin, a culmination of all the key aspects of the study thus far. Opening by drawing together Agamben's notion of homo sacer with Edelman's writings on homosexuality's burden of negativity, Vilaseca explores queers in the contemporary polis as 'perennial reminders of the political order's internal limits and symbolic fractures' (p.193). In Cardin's work this is best expressed, according to Vilaseca, through the fragmentation and de-eroticization of sexual acts through taboo. Queer here becomes aligned with the Lacanian death drive, disrupting and exploiting gaps in the symbolic order. My summaries here do little justice to the complexities and fine details of the theories and material explored in Queer Events. Throughout the study Vilaseca balances neatly the socio-historical, cultural contexts of the works with their universality. The work is accessible to non-Hispanists through the inclusion of translations of all Spanish sources; the division of the bibliography into two-general critical theory and then Hispanic culture-also speaks to the book's dual audience. Vilaseca introduces Queer Events by remarking how it responds to unanswered questions at the end of his previous study Hindsight and the Real: Subjectivity in Gay Hispanic Autobiography (New York: Peter Lang, 2003). As a continuation of that work, Queer Events continues to question perceptions of the self, to deconstruct reassuring identity positions, and to interrogate the ethical engagement of writer and reader. Like his earlier work, Vilaseca's ideas and material here are always thought-provoking, often challenging; though he was unable to continue that work himself, his work will continue nonetheless as an inspiration for others. Queer Events continues to question perceptions of the self, to deconstruct reassuring identity positions, and to interrogate the ethical engagement of writer and reader. Like his earlier work, Vilaseca's ideas and material here are always thought-provoking, often challenging; though he was unable to continue that work himself, his work will continue nonetheless as an inspiration for others. Queer Events continues to question perceptions of the self, to deconstruct reassuring identity positions, and to interrogate the ethical engagement of writer and reader. Like his earlier work, Vilaseca's ideas and material here are always thought-provoking, often challenging; though he was unable to continue that work himself, his work will continue nonetheless as an inspiration for others.
