In this book I study the representations of subjectivity in several Spanish texts and films from the mid-1960s to the 1990s, drawing on a handful of key contemporary critics and philosophers who are best described, drawing on Simon Critchley’s terminology, as ‘post-deconstructive’ (1999: 51–82). Such thinkers include Gilles Deleuze, who Foucault (1994: 76) famously elevated to the category of greatest philosopher of the twentieth century; Alain Badiou, who was described by one of his Anglo-American critics as ‘arguably the most ambitious speculative thinker since Hegel’ (Barker 2002: 1); the Italian political theorist Giorgio Agamben; Slavoj Žižek, the cultural critic...

The name of the ex-Carmelite priest Antonio Roig (b. Eivissa, 1939) is by now inextricably linked in Spain to the controversy which, in the late 1970s, followed the publication of his three autobiographical works in which he came out as a gay man: first, in 1977,Todos los parques no son un paraíso (Memorias de un sacerdote)(All parks are not a paradise (Memoirs of a priest)); in 1978,Variaciones sobre un tema de Orestes (Diario, 1975–1977)(Variations on a theme of Orestes (Diary, 1975–1977)); and in 1979,Vidente en rebeldía: Un proceso en la Iglesia(Seer in...

InBeing and Event(2005 [1988]) and in more recent works such asEthics(2001 [1998]),Saint Paul: The Foundation of Universalism(2003 [1997]), andLogics of Worlds(2009 [2006]), the philosopher Alain Badiou (b. Rabat, 1937) opposes the particularist and typically ‘minoritarian’ concerns – be these of a genderrelated, (homo)sexual, ‘racial’ or national character – which have constituted the main focus of attention for post-structuralist and Cultural Studies thinkers for over two decades now, in favour of a type of criticism which brings back to the fore currently disgraced categories such as ‘truth’ and the ‘universal’. According to Badiou – in confrontation...

The publication of Alain Badiou’sThe Clamor of Being(2000) represented nothing short of a revolution in the context of the studies on the philosopher Gilles Deleuze. Badiou writes against the prevailing view among Anglo-American critics of a Deleuze refusing all systematicity, breaking with the ‘Western metaphysical tradition’, etc. – against what Badiou calls the fashionable doxa of a Deleuzianism which, focusing exclusively on the philosopher’s later collaborative work with Félix Guattari, makes of him the joyous champion of desire, free flux and ‘the world’sconfusion’ (Badiou 2000: 10). Badiou’s Deleuze controversially emerges as an impeccably sober and ‘ascetic’ (13) thinker,...

InCinema I: The Movement-Image(1986 [1983]) andCinema II: The Time-Image(1989 [1985]) Deleuze establishes a well-known distinction between two kinds of cinema. The first kind, best exemplified by Hollywood’s productions before the Second World War, obeys the ‘sensory-motor schema’, by which Deleuze means the system of temporal and spatial coordinates which ultimately conforms to our everyday, commonsense world (Deleuze 1986: 210). This is a cinema dominated by the ‘action-image’, in which the existence of a protagonist (individual or collective) testifies to a Cartesian belief in the subject as origin and locus of truth, shots are linked through chains...

As is well known, the cornerstone of Giorgio Agamben’s argument inHomo Sacer(1998) is that modern statehood first constitutes itself through the simultaneous inclusion/exclusion of ‘bare life’ [la nuda vita]:¹ ‘In Western politics’, he notes, ‘bare life has the peculiar privilege of being that whose exclusion founds the city of men’ (8). Going back to the ancient Greek distinction betweenzoē(understood as ‘the simple fact of living common to all living beings’) andbios(‘the form or way of living proper to an individual or a group’) (1), Agamben maintains that the inclusion of ‘bare life’ within the...

InThe Century(2007 [2005]), Alain Badiou’s final appraisal of the twentieth century is damning: ‘The century concludes on the motif of the impossibility of subjective novelty and the comfort of repetition’, he points out. If earlier in the century men and women (at least those considering themselves progressive) had believed in and fought for ways of escaping from the constraints of ‘family, property and state’, Badiou notes, nowadays ‘it seems that “modernization” […] amounts to being a good little dad, a good little mum, a good little son, to becoming an efficient employee, enriching oneself as much as possible,...