[In the following essay, Vilaseca describes Goytisolo's transformation as exhibited in his two-volume autobiography Coto vedado and En los reinos de taifaand how such a transformation has personal, political, and literary implications.]

Everything is played out in retro and a tergo. (Jacques Derrida)¹

‘In classic paintings, I look for the subconscious—in a Surrealist painting, for the conscious.’ (Sigmund Freud)²

One of the most productive yet relatively overlooked contributions in Lee Edelman's Homographesis (1994) is its rereading of Freud's famous case From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (The ‘Wolf Man’) (1918) in terms of a crisis not only of the dominant narratives that inform and orient the knowledge of sexual difference, but also of Western epistemology in general.³ From his distinctively deconstructive perspective, Edelman points out that such an epistemological crisis follows from the metaleptic, ‘Moebius-strip’ type of logic that informs Freud's hypothesis of the ‘primal scene’ as described in the case, as well as from the scene's implication in the spectacle of what the critic provocatively calls a ‘proto-homosexuality’ (Homographesis, p. 180). This article looks in some detail at the relationship between such epistemological disruptions and the constitution and uses of homosexuality in Juan Goytisolo's two autobiographical volumes to date: Coto vedado (1985) and En los reinos de laifa (1986). Building on an implicit comparison between Edelman's ideas on the metaleptic nature of the primal scene as a (proto-)homosexual structure, and Jacques Lacan's theory of the subject's ‘extimate’ relationship to the Other, I shall attempt to show that the subject of Goytisolo's autobiography constructs his own ontological coherence always in retrospect and a tergo (from behind), hence in a series of anti-essentialist movements in which it is the metaleptic ‘(be)hindsight’⁴ of homosexuality that determines both the subject's constitution and his exorbitant chronology.

As is well known, in The ‘Wolf Man’ Freud undertook the analysis of a young Russian man who had suffered in the earlier years of his childhood from a ‘severe neurotic disturbance’, one that began as an anxiety-hysteria (in the shape of an animal phobia) and then changed into an obsessional neurosis.⁵ In his attempt to interpret an early dream from which his patient, as a child, had emerged in a great state of anxiety, Freud famously arrived in this case at his hypothesis of the ‘primal scene’: at the age of one and a half, as he was sleeping in his cot in his parents' bedroom, the Wolf Man must have woken up to witness his parents engaged in a sexual intercourse a tergo (from behind),⁶ a sight he had not understood at the time, and only retrospectively (coinciding with the time when the Wolf Man had his anxiety dream) had convinced him of ‘the reality of the existence of castration’ (p. 267).

Emerging from the interpretation of a childhood dream, based in its turn on a previous memory, and featuring an erotic vision that within its discursive context can only be described as quite ‘sensational’,⁷ Freud's hypothesis of the ‘primal scene’ raises a number of interesting questions.⁸ First, there is a parallel Edelman calls ‘directional’ to be considered: a parallel between the type of sexual intercourse that the Wolf Man was supposed to have witnessed and the practice of psychoanalysis itself, in so far as it too, as Edelman points out, approaches the subject's experience ‘from behind’ through the analyst's efforts to disentangle the distinctive logic of the unconscious (p. 175). Secondly, however, and more important for my purposes, the coitus a tergo allegedly witnessed by the Wolf Man allegorizes (mirrors in mîse en abîme) the retroactive (behindactive) character of the primal scene itself as described by Freud. As suggested in The ‘Wolf Man’, the impact of the primal scene upon the subject appears also to come chronologically ‘from behind’ (or ‘back to front’), for it is not at the time it is allegedly witnessed but only in retrospect (as the scene comes to be remembered and interpreted in the very process of analytical (re)construction) that it acquires its foundational, ‘primal’ status.⁹ As Edelman points out, in the primal scene the subject thus returns ‘to a trauma occasioned by an earlier event that has no existence as a scene of trauma until it is (re)presented—or (re)produced—as a trauma in the movement of return itself’ (p. 175).

Therefore, both the primal scene and the sodomitical (retroactive/behindactive) exchange that allegorizes it constitute metaleptic, ‘Moebius-strip’ types of structures, which, as Edelman points out, bespeak ‘a crisis of certainty’ and a ‘destabilizing of the foundational logic on which knowledge as such depends’ (p. 176). What distinguishes the ‘Moebius strip’ is its subversion of the usual (Euclidean) way of representing space: the strip appears to have two sides when in fact it has only one: hence the impossibility of distinguishing its ‘back’ from its ‘front’.¹⁰ Likewise, what distinguishes a metalepsis (the rhetorical figure that takes a cause for its effect or vice versa) is its undermining of the temporal logic upon which the very distinction between cause and effect (what comes before and what comes after) is based. Conceived of as a (re)construction that emerges from the interpretation of symptoms subsequently determined to have been, themselves, effects of that very (re)construction, it is precisely such epistemological disruptions, such a destabilizing of oppositional and temporal logic (cause v. effect, before v. after), that Freud's notion of the primal scene brings about.

The metaleptic ‘(il)logic’ characterizing the primal scene in Edelman's account is best exemplified in Juan Goytisolo's two autobiographical volumes. The autobiography by the Barcelona-born Castillian writer is the story of a ‘conversion’ of sorts: that of a writer who at a crucial point in his life chooses to give up the literary, political, and sexual orthodoxies to which he owed his incipient popularity in the 1950s and early 1960s in order to follow, in the decades to come, what he experiences as a more genuine, individualized, and ethically valuable personal and literary path. Such a transformation affects all aspects of his life, entailing the overthrowing and subsequent substitution of most of his previous values and literary models: as far as politics are concerned, during the 1970s, partly after he became aware of the appalling treatment of homosexuals following the 1st National Congress in Havana in 1971, his Marxism and early admiration for the Soviet Union and Castroist Cuba gives way to the outright condemnation of all Western totalitarian régimes, Fascist as well as Communist. As for literature, his pursuit of worldly recognition and his tactical defence of social realism in early novels such as Juegos de manos (1954) and Duelo en el paraíso (1955) developed, in Reivindicación del Conde Don Fulián (1970), towards a new conception of literature as ‘gracia y condena’, one that followed the example of Jean Genet, among others, and despised professionalization, proclaiming the writer's sole commitment to his own ‘autenticidad subjetiva’.¹¹ Finally, when he is thirty-four years old his public heterosexual identity from the 1950s and 1960s gives way to his coming out as a homosexual man, an identity finding its ideal object of desire in Arab men from the Maghreb countries, but not preventing the writer from remaining in a loving relationship with his long-time female partner Monique Lange.

Goytisolo speaks of such a change in his personal and literary path in terms of a ‘renacimiento’ (Reinos, p. 248) and a ‘muda de piel’ (p. 107). Resorting to what is arguably a highly essentializing set of comparisons and rhetorical devices, the writer establishes a clear cut, hierarchical opposition between the person he used to be in ‘esa etapa de pose e inautenticidad’ (Coto, p. 117) during the 1950s and early 1960s and the narrator of the autobiography as he conceives of himself at the time of the writing.¹² The former Juan Goytisolo is characterized as an impostor and a fake, as a vain and dishonest double who used to run after social recognition and who masked his ‘yo genuino inerme y agazapado’ (p. 139); on the other hand, the present-day Goytisolo represents the writer's genuine, true self, devoid of all former opportunistic concerns, somebody who ‘sin las anteojeras ni prejuicios inherentes a toda ideología o sistema’ (p. 145) has learnt entirely to devote himself to ‘el debate contigo y con tu verdad’ (Reinos, p. 65).

To return to Freud's account of the primal scene, what is particularly interesting about Goytisolo's biographical narrative and about such a ‘renacimiento’ into ‘Juan Goytisolo’ the writer as he is known now, is precisely the metaleptic, retroactive/behindactive logic that underlies and informs the narrator's ‘transformation’. For, paraphrasing Edelman on Freud, this is also a Moebius-strip type of narrative, one in which a particular event (the advent of ‘Juan Goytisolo’ as master-signifier of the autobiography) functions as both effect and cause of its own history, and in so doing undermines the temporal and positional logic upon which the very distinction between cause and effect depends.

This question will be studied in more detail. On the one hand, the ‘first’ Goytisolo of the 1950s and early 1960s does precede the narrator of the autobiography as he conceives of himself at the time of the writing: one has developed into the other; the former's biographical experiences, influences, and thoughts are at the origin of the latter's, leading to his present-day identity. Paradoxically, however, that original, ‘primal’ Goytisolo is always already an effect and an offshoot of his namesake successor, for he is never ‘in his own terms’ but is constituted as a result of that moment of future identification from which ‘Juan Goytisolo’, achieving what Walter Benjamin calls a ‘tiger's leap into the past’,¹³ has retrospectively generated ‘his own’ history and ‘his own’ ontological necessity as a projection or reflection of ‘himself’. To put it in Lacanian terminology, Goytisolo's past in Coto vedado and En los reinos de taifa is thus produced in that most paradoxical of tenses, the future perfect (future antérieur), as a cluster of defining features that literally ‘are not’ but always ‘will have been’ (what came before ‘myself’, what preceded my own ‘renaissance’).¹⁴

A passage from Coto vedado best exemplifies this point. It is 1956 and Juan Goytisolo, increasingly critical of the Spanish cultural and political situation under Franco, is just about to move to Paris for good. ‘Aquél joven español imbuido de marxismo y adepto a las tesis del compromiso de Sartre’ (as Goytisolo describes himself at the time [Coto, p. 209]) has not yet read any of the authors who roughly eight years later (when he will no longer uphold Marxist ideals) will inspire his new way of writing and conception of the intellectual's task: Artaud, Bataille, Beckett, Genet, Rimbaud. At this point, however, and for a brief period, Goytisolo befriends the Catalan poet in exile Josep Palau i Fabre, who is fourteen years older than he is, whom he describes as ‘una suerte de francotirador en un panorama cultural que tendía fatalmente a politizarse’ (p. 209). The point is that as Goytisolo knows perfectly well, Palau i Fabre's poetry at the time was already strongly influenced by these French authors (particularly by Artaud and Rimbaud), which means that when reflecting on this episode almost thirty years later, Goytisolo is left with the metaleptic riddle of wondering whether, along with his brief friendship with Palau i Fabre, he lost a unique opportunity then of familiarizing himself much earlier with those who were to be his intellectual and aesthetic influences, and hence of considerably ‘shortening the path’ (‘acortar el camino’) that was to lead to his ‘new’, present-day ‘self’. Goytisolo writes:

Mi amistad con él [Palau i Fabre] hubiera podido procurarme la oportunidad de penetrar entonces en la obra de unos autores que, libre ya de mis anteojeras ideológicas, descubriría tan sólo ocho años más tarde; pero la brevedad de nuestra relación [ … ] malogró aquella ocasión única de acortar el camino que debería llevarme a la conquista de una escritura personal y responsable. (p. 209)

How may we befriend our future friends? What is of interest here, of course, is the metaleptic, Moebius-strip type of logic underlying Goytisolo's reflection, which raises the question of how he could possibly shorten, with or without Palau i Fabre, the path leading to something that had not yet taken place. Or, in other words, how could he possibly become who he ‘is’ before ‘being’ who he is, except as an illusion of the autobiographical distance already separating ‘him’ as subject of the enunciation from ‘him’ as subject of the utterance? In fact, what has happened is that despite the chronological disposition of events here, just as in Freud's primal scene, meaning comes ‘from behind’ and in the future perfect of what ‘I’ (‘Juan Goytisolo’) will have been. The Juan Goytisolo of 1956 is no entity in himself; a mere imperfect prefiguration of his namesake successor, his identity is established in the mode not of what he was (which he no longer is), not even of what he will be (which the autobiographer never follows through), but in the mode of what he will (not) have been for what ‘I’ (‘Juan Goytisolo’) presently am: he who ‘malogró aquella ocasión única’; he who ‘hubiera podido acortar el camino’. Ultimately, it is the later, present-day Goytisolo who, by endowing his predecessor with a specific meaning and position in the overall narrative, thus ‘precedes’ him in the autobiography, not the other way around. Generating his own history and his own ontological necessity as projections of himself, it is Goytisolo who (always at the absolute origin of the narrative) thus establishes his ‘new’ identity in an act of (be)hindsight where causes and effects are the two reversible sides of his own symbolic and ideological naturalization.¹⁵

Later in this article I shall look at the metaleptic ‘(il)logic’ underlying Goytisolo's subjective constitution in connection with his later friendship with Jean Genet; first, however, I discuss another question: what is the relationship between the chronological disruptions that Freud's primal scene can be taken to epitomize within the history of the subject and the spectacle of male sodomy? Or, in so far as the question relates to a reading of Goytisolo, in what ways, if at all, is the narrator's distinctively retroactive hindsight (as exemplified by the above episode) related to homosexuality as a discursive structure undermining the classical hierarchical binaries of corporeal and epistemological representation (front/back, before/behind, penis/anus) with its particular investment in the ‘behind’: in what comes from the ‘rear’ and a tergo?

The theoretical implications of this question have been the object of careful analysis in Edelman's Homographesis. As well as indicating how in the first instance (at a pre-genital stage) Freud's primal scene is always of a ‘proto-homosexual’ nature (that is, always fantasmatically perceived as taking place between partners both of whom are thought to possess the phallus)¹⁶ and with either of whose positions the infant has no difficulty in identifying pleasurably at that stage (Homographesis, p. 180), Edelman notes that the spectacle of male sodomy represents in itself a troubling structural subversion of the binary logic on which knowledge (not least sexual knowledge) is based. As he points out in his reading of John Cleland's Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, equally capable of penetrating and being penetrated (of having the phallus and ‘taking’ it), the male homosexual is a man who, from the front, is like his father from the front, while being also, from behind (by the same fantasmatic principle that purportedly leads a little boy to construct the vagina as the mother's ‘front bottom’) like his mother from the front (Homographesis, p. 184).¹⁷ Hence, not only does the homosexual challenge the opposition between ‘having’ and ‘not having’ the phallus (or in Lacanian terms, between ‘having’ the phallus and ‘being’ it) upon which gender difference is culturally constructed,¹⁸ but ‘he’ embodies also the metaleptic structure of the Moebius strip as described above. As Edelman argues, the homosexual constitutes himself ‘as a single-sided surface whose front and back are never completely distinguishable as such’, hence enacting a positional and temporal ‘(il)logic’ whose consequences for classical gender and epistemological narratives can be described as nothing short of ‘catastrophic’ (pp. 185–89).

It is worth briefly referring at this point to Jacques Derrida's seminal insights on homosexuality in The Post-Card (1987), in which he reads a post-card reproduction of a thirteenth century frontispiece of Plato and Socrates as a graphic depiction of penetration from behind.¹⁹ Elevating that image to the category of philosophy's primal scene, Derrida focuses on the ways in which Plato and Socrates play out a vertiginous reversibility of positions, particularly of the spatial-temporal positions on which Western philosophy rests. The spectacle of sodomy between these philosophers, according to Derrida, represents an ‘overturning and inversion of relations’ (p. 22) of ‘apocalyptic’ consequences (p. 13); for, by undermining the determinacy of (and opposition between) what or who is before and what or who behind (phallic presence v. absence, speech [Socrates] v. writing [Plato]), such a spectacle challenges in its turn the very foundations of the whole Western phallogocentric legacy. Derrida writes: ‘What I prefer, about post-cards, is that one does not know what is in front or what is in back, here or there, near or far, the Plato or the Socrates, recto or verso’ (p. 13), and ‘S. does not see P. who sees S., but (and here is the truth of philosophy) only from the back. There is only the back, seen from the back, in what is written [ … ]. Everything is played out in retro and a tergo’ (p. 48).

Before entering further into this theoretical discussion, I return to Goytisolo's autobiography, to see in what ways the troubling resistances posed by homosexuality to a conventional lineal epistemological logic, as described by Derrida and Edelman, can shed some further light on its narrator's uses of subjectivity. On several occasions in Coto vedado and En los reinos de taifa the narrator lays emphasis on the inevitably ‘constructed’ (retroactive/behindactive) character of any totalizing meaning imposed upon the discontinuous cluster of his biographical events and subjective attributes. Reflecting on the incident with his Madrid friend Lucho, reported in Part II of Coto vedado (the incident in which, much to his own surprise, a still heterosexually identified Goytisolo found himself accused of attempting to seduce his friend while under the effects of alcohol), the narrator says: ‘A la luz de mi experiencia posterior resulta muy cómodo atribuir a lo acaecido un sentido premonitorio y establecer a partir de ello una impecable cadena de causas y efectos. Pero mi deseo no es ése sino exponer los hechos tal y como los percibía en el momento en que sucedieron’ (p. 188). Moreover, still reflecting on roughly the same period of his life (though in that other self-engendering autobiographical voice, characterized by the use of italics and unconventional punctuation, which Annie Perrin defines as ‘homotextual’),²⁰ Goytisolo notes: ‘Tu personalidad aleatoria de aquellos años, con sus rasgos a menudo antitéticos, propicia la tentación de otorgarle una posterior coherencia que, pese a su verdad teleológica, será una forma sutil de traición’ (Coto, p. 152).

What is particularly striking about these remarks is that they performatively affirm what they seek to deny: by telling us what the autobiography strives not to do, they in fact manage to do it all the more successfully. For, such wilful declarations of faithfulness to events as perceived at the moment they happened (‘los hechos tal y como los percibía en el momento en que sucedieron’), such an emphatic wariness not to mystify with an overimposed teleology, Goytisolo's youthful ‘volatile personality’ (‘tu personalidad aleatoria de aquellos años’), rather than a refutation, surely constitute the best proof that the process of ‘mystification’ the reader is warned about is found here at its purest. I suggest that it is precisely because of such remarks that what Goytisolo calls ‘una forma sutil de traición’ (the betrayal of a past that in the autobiography is always already ‘his own’ or, to put it in Derrida's terminology, always played out in retro) can remain ‘sutil’, thereby masking the fact that the biographical necessity of the narrator's so-called moral and sexual ‘muda de piel’ at the age of thirty-four constitutes only a secondary effect of projecting himself onto his own history, and of doing so in the future perfect of what will have been for what ‘I’ presently am.

It is not surprising that such metaleptic effects, the effects (following Derrida and Edelman) whereby the founding and naturalization of a subject's position can be said to come always ‘from behind’ and a tergo, should be perfectly exemplified here, in an autobiography that constitutes Goytisolo's ‘official’ coming-out narrative as a homosexual man. More interesting, however, than suggesting that Goytisolo's uses of subjectivity (qua distinctively homosexual) stand in any privileged relationship to such spatial-temporal disruptions (a position which is vulnerable to accusations of essentialism), is analysing in its discursive specificity the way in which he radically reconceptialises some of the most basic nodes of contemporary Western thought. Considering the episode of Goytisolo's inaugural friendship with Jean Genet in the light of the Lacanian notion of ‘extimacy’ (‘extimité’), I will endeavour to show that the metaleptic challenges posed by this episode's chronology cannot be understood without taking into account a broader context in which Goytisolo's life writing problematises and undermines the most basic opposition between the real and its symbolisation.

The friendship with Genet constitutes one of the most influential events in the autobiography, as Genet's example represented the main triggering factor in Goytisolo's crucial ‘muda de piel’ in the late 1960's. Goytisolo notes:

[Genet] ha sido en verdad mi única influencia adulta en el plano estrictamente moral. Genet me enseñó a desprenderme poco a poco de mi vanidad primeriza, el oportunismo político, el deseo de figurar en la vida literariosocial para centrarme en algo más hondo y difícil: la conquista de una expresión literaria propia, mi autenticidad subjectiva. Sin él, sin su ejemplo, no habría tenido tal vez la fuerza de [ … ] escribir cuanto he escrito a partir de Don Julián.

(Reinos, p. 153)

Furthermore:

Las apariciones y eclipses de Genet a lo largo de dos décadas me descubrirán un ámbito moral nuevo: tras un mundo burgués cerrado y compacto [ … ] me internaré poco a poco y con cautela, de su mano, en esa fecundidad desligada de nociones de patria, credo, estado, doctrina o respetabilidad de mi ejido-medina de la Bonne Nouvelle. (p. 123)

As noted previously, what is particularly interesting about the constitution of Goytisolo's subjective position is that despite the chronological disposition of events, it generates its own biographical necessity always in retrospect and in the future perfect of what ‘I’ will have been. This fact can now be observed in relation to Genet's influence, which, achieving an identical ‘tiger's leap into the past’ (Benjamin), appears also to project itself ‘back to front’ onto an earlier period of the narrator's life, hence, so to speak, presupposing ‘Goytisolo’ as already present in his own history. An example is the narrator's remark that after reading Genet's Journal du voleur (1949) for the first time, he felt as if he had been introduced to ‘un mundo para mí [no] totalmente desconocido; algo presentido de modo oscuro desde la adolescencia, pero que mi educación y prejuicios me habían impedido verificar’ (Reinos, p. 126). Furthermore, something similar occurs as Goytisolo discovers his desire for Arab men two chapters later in En los reinos de taifa, pointing out how even before meeting his first Arab lover, Mohamed, he could have reproduced in his mind an exact model of masculinity that had attracted him since childhood: ‘Antes aún de mi encuentro iniciador con Mohamed, podía reproducir mentalmente, con la minucia y exactitud de un miniaturista, la imagen masculina que me imantaba desde su mágica irrupción en la infancia’ (p. 221).

The metaleptic ‘(il)logic’ of Genet's influence on Goytisolo and, later, of Goytisolo's subjective constitution in the autobiography is nowhere better represented than in the very first meeting between the two men. I conclude with analysis of this episode. It took place on 8 October 1955, and is noted in the autobiography, not once but twice. The first time, towards the end of Coto vedado, it forms part of the roughly chronological disposition of events that characterizes the diegesis: along with other events taking place in that same year, the narrator attended a dinner party at the home of Monique Lange (whom Goytisolo had recently met through her work as an editor at Gallimard) to which Genet had also been invited (pp. 259–60).²¹ Goytisolo and Genet apparently spent most of the evening without speaking to each other, as Genet, at a time when Goytisolo had not yet come out as a homosexual, famously embarrassed him with the question: ‘Y usted, ¿es maricón?’, to which Goytisolo replied evasively (p. 260). It is only some one hundred and fifty pages later, when the dinner party is again recalled in En los reinos de taifa, that its real importance for the narrator's uses of subjectivity is made clear. The beginning of a friendship that over the following two decades completely transformed the way Goytisolo conceived of himself and his literary career that evening represented for Goytisolo nothing less than ‘mi Lil Al Qader’ (Arabic for ‘Night of Decree’). This is a reference to the twenty-seventh night of the Ramadan month, in which, according to the Koran (97.1), the Scriptures were sent down as a guidance to the Muslim people:²²

Mi Lil Al Qader acaeció un ocho de octubre, no sé si dentro o fuera del mes sagrado de Ramadán, la noche en que fui por primera vez en el lugar en el que escribo estas líneas y conocí a un tiempo a Monique y Genet, dos personas que por vías y maneras distintas influyeron decisivamente en mi vida y cuyo encuentro desempeña en esta un papel auroral. Mi evolución posterior la deberé en gran parte a ellas. (p. 123)

There are two interesting things about this quotation. The first is the use of the reference to Lailat Al-Qadr to mark the inaugural role of that first encounter with Genet, despite the fact that if the chronology of Goytisolo's autobiography is to be believed, Muslim culture was still quite alien to him in 1955.²³ What he calls ‘la entrada del mundo magrebí en mi vida’ (Reinos, p. 229), his ‘afán posterior de saber, explorar paso a paso [ … ] embeberme de su lengua y cultura’ (p. 225) (first by wandering alone around the Parisian Barbès quarter and later inspired by his lover Mohammed) did not start, according to En los reinos de taifa, until roughly eight years later, in 1963, which again points to the metaleptic nature of an event that challenges conventional causal logic by retroactively extending its structural effects to a moment when it had not yet taken place. But what is the symbolic function of the double (re)presentation of the first encounter with Genet in Goytisolo's autobiography? More precisely: why is it that, embarrassing and forgettable as it appears to have been the first time it is described in Coto vedado, it is not until it is revisited in En los reinos de taifa that its ‘inaugural’ function (‘auroral’) for the narrator's identity should be made clear to us (and, I would argue, even to himself as subject)?²⁴

An interesting analogy may be drawn with Lacan's theory of the ‘two deaths’ here, a theory which, following Slavoj Žižek, may be summarized ironically as ‘everybody must die twice’.²⁵ In his 1959–60 seminar ‘The Ethics of Psychoanalysis’, Lacan distinguishes between real (biological) death and its symbolization; between the physical, contingent death of a human being and a death already inscribed in the signifying web as a ‘settling of accounts’ and an ‘accomplishment of symbolic destiny’.²⁶ As opposed to biological death, the second, symbolic death represents for Lacan the moment in which a subject recognizes himself as the addressee of a certain (death) ‘sentence’ coming from the Other, the moment in which, effecting a retroactive inversion of contingency into necessity, the subject is finally able to recognize and identify with his or her own death. Žižek gives an example of this distinction with the classical, archetypal cartoon scene: a cat inattentively runs past the edge of a precipice, and although it is already hanging in the air, without ground under its feet, it does not fall, until the moment it looks down and becomes aware of its perilous situation. As Žižek notes, the point of this nonsensical accident is that because the cat does not know that it is falling, it continues to hang. In other words, it is as if nature had ‘forgotten its laws’ for a moment: the cat has to realize that it is falling, it must be reminded of it a second time for the fall to happen (The Sublime Object of Ideology, pp. 133–34).

Something similar took place on that emblematic night of 8 October 1955, Goytisolo's metaphorical ‘Lailat Al-Qadr’. Inscribed in mise en abîme within the autobiography's diegesis, we are also presented here with an event that becomes ‘auroral’ (which properly becomes a scene of ‘transformation’) only as it is interpreted and remembered for the second time in the process of autobiographical (re)construction. The night of ‘my Lailat Al-Qadr’ does not exist until it is (re)presented, symbolized, or revealed as such in the movement of return itself. As in Freud's primal scene, what particularly concerns me here is the retroactive, metaleptic effect that symbolization appears to have upon the real. Regardless of the chronological disposition of events, it is the inscription in the symbolic web (the act of naming a particular occasion through hindsight as ‘my Lailat Al-Qadr’) that precedes (and performatively constitutes) the referent, not the other way around. In other words, the revelation of Goytisolo's new self as subject of the autobiography may well be situated on that occasion in 1955 when he and Genet met for the first time; much more interesting than that, however, is that the foundational effect (in Lacanian terms, the effect of ‘quilting’)²⁷ that a signifier such as ‘my Lailat Al-Qadr’ has in the subject's chronology is inescapably retroactive/behindactive. This is what the second (re)presentation of that occasion in En los reinos de taifa appears to be hinting at. Had it not been for the performative act of returning to the event a second time, surely the ‘revelations’ of that night, along with Goytisolo who saw his future in them, would have been left hanging in the air like the cat in the cartoon.

The oxymoronic neologism ‘extimacy’, coined by Lacan by applying the prefix ‘ex-’ (external, exterior) to ‘intimacy’, occurs two or three times in the Seminar and neatly expresses the way in which psychoanalysis aims to question a number of binary oppositions.²⁸ Topologically, ‘extimacy’ designates the relationship between ‘inside’ and ‘outside’ (or ‘container’ and ‘contained’) (as in the Moebius strip); structurally, it designates the relationship between ‘self’ and ‘other’ (or the ‘conscious’ and the ‘unconscious’) as in Lacan's definition of the Other as ‘something strange to me, although it is at the heart of me’ (hence, ‘extimate’) (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 71). Finally, from the standpoint of the three Lacanian orders, ‘extimacy’ also designates the Real in the Symbolic, as the former is neither fully outside nor inside the latter (p. 118). In the words of Jacques-Alain Miller, ‘extimacy says that the intimate is Other—like a foreign body, a parasite’; moreover, ‘the subject contains as the most intimate (intime) of its intimacy the extimacy of the Other [ … ]. This is what Lacan is commenting on when he speaks of the unconscious as discourse of the Other, of this Other who, more intimate than my intimacy, stirs me’.²⁹

There is something rather obvious about the fact that the constitution of Goytisolo's subjective identity in the autobiography, linked to a large extent to Genet's influence and example, should lead to this notion of ‘extimacy’. If what Goytisolo calls ‘la conquista de una expresión literaria propia [y de] mi autenticidad subjetiva’ (Reinos, p. 153) is closely associated with his friendship with Genet and his identification with Genet's ethical, sexual, and artistic positions, that surely makes difficult any simple opposition between ‘subject’ and ‘Other’, placing Genet at the most internal and intimate of Goytisolo's ‘intimacy’, and therefore establishing Goytisolo's identity (for all his declarations of having finally reached his ‘yo genuino’ [Coto, p. 139] and his ‘realidad más profunda’ [Reinos, p. 115]) as a perfect example of an ‘ex-centric’, truly extimate identity.

However, in a less obvious manner, Goytisolo's ‘extimacy’ must also be sought at the very core of his history and subjective chronology as represented in the autobiography. I have shown some of the ways in which, challenging conventional causal and positional logic, Goytisolo's newly found subjective position establishes its own past and its own ontological necessity only metaleptically and in retrospect, through the very act of autobiographical (re)presentation. Establishing himself as both effect and cause of his own history (hence performatively presupposing himself as already present in it), Goytisolo, following Lacan, is in a fundamentally extimate relationship to himself.

Here, it is the presence of the Real in the Symbolic, according to Lacan's description, that best exemplifies my argument. Defined as both the basis, the starting-point of the process of symbolization (that which in a sense precedes the symbolic order) and at the same time the result, product and leftover of such a process, the real is neither inside nor totally outside the symbolic: it is extimate to it (The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 118).³⁰ Likewise with Goytisolo: his newly established identity as the subject/narrator of the autobiography lies neither totally outside the process of its own discursive constitution (pre-existing its own symbolic inscription as self-present inwardness) nor merely inside it either. The crucial point is that ‘Goytisolo’, as ‘outside’ agency, still remains he who performatively constitutes ‘himself’: he who (as ‘pure void of self-relating’)³¹ determines which history and which biographical necessity will, through hindsight, become his own (hence determining ‘him’).

Such an irreducible contradiction or deadlock of the Real is what keeps this argument strictly within the metaleptic ‘(il)logic’ of the Moebius strip, and is the fine line that separates Goytisolo (along with Lacan) from deconstruction or poststructuralism tout court. Just as it is impossible to say, on passing a finger along the strip, at which precise point the finger has crossed over from ‘back’ to ‘front’, so it is impossible to distinguish in Goytisolo's uses of subjectivity what is ‘inside’ and what is ‘outside’ his own symbolic inscription, what comes ‘before’ and what ‘after’, what belongs to the Symbolic, what to the Real. This is why, in Goytisolo's realms of ‘extimacy’, to say that identity is discursive should not imply that all in identity is discourse, and to say that subjectivity is played out in retrospect and a tergo need not mean that all in subjectivity ‘comes from behind’.

Notes

1. The Post-Card: From Socrates to Freud and Beyond, trans. by Alan Bass (London: University of Chicago Press, 1987), p. 48. All references are to this edition.

2. Quoted in Salvador Dalí, The Secret Life of Salvador Dalí, trans. by Haakon M. Chevalier (London: Vision Press, 1948), p. 397.

3. Lee Edelman, Homographesis: Essays in Gay Literary and Cultural Theory (London: Routledge, 1994), pp. 173–91. All references are to this edition.

4. Edelman coins this term in order to figure the ‘complicitous involvement [of structures such as Freud's primal scene] in the sodomitical encounter’ (Homographesis, p. 176).

5. ‘From the History of an Infantile Neurosis (“The Wolf Man”)’, in Case Histories, II, trans. by James Strachey (London: Penguin, 1979); pp. 227–366. All references cited as Wolf Man are to this edition.

6. Freud writes: ‘When he woke up, he witnessed a coitus a tergo three times repeated; he was able to see his mother's genitals as well as his father's organ’ (Wolf Man, p. 269).

7. The adjective is Edelman's, who writes: ‘That the parents of a one-and-a-half-year-old boy—a boy who was suffering at the time from malaria—would engage in sexual relations three times while the child rested in the same room—let alone that those relations would feature penetration from behind—and that all of this would take place around five o'clock on a summer afternoon, represents, within its discursive context, so sensational an erotic vision that Freud must initially defend his construction by flatly denying that there is anything sensational in this scenario at all’ (Homographesis, p. 177).

8. Not least, it raises the question of its own historical character, as opposed to merely ‘suppositional’, an aspect that never quite ceases to preoccupy Freud throughout the case history. Edelman notes in this respect: ‘Throughout the case history of the Wolf Man the insistence of such doubt reflects Freud's deep anxiety that the primal scene that takes center stage in his analysis may prove to be only an illicit supposition of something that ought never to be supposed to exist’ (p. 177).

9. As Freud notes in a crucial paragraph: ‘Scenes like this one in my present patient's case, which date from such an early period and which further lay claim to such an extraordinary significance for the history of the case, are as a rule not reproduced as recollections, but have to be divined—constructed—gradually and laboriously from an aggregate of indications’ (Wolf Man, pp. 284–85).

10. As is well-known, the Moebius strip (bande de Moebius) is the three dimensional figure that can be formed by giving a 180° twist to a strip of paper before joining its ends. For a discussion on its function within the Lacanian use of topology, see Dylan Evans, An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis (London: Routledge, 1996), pp. 116–17.

11. En los reinos de taifa (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1986), p. 117. All references are to this edition. There exists an English version under the title, Realms of Strife: Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo, 1957–1982, trans. by Peter Bush (London: Quartet Books, 1990).

12. Coto vedado (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1985), pp. 103, 153. All references are to this edition. There exists an English version under the title, Forbidden Territory: Memoirs of Juan Goytisolo, 1931–1956, trans. by Peter Bush (London: Quartet Books, 1989).

13. ‘Theses on the Philosophy of History’, in Illuminations, ed. by Hannah Arendt, trans. by Harry Zohn (London: Fontana, 1973), pp. 245–55 (p. 253).

14. Lacan posits the future perfect as the subject's grammatical tense par excellence: ‘Ce qui se réalise dans mon histoire n'est past le passé défini de ce qui fut puisquíl n'est plus, ni même le parfait de ce qui a été dans ce que je suis, mais le futur antérieur de ce que j'aurai été pour ce que je suis en train de devenir’ (‘Fonction et champ de la parole et du langage en psychanalyse’, in Jacques Lacan, Écrits [Paris: Seuil, 1966], pp. 237–322 [p. 300]).

15. I am aware that here and in the rest of the article my argument runs against the general trend of current Goytisolo criticism. Most critics have tended to emphasize the ways in which his texts (through their postmodern use of conflicting narrative voices and subjective positions) give representation, in Bradley Epps's words, to a ‘fragmented subject that resists totalisation [ … ] a figure in tension, a figure that is not one’ (Significant Violence: Oppression and Resistance in the Narratives of Juan Goytisolo: 1971–1990 [Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1996], p. 455). See also Jo Labanyi, ‘The Construction/Deconstruction of the Self in the Autobiographies of Pablo Neruda and Juan Goytisolo’, Forum for Modern Language Studies, 26 (1990); 212–21; Abigail Lee Six, Juan Goytisolo: The Case for Chaos (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1990); Paul Julian Smith, Laws of Desire: Questions of Homosexuality in Spanish Writing and Film 1960–1990 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), pp. 31–41. Without disagreeing in principle with such arguments, I am more interested in the way in which, despite Goytisolo's use of these narrative devices, his uses of subjectivity as represented in the autobiography are much more indebted to a metaphysics of ‘essences’, ‘naturalness’, and ‘truth’ (‘mi yo genuino, imerme y agazapado’ [Coto, p. 139]) than critics have so far been willing to accept. Here, I am reading Goytisolo very much against ‘himself’ and ultimately a tergo. To paraphrase Freud on Dalí as quoted in my first epigraph: if in a traditional writer one should look for the transgressive and liberational, in a self-consciously ‘transgressive’ and ‘deviant’ writer such as Goytisolo, one should definitely look for the traditional and canonical.

16. This point deserves some further explanation. As Edelman's reading of Freud makes clear, it is only belatedly that a normative heterosexualization takes place, as the child comes retrospectively to understand the primal scene as the trauma of the mother's lack of penis, which brings about his fear of castration and the subsequent repression of his identification with the so-called ‘passive’ position in the scene. From the diachronic perspective of the dominant narratives of psycho-sexual development, the spectacle of male homosexuality is thus both uncannily familiar and deeply subversive: playing out the multiplicity of non-exclusive erotic identifications that the heterosexual male is expected to have repudiated, it constitutes a reminder of that most primary of sexual ‘visions’, one that by showing how being penetrated and having a penis need not be contradictory positions challenges the privileged status of the threat of castration in opposition to which his sexual identity has been constructed (see Homographesis, p. 180).

17. As Edelman points out, at one point in Cleland's novel the main female character focuses on the erection sported by a young man while being penetrated from the rear, a spectacle which she describes as follows: ‘His red-topt ivory toy, that stood perfectly stiff shewed, that if he was like his mother behind, he was like his father before’ (John Cleland, Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure, ed. by Peter Sabor [New York: Harrington Park Press, 1989], p. 158), quoted in Homographesis, p. 184.

18. Concerning this crucial Lacanian distinction, Judith Butler notes: ‘Women are said to “be” the Phallus in the sense that they maintain the power to reflect or represent the “reality” of the self-grounding postures of the masculine subject [ … ]. In order to “be” the Phallus, the reflector and guarantor of an apparent masculine subject position, women must become, must “be” (in the sense of “posture as if they were”) precisely what men are not and, in their very lack, establish the essential function of men. Hence, “being” the Phallus is always a “being for” a masculine subject who seeks to reconfirm and augment his identity through the recognition of that “being for”’ (Gender Trouble: Feminism and the Subversion of Identity [London: Routledge, 1990], p. 45).

19. See particularly the chapter ‘Envois’, in The Post-Card, pp. 3–256.

20. ‘El laberinto homotextual’, in Escritos sobre Juan Goytisolo. Coloquio en torno a la obra de Juan Goytisolo (Almería, 1987), ed. by Manuel Ruiz Lagos (Almería: Instituto de Estudios Almerienses, 1988), pp. 73–81 (p. 75).

21. The date and circumstances of the first meeting between Genet and Goytisolo are also confirmed in Edmund White's biography of the French writer, Genet (London: Picador, 1994), p. 518.

22. The Quran, trans. by Muhammed Zafrulla Khan (London: Curzon Press, 1971), p. 625.

23. In his description of a visit to the Arab quarter in Paris in the early 1960s, Goytisolo remarks upon his ‘absoluta ignorancia de su idioma, cultura, normas de cultura e idiosincrasia’ (Reinos, p. 224).

24. Of course, I am interested in the symbolic economy of the text (which is largely independent from ‘history’ or ‘biography’), and in the apparent paradox underlying the fact that it is only secondarily and in retrospect that the ‘original’, ‘primary’ character of that first encounter with Genet can manifest itself as such. It falls beyond the scope of this article to draw attention to other autobiographical texts in which similar retroactive effects lie also at the very core of their narrators' uses of subjectivity. For example, I have argued elsewhere that Dali's self-made public persona as the ‘mad genius’ of modern art is also the result of a metaleptic reading of his own history and biography, one in which Dalí can establish his identity only in the future perfect and from the point of view of an always already accomplished identification with himself (see my The Apocryphal Subject Masochism, Identification and Paranoia in Salvador Dalí's Autobiographical Writings (New York: Lang, 1986), pp. 175–212).

25. Žižek's slightly different version is ‘You only die twice’ (The Sublime Object of Ideology (London: Verso, 1989), p. 131).

26. The Seminar of Jacques Lacan, Book VII: 1959–1960: The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, ed. by Jacques-Alain Miller, trans. by Dennis Porter (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 211–48.

27. For the use of the term ‘quilting’ (translation of the French ‘point de capiton’) in Lacan, see Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, Hegemony and Socialist Strategy (London: Verso, 1985), p. 112.

28. See, for example The Ethics of Psychoanalysis, p. 139. See also Dylan Evans's interesting discussion of this term in his An Introductory Dictionary of Lacanian Psychoanalysis, pp. 58–59.

29. ‘Extimité’, in Lacanian Theory of Discourse: Subject, Structure and Society, ed. by Mark Bracher and others (New York: New York University Press, 1994), pp. 74–87 (pp. 76–77).

30. For the notion of the Lacanian Real, see also Žižek, The Sublime Object of Ideology, p. 169, and Miller, ‘Extimité’, p. 75.

31. The phrase is Žižek's (‘Identity and Its Vicissitudes: Hegel's “Logic of Essence” as a Theory of Ideology’, in The Making of Political Identities, ed. by Ernesto Laclau [London: Verso, 1994], pp. 40–75 [p. 45]).

Additional coverage of Goytisolo's life and career is contained in the following sources published by the Gale Group: Contemporary Authors, Vols. 85-88; Contemporary Authors New Revision Series, Vols. 32, 61; DISCovering Authors Modules: Multicultural; Hispanic Literature Criticism, Vol. 1; Hispanic Writers, Vols. 1, 2; and Major 20th-Century Writers, Vols. 1, 2.