This article analyzes two Catalan novels, Albert Sánchez Piñol’s Victus: Barcelona 1714 (2012) and Martí Domínguez’s L’esperit del temps (2019), in light of the concept of immunity developed by the Italian theorist Roberto Esposito. It is argued that the two works share an affinity by demonstrating the material relevance of Esposito’s concepts, especially with reference to the skin as the basis for biopolitics. Victus links the rending of skin to textuality but simultaneously uses the breaking open of the body to highlight community as an assemblage of diverse material actors and agents. L’esperit del temps situates Nazi thanatopolitics at the intersection of biology and law, emphasizing how a politics of death relies on what kinds of matter, such as the phenotype of skin, are fetishized, pathologized, and subjected to human-centered techniques of power. Domínguez returns to the Second World War to comment on more contemporary concerns regarding bioethics and the increasingly mainstream presence of extremist politics in Europe. Opening the discussion with the reflections on skin of Donna Haraway and Jean-Luc Nancy, the article closes by engaging with Haraway’s work on companionship and the “illicit fusion” of beings, particularly in the historical period referred to as the “Chthulucene,” in which kinship and multispecies assemblages are viewed as tools for survival.
The tale of the City of Brass, best known today from the Arabian Nights, tells of the imagined encounter between humans and the occult properties of the material world, namely, the powers inherent in minerals. In the Middle Ages knowledge of such properties was transmitted in works such as the Ghayat al-Hakim and Alfonso X's Lapidario. This article explores how this knowledge of precious stones and metals is reflected in the versions of the City of Brass transmitted in medieval Iberia, particularly in the use of copper manifest in the vessels, statues, walls, and domes that bind or contain jinn, treasures, and secrets of the pre-Islamic past.
David Bestué’s recent take on Philip II’s reification of centrality (El Escorial: Imperio y estómago, 2021) is an open contestation of the royal site’s conception—and later reception—as an immutable, transcendental edifice meant to “stop the entropy of physical processes.” Distancing himself from castizo evocations of El Escorial as “piedra lírica” (Ortega y Gasset) and “líneas puras” (Unamuno), Bestué guides us through the building’s secluded sewers, the granite quarries that nourished its construction, and its many scenes of fire and dereliction to dismantle the monastery’s value as purely symbolic permanence. As Bestué explains, his book functions “no como un acto más de significación, otra capa, sino como un corte.” This mechanistic notion of the written word as a device with which to shape abstraction back into physicality, however, is not a novel addition to the literature on El Escorial. This article revisits José de Sigüenza’s Fundación del monasterio de El Escorial (1605)—the most exhaustive and authoritative chronicle of its construction—as a reaction to the official representational apparatus of the building. Whereas the language of Philip II’s instructions allied with Juan de Herrera’s designs to project an immutability beyond space and time, Sigüenza, this article shows, enacts a ventriloquist mimicking of artisanal practice that vindicates process and local experience in conflict with the notion of a petrified center of empire. It also examines, as reverberations of these disparities, late nineteenth- to early twentieth-century appraisals of Sigüenza’s text that have projected the unblemished geometrical lines of the Escorial onto the friar’s writing. Its overall aim is to shed light on the lingering tensions around language, architecture, and place that characterize the most instrumentalized—and yet paradoxically dematerialized—of Iberian materialities.
On April 25, 1974, everyday Portuguese citizens transformed a military coup into collective popular resistance, thus initiating a revolutionary process that marked an end to the Estado Novo. Image-makers, aware of the historical event unraveling in plain view, occupied public plazas and roamed city avenues to document a popular uprising that marked a clear end to Portugal’s Fascist project. In this impetus to record radical change, film and its associated technologies promised not only to document, capture, and freeze history in the making but also to make it material, to transform the push and pull of the revolutionary project into something that could be preserved and kept. The article questions the notion that digitization produces a straightforward dematerialization of the analogue print by proposing the concept of digital (im)materiality. This (im)materiality, it argues, not only allows the transformation of revolutionary images into heritage but also makes possible their (re)activation in ways that both speak to the past and reinvent the future. Attending to the (im)materiality of Portuguese militant cinema makes it possible to approach these images not as texts to be interpreted but as social artifacts through which meaning, knowledge, and memories are made. Following Morgan Adamson’s call to consider how “images of resistance endure” and how “enduring images resist,” the article traces the (im)materiality of Portugal’s revolutionary filmic images with the aim of thinking across temporalities. So while, on one hand. the text unpacks how images of the Portuguese Revolution were produced and, subsequently, transformed into heritage, it also reflects on the author’s own engagement with the Revolution’s visual archives and her co-direction of the film essay A revolução (é) provável (The Revolution [Is] Probable, 2022), where splicing, cutting, and juxtaposing digitized images makes it possible to interrogate the material texture of history while also producing other forms or knowledge and knowing.
