Selfdestruction, sacrifice and community in Romance de la negra rubia (2014) by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara

Abstract

This work proposes a philosophical Reading on Gabriela Cabezón Cámara’s Romance de la negra Rubia (2014) focused on the process of the main character. Its fundamental action, to burn like a bonzo, is understood as a radical self-destructive experience different from suicide. Thought from Bataille (2007), and from the reading that Esposito makes out of Bataille (2006), sacrifice can be understood as a “founding” event (CABEZÓN CÁMARA, 2014, p. 32), axis in a process of subjectivation and affectation that transcends the purely existential dimension of suicide as Camus understands it in The myth of Sisyphus (1942), to move to a collective dimension: the possibility of a community. Unlike Christian martyrdom, in Cabezón Cámara's text, the body is decentralized by placing it within a process whose effects on others escape the individual who offers themselves as a sacrifice: their voluntary death, or the possibility of such death, becomes a predominantly political event or, rather, political resistance against the onslaught of state violence articulated through eviction as a predatory practice of capitalism in its current state. Self-destruction appears in Cabezón Cámara's work as a mechanism of radical resistance, and its establishment as sacrifice, as the possibility of founding a collective memory.