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Memoria, literatura, presente y pasado, lo que imaginamos y nunca fue, los sueños que tuvimos y nunca se cumplieron . . . todo forma un todo absoluto.
Terenci Moix, Extrano en elparaiso
The publication of Alain Badiou's The Clamor of Being represented nothing short of a revolution in the context of 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's confusion" (Badiou 10). Badiou's Deleuze controversially emerges as an impeccably sober and "ascetic" thinker (13), one whose most radical contribution lies in a return to the thesis of the univocity of being or "Being as One" (20). According to Badiou, Deleuze's most fundamental concern is not-as previous critics had tended to emphasize-to "liberate the multiple" but, quite the opposite, to submit thinking to a "renewed concept of the One" (12). What this means is that, for Deleuze, multiplicity-crucial though this concept clearly is in his corpus-has a purely formal or modal, and not real, status and that, as Louise Burchill notes, it "is . . . ultimately of the order of simulacra" (xiv). Deleuzianism is thus provocatively posited by Badiou as fundamentally a "Platonism with a different accentuation" (26)-a doctrine which, rejecting a mimetic vision of being, nonetheless "retains from Plato the univocal sovereignty of the One" and is thus best defined as a "Platonism of the virtual" (46).
Like Deleuze, the best-selling Catalan novelist Terenci Moix (b. Ramon Moix i Messeguer, 1942-2003) is an author around whom it can justly be said that a certain critical "doxa" has in recent years started to emerge within Hispanic studies. This involves viewing Moix as one of the main representatives of a distinctively postmodernist and camp aesthetics in Spain. It is a view primarily concerned with the blurring of the boundaries between high art and mass culture found in Moix's work and which has tended to emphasize his role as "el primer escritor espanol que no tuvo empacho en declararse homosexual y utilizo su...