X-ray of 'I Love Dick', the work about female sexual desire that fascinates Rosalía (and before generations of women)

“Being in love with you, deciding to take this trip, has made me feel like I was sixteen, in a leather jacket, hunched over in a corner with my friends.

A timeless image, damn it.

It's about not giving a shit or seeing the consequences of something and doing it despite everything," says a fragment of

I Love Dick

, the novel that Rosalía recently appeared reading on her Instagram.

Every once in a while, Chirs Kraus's iconic novel seems to gain new life.

Ridiculed and reduced to a scandal novel when it was originally published in 1997, it took almost 10 years for that first edition to be sold out.

It was not until years later, when Semiotext(e)—one of the most influential independent publishers in the United States, where the author also continues to work as an editor—republished it in 2006 and, from that moment on, a younger generation She discovered it and adopted it as a symbol of feminism.

Also converted into a fun television series directed by Joey Soloway (available on Amazon Prime) and republished in Spain a little over a year ago by Alpha Decay, today its family of readers is increasingly larger, from the writer Gabriela Wiener (who writes an interesting prologue in this latest edition in Spanish) to the filmmaker Lena Dunham or the famous Catalan singer.

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When

I Love Dick

was first published it was perceived as a kind of veiled autobiography about Chris Kraus's obsession with the British sociologist and cultural critic Dick Hebdige (author of books such as

Subculture: The Meaning of Styl

e).

The novel tells the story of the author's fall in love with the charismatic theorist, in the mid-nineties and how she and her then husband - the renowned university professor Sylvère Lotringer - begin a correspondence between them, giving free rein to the romance they imagine with Dick, and how later she decides to pursue her object of desire through the United States.

Although Kraus's biographical details in the book are those of the author herself at the time she wrote it (she only changed the details about Dick before the release in order to protect him), it is clear that her purpose goes beyond what purely personal (as the writer herself argues throughout the novel), which, as Annie Ernaux also said about her lover in

Pure Passion

, is not a book about “him,” or even about herself.

“She uses Dick for the speech.

She uses Dick for release.

She uses Dick for revenge.

She uses Dick to build theory.

And beauty.

And what she denounces are many things,” says Wiener in the prologue.

Several decades had to pass before the center of the debate was not on Dick, but on everything that “Dick” represents and triggers for the author.

Why

I Love Dick

(that subject of the original title in English is very revealing) is a novel in which the author's “I” displaces “Dick” as the dominant term, in which he is simply a reason for she finds her own voice to actually write to herself.

“I suppose that in a certain sense I have killed you… You have become Dear Diary…” writes the author in a passage of the book.

The writer, in 2019.Christine Olsson / ALAMY STOCK / CORDON PRESS

Like the character in the novel, at the time she wrote it, Kraus was a frustrated artist on the verge of 40; her works as a filmmaker could not find distribution in New York.

Gravity and Grace

(the film inspired by the work of Simone Weil that she continually mentions in the book) was her last attempt at filmmaking and was rejected several times at important international festivals such as Berlin.

Being the partner of Sylvère Lotringer, a well-known cultural theorist and professor at Columbia University, Kraus used to feel really overwhelmed by her aura and invisible to her in the circles of intellectuals with whom they interacted.

Also an editor at the label founded by Lotringer, Kraus wanted to do something for herself, so she decided to accept a job offered by a friend as a teacher at the Art Center in Pasadena and move to Los Angeles.

But shortly before this happened, one night in December 1994, Kraus and her husband had dinner with his professional colleague, Dick Hebdige.

And that's where the story of Chris Kraus begins.

Beyond the extent of the correspondence between fact and fiction in the book (as Joan Hawkins says in the afterword of the latest edition of Alpha Decay, it is difficult to know whether certain things Kraus tells about really happened), what is truly revolutionary is how the author uses Dick for the search for the 'I' and for that performative 'I' to become a universal subject.

In the end, what Kraus tells in the book has almost nothing to do with Dick, it does not matter whether he responds or fails to respond to the letters sent to him, he is simply a means for something that manages to transcend the individual.

With everything and above all,

I Love Dick

is a novel about so-called female empowerment (however cliché this may seem today), about a woman who, beyond trying to find the meaning of her life, decides to give it meaning.

Kraus uses Dick to break molds—social, literary, and academic—and speak freely about the experience of desire, love, sex, feminine abjection, its link with madness, and the relationships of all this with the power, writing and its transformative capacity.

Alpha Decay has released 'I Love Dick'.

“

If women have failed to make 'universal' art because we are trapped in 'the personal', why not universalize the 'personal' and make it the subject of our art?

Asking this question, being willing to live it, is still daring,” Kraus writes, quoting the American artist Hannah Wilke.

And in that question, in wondering why literature written by women continues to be questioned as if it were a genre in itself, also lies one of the reasons why

I Love Dick

continues to be a deeply revealing read today.