Pedro Lemebel: A Trans-Modern Reading

On the occasion of Milano Pride 2022, a talk with Ariase Barretta to explore the figure of Pedro Lemebel, Chilean essayist, chronicler and novelist.

In Pedro Lemebel’s work we recognise a constant form of trans-textuality as a reflection of the fluctuating transmodern magma, of the dynamics of global communication and the transmission of information in real time. The Chilean artist/writer openly opposes the foundations of neo-liberal and capitalist society to propose a renewed altermondist thought, the consequence of which is the recovery of that utopian vision that was lost in the reformist assimilation processes of the 1990s. This is why, with absolute determination, she contrasts the value and revolutionary charge of gender fluidity and intersectional transfeminism with radical, trans-exclusionary feminist politics.

It is no coincidence that elements of the main critical theories of a revolutionary-political nature, such as Freudomarxism, Radical Constructivism, Anti-Social Theories and the New Utopian Theories, can be discerned in her work. However, the most interesting aspect of his dialectic is a possible placement of identity in a field alien to all these theories and associated with an archetypal form of pansexual identification, prior to all modern definitions, which is archaic and proto-queer in nature. In short, if it is true that nothing can be more modern than the transmodern (and it is), no one can be more modern than Pedro Lemebel (and it is).

Ariase Barretta was born in Naples and lives in Madrid. He holds a PhD in Hispano-American Literature from the Complutense University of Madrid. He has published the novels Litany (2010), Darkene (2012), Psychosynthesis of the Insect Form (2014), H from the Seven Plagues (2015), Living Fleshlight (2018), all published by Meridian Zero, and Song of the Abyss (2021 – Arkadia). In 2018 he founded the performance literature duo Sacrificium Viduae with Manuela Maroli, with whom he created the works Light of Living Flesh and The Tears of Venus. She is currently working on Queer Art and Transmodernism, with particular reference to the work of Chilean artist/writer Pedro Lemebel.