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Given that my own work is focused on questions of diaspora, visuality, and queerness, I am very grateful for the fact that Fiol-Matta models for us a mode of both listening and looking with deep care. This critical listening and critical looking make apparent an entirely different understanding of Puerto Rican music culture, through an examination of how women singers have negotiated the impossible demands placed on their star bodies. Fiol-Matta theorizes for us the intimate relation between the visual and the aural. As such, her work in fact powerfully resonates with that of visual studies scholars such as Tina Campt, Christopher Pinney, and Krista Thompson. For instance, writing of the Afro–Puerto Rican icon Ruth Fernández, Fiol-Matta writes, “The photo as material object relies on the visual, while recordings obviously stress the aural. Yet both visual and aural belong to the sensorium of racism. These archival objects are interdependent; sound and gaze, visuality and aurality, work together in the perceiving subject’s sensorium. Fernandez’s first photos, today, compel us to the gaze, but we can’t obliterate the sound they were associated with” (75). Here Fiol-Matta’s reading of Fernandez’s photograph, in tandem with her recordings, practices the method that Tina Campt (2017) names “listening to images”: tuning in to their typically inaudible frequencies so as to open us up to their occluded meanings and interpretive possibilities. Fiol-Matta also writes of Fernández: “Under constant scrutiny, visually and vocally, she constructed a persona, literally a glittering surface to match the wonder her voice provoked” (72). We can understand this glittering, reflective surface of the female star body, as Fiol-Matta describes it, as an enactment of what Christopher Pinney (2003) names “surfacism,” or what Krista Thomson (2015) refers to as “shine”: strategies through which subaltern subjects embrace a kind of representational flatness, a refusal of depth, or a blinding hypervisibility, so as to deflect a dominant gaze that seeks mastery over a knowable, intelligible racial and gendered subject. • These are just two instances of the way that Fiol-Matta’s book schools us in a mode of both critical listening and critical looking, and as such is very much in conversation with visual studies scholars. I think there’s just as much to be gleaned from this book about the visual text of the star body as there is about its aurality. Secondly, I want to highlight the question of methodology and Fiol-Matta’s engagement with the archive. As was the case with Fiol-Matta’s first book, A Queer Mother for the Nation (2002), this book is a deeply archival project. Here, as in her earlier work, Fiol-Matta perfects the art of the critical biography. She expertly weaves the archival excavation of the lives and artistic output of each of the four figures in the book with a critical theorization of voice and gender, but she does this so seamlessly that we may fail initially to apprehend just how difficult this archival labor must have been. The work of critical biography is about grappling with what Fiol-Matta elsewhere calls the “permanent open-endedness of the archive” (2014, 49), as well as with its violent erasures and blanknesses. In restoring these artists to audibility by foregrounding their “thinking voice”—their subterfuge, sonic strategies—Fiol-Matta’s book is a resounding blow against what she terms the “shocking oblivion” (18) that characterizes the non-presence of these artists in the historical record not only as serious singers, but also as composers, producers, bandleaders, and the myriad other roles they played. Fiol-Matta demands that we remember these artists differently, outside the typically misogynist and homophobic interpretive frames through which they emerge in the historical record. In a particularly striking turn of phrase, Fiol-Matta writes of Myrta Silva: “Instead of remembering Silva as a bombshell who lost her sex appeal, we should remember her sonic licentiousness, the way she was the first Latino star to transform the culturally inflicted passive position of the woman into a putative bottom power” (28). Fiol-Matta’s reading of Silva as a quintessential power bottom recalls Hoang Nguyen’s explication of bottomhood not simply as a sexual position but also as an ethical model of relationality, a social alliance that extends to all those who inhabit various forms of racial, gender, and sexual abjection: the loca, the butch, the working-class woman, the jibara, the racial other. Fiol-Matta’s book maps out the ways in which all these abjected positions are in fact inhabited and transformed by these women into sites of bottom power, a place from which to critique the normative class, gender, racial, and sexual ideologies that bear down on them in the multiple national spaces they traverse (from PR and the US mainland, to Cuba, to Argentina, among other sites). This gets me to the final point I want to highlight in Fiol-Matta’s book: her central and suggestive theorization of nada, the nothingness. Throughout the book, Fiol-Matta variously refers to the nothing, along with the gap, the pause, the suspension, the nonplace, and the state of oblivion. As I understand it, Fiol-Matta reads the claim “to be nothing” on the part of an artist such as Lucecita Benítez as a queer strategy of fully inhabiting the place of lack, of oblivion, to which one is consigned within a misogynist and homophobic logic, as a way of refusing legibility within those terms. It is about demanding a pause, a silence, a moment of stillness, a suspension, of the dominant terms through which she is seen and heard. We can read the nothing not as a space of simple erasure or eradication, but rather, as Fiol-Matta puts it, as one of “productive density” (134), a “clearing to reconstruct the event of voice in multiple displacements” (171). Thus we can understand the nothing, as Fiol-Matta theorizes it, as a particularly queer mode of refusal that enables the thinking voice to come to the fore. While this is obviously a book about voice and gendered embodiment, and restoring to the historical record a way of truly hearing the thinking voice of these four artists, what I think emerges most strongly in these pages is Fiol-Matta’s own thinking voice: resonant, rigorous, lyrical, demanding, and always uncompromisingly queer. References Campt, Tina. 2017. Listening to Images. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Fiol-Matta, Licia. 2002. Queer Mother for the Nation: The State and Gabriela Mistral. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press. ———. 2014. “A Queer Mother for the Nation Redux: Gabriela Mistral in the Twenty-First Century.” Radical History Review 120 (Fall): 35–51. Nguyen, Tan Hoang. 2014. A View from the Bottom: Asian American Masculinity and Sexual Representation. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Pinney, Christopher. 2003. “Notes from the Surface of the Image.” In Photography’s Other Histories, edited by Christopher Pinney, 202–20. Durham, NC: Duke University Press. Thompson, Krista. 2015. Shine: The Visual Economy of Light in African Diasporic Practice. Durham, NC: Duke University Press., Current Musicology, No 102 (2018): Current Musicology

When nothing is left on Earth to feel the warmth of the sun When no one is left on Earth to invoke God When not even pain will be felt on earth There will only be a flame and that flame will be love, Love, love! To begin again. Considering its lugubrious content, it seems odd, more than forty years later, that the music industry and listening public frantically celebrated “nothingness” in this very melodramatic way. The muscular symphonic orchestra rushed to keep pace with the singer who had appeared, seemingly out of nowhere and literally came out of the nowhere that was Puerto Rico to Latin America, the United States, and the world. Licia Fiol-Matta, The Great Woman Singer, 1 And God said let there be a little light: and there was this little light of nonbelonging, Lucecita and her “Génesis.” Her light is given brightest in an incoherence she bears. It’s not that Lucecita can’t but that no one can be the voice of the nation. Having already shown how the nation can’t have a mother, Licia Fiol-Matta shows us that the nation can’t have a voice, either. Women, in being continually enjoined to do the impossible, are irreducible to that imposition, which is why and how they carry the extranational flavor and desire of the nation’s refusal, its nonperformance. Licia allows us to hear Lucecita’s perfectly deviant moral perfectionism (the truth; the objective account of the good life which is, eventually, crystallized into a sense of the absolute necessity of freedom): I have only one weakness / which I share with all my might / I must be free. I want to be perfect. I am not pro-independence, I am not a nationalist, I am nothing. The only thing you can’t allow is to have your freedom taken from you because then you become nothing. I must be free. I desire freedom. I want to enjoy freedom. I have a taste for liberty. I can taste it. I can feel it in my mouth. Freedom is very sweet. The mouthfeel of freedom. Evangelical perfectionism, neither identification nor plenitude, but truth in transport, suspension, via signal not symbol, having refused the readily legible. There is a discourse on nothing, on nothingness and nowhere, with which Licia begins. Is the lyrical content of “Génesis” really lugubrious? What about that little drum figure, that husky-voiced intro to a bombast of strings and woodwinds? Isn’t it the music and not the words that threaten too sweetly to overwhelm. What would it be for nothing to be left on earth? This pop-zen attitude hit the English-speaking world a couple of years later with John Lennon’s “Imagine,” also echoing a convergence that had already occurred in Don Cherry’s 1970 Mu, re-echoed a few years later in Billy Preston’s “Nothing from Nothing.” But “the nowhere that is Puerto Rico” is where it all begins, remaining special, as it were, in the manmade persistence of the storm. What is the nature of this sub-national, anti- and ante-national, international nowhere? If we consider the residual insurgency of the historical irrelevents, as Zbigniew Brzenski calls them, which Greil Marus famously recites in his history of punk music, Lipstrick Traces, then Lucecita is a punk artist, as much as The Slits, in being more + less than a “great woman singer.” More precisely, she exemplifies that proto-punk thing that constituted the insurgency that punk came along to mourn in its recrudescent whiteness. This is almost like the historical transition and loss of the lower east side, which will have already occurred by the mid-seventies, if you’ll forgive that weird sleight of hand with tense and case, a subjunctivity already buried. What was the mood of the times? The loss will have occurred long ago. If it occurs, the loss will have occurred long ago. The absolute nothing of dissolution, of ceasing to be, which “Génesis” evoked, gave way to the relative nothing that the singer claimed for herself, when she informed the public that it could not dictate what she was. “I am nothing,” she said in 1974, furiously and presciently. She was not legibility, but potentiality. She could not be generalized. She was singular. That’s what she meant when she said, “I am nothing” (3). She pits a supposedly general anxiety regarding nuclear apocalypse against a singular assertion of a non-generalizable self. But what if Lucecita’s position in all this is the other way around—a refusal of geo-politics that is also a refusal of self? In this regard, being nothing is more + less than singular. It undermines that math, that structure of accounting, its spatio-temporal constitution. And this will have moved by way of the specific gender-non-conformity of a richly internally differentiated, Puerto Rican anti-colonial and internationalist anti-nationalism. Can there be a shared anti-nationalism that mobilizes certain features of nationalism on its behalf? What would the dangers of such expediency be? If the nation has a queer mother is it stillborn or, deeper still, mutant? Must it have certain developmental delays or disorders? Perhaps it’s disorder will have been total, in a Fanonian sense. And this disorder must be thought with greater intensity in the wake of unnatural disaster. What if the thing people think they want to call decolonization is an effect, finally, of these subnational ensembles and (non)performances, these errant underdevelopments that emerge when the anti- and ante-nation is handed, as Spillers might say, by the mother? Of course, the normative discourse of nationhood is deeply committed to a certain fixation on and of the mother, her necessity troubled by a vulnerability she constitutes in being-constitutive. But here, the nation is disfigured by a kind of patriarchal absence or eclipse even within the general atmosphere of the settler’s patriarchal order. It’s like Lucecita is the dissident star of the Moynihan report, her diminutive female masculinity constantly subject to a diminution she won’t take, an infantilization her deviant function will have actively failed to bear. It’s like Las Nietas de Nonó literally obliterates the mathematics of a single subject’s relation to nation and the boundaries that structure what it is or is not to be a singer. The iconic figure of the nation, of national womanhood, just won’t work out. What if the first move of decolonization is to accept this monstrosity, this disfiguration? This is a modified Arturo Escobar/Manfred Max-Neef kinda question regarding the necessity of the embrace of and the continual differentiation and cultivation of underdevelopment, something which the current intensification of disaster, which is a disaster of development, not underdevelopment, itself only further intensifies. It makes you want to consider, again, national moral perfectionism and the future (im)perfect—an action that will have been completed at some point toward which we incompletely tend with errant precision. Puerto Rico will have developed, or will have been developed by, when? What if the end of the world that Lucecita finds in the song is not so much marked by extinction but by the refusal of development, of a certain national perfection? Perhaps the imperfect future of or in the voice coincides with that which hasn’t happened yet. Lucecita would bear this—even as she shows that kind of singularist moral perfectionism that Licia shows—as something not quite bearable. What if self is not only in defiance of the nation but also its secret sharer, its accursed share, its irreducibly necessary instrument, element and remainder? “Nada,” as Licia teaches us, is also “that’s it,” or that’s all, or that’s the end—enough of all that. It is equivalent, in a way, to Elis Regina’s “el todo,” at the end of some live versions of “Águas de Março.” It’s like all or nothing at all, each the other’s ally or double or deconstruction in the refusal of the (every)thing. This brings us to Myrta Silva. This brings us, with Licia, to the great woman singer’s discomposing embellishment of (male) composition, as in what Betty Carter does to Neal Hefti or Cole Porter; what Lucecita does to Guillermo Venegas Lloveras; what Myrta does to Rafael Hernández; what Elis does to Tom Jobim. Licia amplifies Myrta’s long-running making of much ado about nothing—and it runs not just through psychoanalytic and semiotic protocols of disavowal and (de)signification but against the grain, by way of but also in excess of Kaja Silverman and Shoshona Felman, showing how this making of something out of nothing always tends to undermine the seduction of meaning within phallic economies and the reduction of non-meaning in psychoanalytic interpretation. In other words, Licia hips us to how Myrta brings off—in getting the nation off, or in getting off the nation—the seduction that non-meaning bears in/as sound and gesture, rhythm and glance, in what J. L. Austin calls “mere accompaniments of the utterance.” Jack Halberstam says, the diva is she who transcends the norms of performance. We might also say: she is she who discomposes; or, she’s who mobilizes nonperformance. The voice as a thinking object. Thinking is Myrta working that low register, alongside Big Maybelle, say, or, in another way, Sarah Vaughan. What’s cool is just the way Myrta says “Nada.” She uses her whole face. Or, there is a mutual discomposition of face and voice in defiance of portraiture. What’s cool is the production of a sound and a persona—through and against voice and face or, at least, their reduction to (national or personal) identity. “Personare,” as Damien-Adia Morassa would say, with regard to Machado de Assis, but, somehow impersonal, or more + less than personal. Radical impersonation, radical ante-nationality, a hyperreality to which Myrta ought not be reduced but which she seduced into a non-normative, non-desertified fecundity, as the queer, more + less than rational productivity that marks the un(der)development of the nation. Licia teaches us how to want nothing but that!, Current Musicology, No 102 (2018): Current Musicology

In my thesis, I present a novel interpretation of the so-called second Heidegger. In the first chapter I discuss the paradox of being, according to which talking and thinking about being leads to a contradiction. I also show that the late Heidegger endorses dialetheism, accepting the contradiction of being as a true one. In the second chapter, I present a comparison between Heidegger and Meinong. First of all, I discuss some similarities between Heidegger’s account of intentionality and Meinong’s account of intentionality, and Heidegger’s ontology and Meinong’s ontology. Secondly, I interpret Heidegger’s being as a special case in Meinong’s ‘Theory of Objects’. In the third chapter, after showing that, according to Heidegger, being is identical to nothingness, I present a paraconsistent mereological system that makes formal sense of Heidegger’s metaphysics. In this mereological system, the totality is taken to be the mereological sum of everything that is and the complement of the totality is interpreted as nothingness, namely what we obtain removing all things from the totality. Since, according to Heidegger, nothingness is being, the complement of totality is taken to be being as well. Finally, in the fourth and last chapter, I discuss Heidegger’s theory of grounding. I show that the early Heidegger endorses a particularly strong form of foundationalism. Moreover, I present two paraconsistent versions of foundationalism (called para-foundationalism 1.0 and para-foundationalism 2.0) that can accommodate the inconsistent views endorsed by the second Heidegger.

La familiaridad entre las poéticas de Fernando Pessoa y Leopoldo María Panero merece un estudio pormenorizado. En este documento – tras una entrevista a Panero – se elaboran algunas intuiciones inaugurales para un tratamiento de esta sintonía centrándose en los conceptos de otredad, máscara, nada, fragmentariedad, tragedia y fingimiento.

[cat] En aquest treball el lector trobarà un estudi d’uns escrits inèdits d’Alexandre Galí. Conegut en les seves vessants de pedagog, lingüista i historiador, els escrits esmentats posen de manifest una nova vessant filosòfica. En ells s’hi desgrana un pensament expressat en la forma de filosofia de la història i antropologia filosòfica. La qüestió de l’home com a subjecte de llibertat i la de l’ésser centren les seves reflexions, al llarg de les quals s’elabora una via de síntesi que té en l’àmbit pràctic la seva clau. L’oposició que entre aquells termes es manifesta l’autor la resol recolzant la veritat del coneixement en la capacitat de promoure la vida, i introduint com a element de la síntesi la relació individu-societat. De manera que l’ésser és allò que permet a l’home-individu establir lligams socials. Atenent a aquestes consideracions –per a les quals usem el concepte d’antropologia filosòfica–, Alexandre Galí emprèn la tasca d’examinar la història del pensament de l’occident d’Europa d’acord amb aquest sentit pràctic-moral del coneixement., [eng] This dissertation revolves around some unpublished texts by Alexandre Galí. Well-known as a pedagogue, linguist and historian, the above mentioned documents reveal a new philosophical side to this author. Galí’s unpublished work illustrates his thoughts about the philosophy of history and philosophical anthropology. The issue of being versus man as a subject of freedom is the main focus of his reflections, which are summarised by taking a practical approach. The opposition between these two terms is solved by defending the power of knowledge in its ability to contribute to life, and by introducing the relationship between the individual and society, meaning that being is what enables the man-individual to establish social bonds. Bearing all of these elements in mind –which are referred to as philosophical anthropology–, Alexandre Galí sets out to examine the history of thought in Western Europe according to this moral-practical sense of knowledge.

[ES] Comparación entre el pensador francés Henri Bergson y Miguel de Unamuno. Primero se repasan sus respectivas influencias filosóficas. Luego se pasa a hablar de las divergencias que tienen que son la "spontaneité de la vie" y "vida desgarrada" por un lado, y por otro "la nada". Las convergencias que existen entre ambos son la "raíz del filosofar" y "del espíritu creador"., [EN] Comparison between the French philosopher Henri Bergson and Miguel de Unamuno. First reviews their respective philosophical influences. Then they switched to talking about the differences that have to include "spontanéité de la vie" and "vida desgarrada" on the one hand and on the other "la nada". The convergence between both are the "raíz del filosofar" and "espíritu creador".

[ES] Análisis de la obra poética "Aldebarán", estudiando sus influencias literarias y el contexto personal de Miguel de Unamuno., [EN] Analysis of the poetical work "Aldebarán", studying his literary influences and the personal context of Miguel de Unamuno.

[ES] Introducción al pensamiento de Miguel de Unamuno. Se centra en el interés del pensador en la vida, el concepto del Ser. Para Unamuno la vida es el fundamento del Ser, la fuente y origen de todo sentido; para comprenderla es comprender el Ser. Según sea el vivir , así será lo vivido, que es el Ser. El artículo está desarrollado en torno al concepto de vida, su relación con otros aspectos como la nada, el amor, la vida como creadora de realidades, el primado ontológico de la vida., [EN] Introduction to the thought of Miguel de Unamuno. It focuses on the interests of the thinker in life, the concept of Being. For Unamuno life is the foundation of Being, the source and origin of any sense; understand it is to understand the Being. As the live, so it will be lived, which is the Being. The article is developed around the concept of life, their relationship with other aspects like nothing, love, life as a creator of realities, the ontological primacy of life.