The pleasure of Simulacrum

THE PLEASURE OF SIMULACRUM

Rosa María Rodríguez Magda

(New Women of Spain. Elisabeth de Sotelo (ed), Lit Verlag Münster, 2005)


A brief biography

My connection with feminism started out as a process of intellectual curiosity. In 1977 or 1978, I was studying the fourth year of my degree in Philosophy. Of course, nobody had ever mentioned the feminist movement to me, nor even the situation of women as the subject of a theoretical discourse. In the book fair in my home town of Valencia, I spotted the Argentinian edition of The Second Sex by Simone de Beauvoir, and bought it. This book opened up a whole new way of seeing myself as a woman in relation to thinking, culture, self.
But perhaps, gender awareness arises in each of us during childhood from more obscure, shaky origins. When I was small, I wanted to be a Red Indian. Or an intrepid young hero involved in life-threatening adventures. Nothing I saw in the films or books I devoured encouraged me to become an attractive “girl”. Rather than waiting for my Prince Charming, I wanted to hunt outlaws armed with my revolver. And that was what I was in my dreams. But there was only a slight problem. Such action narratives usually involved a love story, and my valour was sometimes crowned by the glory of saving the delightful young girl who inevitably fell in love with me. Being active meant that I had to take the male role in all the stories. There were no heroines apart from the selfless mother or the saint heading for martyrdom, which was always achieved by personal annihilation. This bewilderment dominated my childhood and my identification with the amorous stereotype became a problem during my adolescence. I wanted to fall in love without fulfilling all the requirements of subordination to a subordinated gender. But the best parts were always played by males.
This lack of models, as heroines, as philosophers, as strong, fulfilled, human beings, marked my process of subjectivisation, as in almost all of us. Women of my generation have only re-encountered our mothers, our closest ancestors, late in life because our first act of self-assertion aimed precisely at being different to them, by studying, working, being independent and in control of our lives.


Feminism in Spain in the seventies

Feminism in Spain in the seventies was marked by militancy. On the one hand, through the political parties that forced the transition from the Franco dictatorship to democracy and, on the other, through the dual militancy of women who started to suspect that their specific demands – liberation, equal opportunities, divorce, birth control, abortion, changing social roles – were becoming diluted or postponed in the overall political struggle. Once democracy had become consolidated in the eighties, there was more space for theoretical considerations, mostly the debate between sameness feminism and difference feminism. On the one side and in spite of their individual differences were Lidia Falcón, Victoria Sau, Celia Amorós, Amelia Valcárcel…, and on the other Victoria Sendón de León, Carmen Elejabeitia, Milagros Rivera Garretas…
I was somewhat younger than them, so my reflections were fed by their writings and my friendship with them, but my biographical and intellectual situation was different. Neither Marxism nor psychoanalysis provided a framework for what I was thinking. I approached them with suspicion, and my training was based rather on neo- Nietzcheism and post-structuralism. This made a fundamental difference. Both sameness and difference thought are ontologically strong. The status of the subject is not questioned. It is required to be liberated and contractual, or essential and opposed to power, but behind both approaches is a dialectic view of a fight for recognition or for acceptance of absolute otherness. I am aware that we cannot decrease the demands of feminism that stem from materialist socialism, and I am more than attracted by the exciting challenge of recovering one’s own, different space. Really, with regard to the construction of a feminine subject, I cannot see the unstoppable gaps described by advocates on both sides. I think there are areas of convergence and that, if the two approaches are taken together, the horizon is enriched.
However, the subject on which I wish to focus is, when situated and constructed at the convergence of the different discourses, more strategic than essential. It was not easy to think feminism then (in the eighties). Nietzscheism and post-structuralism were perceived by the official progressive thinking of Spanish philosophy as suspicious, literary, unscientific and not politically operative. Feminism, too, considered them to be little more than entertaining rhetorical traps. Spanish difference feminism was sliding more towards Italian feminism. French difference feminism did not establish the fluid, new writing of French difference thought (Deleuze, Lyotard, Derrida), nor did it do the opposite. The postmodernists had not yet made themselves known and were far from being included in the glossary of accepted terms and commonplaces as they are today. The American school that was receiving the French thinkers was starting to draw up its new postmodern and postcolonialist reading of European philosophy. And it was only in the nineties that American feminism was to take over this new reading in its own special way. Let me explain myself. What today seems to have been stated, accepted and repeated ad nauseam at that time had not yet forged its conceptual structures allowing it to be thought. That was when it was all starting up and that was the reason for the effort I had to make when in the early eighties I was making my first notes for La seducción de la diferencia (The seduction of difference), published in 1987.

The seduction of difference

It was only to be expected that there should be a convergence between all these schools of thought because post-structuralism contained useful, more up-to-date elements that could be used by feminist theory. And if feminism is constantly updated, then any new thinking will receive a new reading and analysis because otherwise thinking will go ahead without feminism and against it.
Truth as a metaphorical construction governed by the will for power (Nietzsche), the subject as a recent invention generated from a power/knowledge platform (Foucault), the phallogocentrist configuration of philosophy (Derrida), the body without organs as a machinic fluid (Deleuze-Guattari), the new libidinal economy and the fragmentation of the master narratives (grands récits; Lyotard), reality as simulation (Baudrillard)… all constituted new challenges for and against which the feminine subject could be considered.
The basic problem is that feminism is both theory and practice. The materialist feminism of sameness and the essentialist feminism of difference offered more compact fronts because they were fighting for the construction of a strong subject, but at the same time they were based on dying discourses, on underlying metaphysics whose illusory pretensions had been rejected by postmodernism. Strictly contemporaneous thinking could not be based uncritically on concepts such as : Subject, History, Reason, Reality, Universality… , but “weak thought” (pensiero debole; Vattimo) seemed more acceptable and less costly for the androcentric logos. It was necessary to save the visibility and operativity of the woman-subject. To renounce the identity of an as yet unconsolidated gender represented the danger of passing from non-existence to disappearance without ever having existed.
My purpose in The seduction of difference was to build a notion of difference that was not based on essentialism but on simulation, so that the ontological inconsistency with which the androcentric discourses had characterised things feminine should become a strength rather than a shortcoming, at a time when the metaphysical fundaments were entering a state of crisis. It was necessary for a strategic subject to act firstly by criticising the fallacies of androcentrism and, secondly, by using simulations as forms for acquiring visibility and power, accepting the proliferation of differences as spaces for liberation and the invention of self. This anticipated what was illustrated, for example, by Judith Butler in her gender performances.
The following are some examples of what I said at the time :
“At the time of hyperrealism, of the fall of meanings, we should not look for the point of reference, the real meaning, the real woman or man beyond or beneath what is imposed, what is patriarchal, but rather accept this idealisation and proliferation of roles in the positive sense:
a) Simulation strategy: There are no separate, unchanging substances - man and woman - fighting and opposing each other ab aeternum. Nature is social. The only answer to a power that does not exist but that acts is simulation, representation, the dramatisation of sex, masks, seduction, the proliferation of gestures, expressions and roles that release us from the destiny of our bodies, of biology as a life sentence.
b) Difference multiplication strategy: The privilege of difference, the overcoming of opposed, dialectic models. Accepting particularity (without creating a new, abstract, universal category = sameness). But it is not possible to be a particular individual without being male, female, homosexual, aggressive, kind, with a fiery erotic zone on the soles of our feet, blonde, plump, etc. This specific place is where the difference lies. We must not give in to the binary prototype.
c) Concealment strategy :
- The search for what is ‘not yet significant’, study of gestures, games, approximation, methods of relating with others that are not yet significant for power. Surprise, experimentation, originality. The invention of new languages and names for everything that was wrongly named. Constant revision of models of behaviour, of the obvious withdrawal into despair and lack of communication.
- The dramatised, seductive recovery of forms and uses that are ‘no longer significant’ for power. The rites in which there is longer faith, ineffective fetishes, roles that amuse and liberate us without turning into new, imposed restraints” (Rodríguez Magda 1987, 63-64)
In my subsequent books, I have tried to analyse the present by focusing on the notion of “simulation”, of “absence”. Absence marks the gaps in reasoning on which discourses are based after the collapse of metaphysics. It is an original bewilderment that for centuries has tried to hide beneath strong conceptual clothing, postulating various reigns of Truth.

Foucault and the genealogy of sexes

This was the title and subject of my doctoral thesis which I read at the University of Valencia in 1996 and which was published by Anthropos in 1999. I had already worked on Foucaultian philosophy, focusing on power/knowledge relations, in my degree thesis which was subsequently published as: Discurso/Poder (Discourse/Power). So Foucault was an author I knew who, even when not dealing specifically with feminism, offers a series of methodologies and concepts that I thought might help clarify and resolve the problems of feminist theory and of the cultural and practical mechanisms of domination that are imposed on women.
The Foucaultian archaeological method can offer an alternative historical model for research on women. Firstly, L’archéologie du savoir starts out with the idea that concepts are changing elements that are drawn up with different constitutions and validity, and are based on different rules for use. This means that it is not possible to approach women’s history as the evolution of an unchanging, pre-existing subject but as a dynamic, multiple process that has taken place through androcentristic discourses and practices that promoted or held back feminine self-identity. These two starting points must be stressed – the non-homogeneity of the woman concept, and the need to note how it was constituted through a variety of research materials, ranging from legislation to domestic treatises or medical descriptions. The life and contributions of women were invisible for conventual history, so we need to question accepted periodisation (ancient times, middle ages, Renaissance, Enlightenment, etc.) and the absolute prominence of the public and political arenas from which women were traditionally excluded.
As a concept in gestation and subject to the dynamics of power and knowledge, the Foucaultian notion of “genealogy” is very useful. Genealogy uses a method to find how a concept arises, bringing together both erudite knowledge and local recollections, unqualified or unauthoritative knowledge, generating historical knowledge of the struggle and making it possible at the same time. As I stated at the time “feminist research shares the dual aspects of genealogy: a) unqualified knowledge: oral traditional, folk medicine, unclassifiable feminine texts, handcrafts, medical and culinary practices, resources relating to child and patient care, and b) specific erudite knowledge: gynaecology, court and legal investigation, treatises on pedagogy, writings and activities in female convents, reconstruction of literary salons, manuals for spiritual guidance, training, hygiene, expert advice on motherhood, sexuality, education” (Rodríguez Magda 1999, 53). In addition to genealogy as a patriarchal mechanism, there is also feminist genealogy of two types: firstly, as a methodology which aims to analyse the construction of subjectivity and gender identity through the power/knowledge relation and, secondly, in the strong sense of reconstruction of a historical, symbolic and cultural memory, promoting self-recognition in a new logical, literary, creative and political configuration.
In Les mots et les coses, Foucault defines the history of knowledge as the history of Sameness, identity, order, as opposed to Otherness, which is both internal or unknown and that should be exorcised – madness, disease, what is irrational. Is it good for feminism to maintain this binary approach and occupy the place of woman as the Other? After a detailed analysis of the implications, I considered and still do that the Same/Other approach should be used in two ways:
“a) deconstruction: analysing how this binary matrix of western thought has been used oppressively against woman;
b) genealogy: showing the ideological mechanisms whereby female assimilation = Other has configured a specific concept of ‘woman’ and has been included in the processes of subjectivisation and gender identity, legitimising a whole series of exclusion and domination strategies” (Rodríguez Magda 1999, 92).

The notion of the Foucaultian subject, which states that “man is a recent invention”, offers considerations that can be applied to the construction of feminine subjectivity, showing the emergence of the latter not in an essentialist way but as a convergence of discourses, a strategy that aims to outline and choose the face it wishes to show.
The analysis of Foucaultian power, based on criticism of the Marxist model, offers a notion of reticular, multiple, off-centre power that penetrates bodies, discourse and sexuality, showing the other face of the constitution of knowledge. This microphysics of power, from a feminist point of view, allows the study of power relations between the sexes, clarifying the areas of resistence, deconstruction, the inter-relation with knowledge and opening up towards new subjectivities that have not been totally normalised.
Many of the concepts described by Foucault can be reformulated for use by feminism. The “political anatomy” of the body describes how power penetrates bodies, determines the knowledge we have of them and contains them within a political function of domestication. “Biopolitics” presents contemporariness as normalisation of life, covering work, discipline or birth. The search for the “truth of sex” naturalises it, opposing what is masculine with what is feminine and making heterosexuality compulsory. In La volonté de savoir, the first volume of L’histoire de la sexualité, we discover how, by hysterisation of the female body, sexual difference lies at the origin of biopolitics and how, going beyond Foucault, we can find out about the sexual nature of reason which has tried to legitimise domination of women from the scientific, cultural and everyday points of view. In the second and third volumes of his History of sexuality, Foucault goes back to ancient times to show how care of the body was at the foundation of ethics. If we apply his analysis of power to this process, which Foucault himself does not do, we can see how this “self-control” is not a neutral mechanism but is based on a gendered and androcentric stereotype that does everything to avoid being passive. Passivity is a form for signifying what is feminine, so in the creation of ethics we find that what is feminine is excluded and subdued. So the origin of our culture is seen to be based on the ethics and aesthetics of domination which makes women invisible, and presents a model for women that is essentially damaging as if it were neutral.

Towards transmodern feminism

In parallel to my feminist reflections and having noted the crisis of modernity and the appearance of post-modern trends, my main research focused on outlining the characteristics of the present.
In 1989, in my book La sonrisa de Saturno. Hacia una teoría transmoderna (Saturn’s smile. Towards a transmodern theory), I coined the term “Transmodernity”. In Chapter 6, which is entitled “The future of the theory: transmodernity”, after first analysing the characteristics of modernity and postmodernity, I started to outline the new concept, as follows:
“Transmodernity prolongs, continues and transcends Modernity. It is the return of some of its lines and ideas, perhaps even the most ingenuous but also the most universal. Hegelianism, utopian socialism, Marxism, the philosophies of suspicion, critical schools … showed this ingenuousness. After the crisis in these trends, we look further back to the illustrated project as a general, looser framework in which to choose the present. But this is a remote, ironic return that accepts that it is a useful fiction. Transmodernity is the return, the copy, the survival of a weak, ‘light’ Modernity. The contemporary area that is criss-crossed by all trends, memories, possibilities. It is both transcendental and apparential, and is voluntarily syncretic in its ‘multichrony’. Transmodernity is a fiction: our reality, the copy that supplants the model, eclecticism both mean and angelical. Transmodernity is postmodernity without its innocent rupturism, the museum display of reason, not forgetting history which has died to avoid ending up in barbaric cybernetic or mass media domestication. It is proposing values as stops or as fables, but without forgetting, because we are wise, because our past was wise. Transmodernity takes up and recovers the vanguards, copying and selling them, but meanwhile it remembers that art has had, and has, an effect of denunciation and experimentalism, that is, not everything goes. It breaks down the distance between elitism and mass culture and reveals the connections between them. Transmodernity is image, series, baroque fugue and self-reference, catastrophe, loop, fractal and inane reiteration, the entropy of what is obese, the clumsy inflation of data, the aesthetic of what is full and of what has disappeared, entropic, fatal. The key to it is not what comes after, the rupture, but the trans-substantiation and overlapping of paradigms. The worlds that penetrate each other and end up as soap bubbles or as images on a screen. Transmodernity is not a desire or a goal. It is just there, like a complex, random, imposed strategic situation. It is neither good nor bad, beneficial nor unbearable… and it is all of these things together… It is the abandonment of representation, it is the reign of simulation, of simulation that knows it is real” ( Rodríguez Magda 1989, 141-142).

When I first coined the term I was aiming to set up a theory that would be the very latest and would open up new routes while the post trends were just getting stuck in a dead end in their fascination for the excessively literaturised use of their terms, and deadlocked in socially inane and gnoseologically nihilistic eclecticism and relativism. I therefore made a number of theoretical proposals in my book as follows:
- Regulatory, formal use of certain values and ideas.
- Deliberation and choice of the rules of the game for the various practices. Revision. Multiplicity of language games.
- Acceptance of the ontological commitment to a specific momentaneous option.
- A “weak” critical exercise that, rather than unmasking ontologically, should be practical, independent and healthy.
- Use of post-modern dynamics, fragmentarity. Regulatory use of certain ideas gives objectivity and normalisation. Constant revision aims to palliate instrumentalisation.
- An illustrated, democratic ideal for society, return of the individual to private life.
- Scepticism, irony, distance: a ‘light’ reacceptance of the founding criteria; subsequent legitimisation by results” (Rodríguez Magda 1989, 139).

As Kant showed clearly, in order to act and to think, it is not necessary to have noumenal knowledge of the fundaments but these must be taken as regulatory ideals. It was a question of taking one step further. Although for him they could not be checked empirically, they were to some extent completely real. The challenge is now to recognise the logical need for them in a more radical metaphysical absence. We need them as conditions for epistemological consistency, but this only involves our intellective process that has nothing to do with the real world. Acceptance of this intrinsic absence does not make the process any less effective. The fundament cannot be found in the metaphysical knowledge of truth but in the gnoseological pact of the subjects that agree on a rationale that will allow them to interpret reality and transform it. The agreement, after the fictive, hypothetical assumption of a degree of universality, accepts the multiplicity of language games and establishes certain rules that are intrinsic to the practices selected. Therefore, if an action is to be intelligible, shareable and effective, it should propose certain assertions hypothetically, temporarily and subject to review, and these will be accepted by the subjects as if they were real during the period of the task. For example, any democratic exercise requires a normative agreement and the universalisable will of the ideals that regulate shared rationality, justice, equality, representation, freedom, etc. This does not mean they will be substantially explained, but that there is a formal agreement to accept them, exercising Rawls’ veil of ignorance regarding strong belief content which, because of its firmness, would make any consensus impossible. While it is true that ‘formality’ is not possible with impunity, any conceptual framework necessarily involves an ontology, and we should be aware of the ontological commitment we accept, not forgetting that this is a momentaneous option that is subject to review and constant self-criticism. It is a question of establishing an intermediate path between essentialism and the mere instrumental use of reason. This sort of ironic pragmatism (in the Rortyan sense), being different from metaphysics, does not aim to approach mendacious possibilism but to obtain the best results, accepting the hypothetical and tentative nature of our thinking. Epistemologically, this is the most we can allow ourselves, but when achieving results we should not accept limitations. Our aspiration should be that our intellection and transformation of the world from the theoretical, scientific, technological, social, ethical, aesthetic points of view … should be based not only on instrumental methodologies but on the total wisdom of the ancient philosophers.
These were the basic lines of the first postulation which was then developed in a number of lectures - “Transmodernity, neotribalism and postpolitics”, “Transmodern feminine”, “Gender theorisation in Spain: Illustration, difference and transmodernity” – which were then included in my book: El modelo Frankenstein. De la diferencia a la cultura post. (The Frankenstein model. From difference to the post culture). Madrid, Tecnos, 1997.
“Transmodernity, as an open stage and the designation of our present, goes beyond a random denomination and aims to cover the inheritance of the challenges of Modernity after the collapse of the illustrated project. If we do not renounce Theory, History, Social Justice and the autonomy of the Subject, accepting post-modern criticism, we are limiting the possible horizon for reflection getting away from nihilism without committing ourselves to outdated projects but not forgetting them. Accepting pragmatism as a basis does not mean we have to deny that human action is guided by regulatory ideals that are the basis for argument and rationality. But these regulatory ideals which, after modernity, refused to be based on theology or metaphysics, can still not, after post-modern criticism, be legitimised by the illustrated project. We have weakened their gnoseological vigour but not the logical and social need for them, and this gives us the notion of pragmatism. Such regulatory ideals represent operational simulations legitimised by rational perfectibility, which criticism and consensus constantly renew, non-universal but universalisable public values which find their sphere not in intuition, common sense or tradition but in the theoretical effort to create conceptual paradigms that will help increase social and individual wellbeing. We are therefore talking about social transformation, the transcendence of mere practical management, of compromise, of lines of questioning that cross through rational enquiry, changing and being changed” (Rodríguez Magda 1997, 18).

The notion of transmodernity, as a new paradigm for which the current main narrative is “globalisation” is analysed in its political, ethical, aesthetic, psychological and religious implications in my book: Transmodernidad.
If feminism is to keep up with the times it must therefore be “transmodern feminism”. As I stated in Chapter 4, “Transmodern feminine” of El modelo frankenstein:
“Neither for men in general nor for women in particular is now the time of “post”. It is rather the time of “trans”. Transhistory, transvanguard, transpolitics, transexuality…basically, transmodernity. What can today be taken from postmodernism in order to reply, however paradoxical it may seem, to the questions posed by modernity is, rather than Otherness or difference, what is light, simulated, simulation. Provided it leads to configuration of the elements needed for real feminism – being subjects (either simulated or strategic but with identity and genealogy), presence in history, exercise of reason and transformation of reality” (Rodríguez Magda 1997,82) .

So, with the crisis of Modernity, we are using as a strength what constituted our weakness in Modernity, namely our lack of identity. With the collapse of strong foundations, women have become used to surviving amongst appearances, so we should take advantage of our reduction to simulation as a useful strategy. We were never allowed to be “substances”, socially recognised subjects based on law and in possession of reason. If metaphysics collapsed with its reign of essences, women are not now demanding a different type of metaphysics. We are happy with nominalism, we are used to accepted an agreed, regulatory use of values. The woman as an individual, recognised as an equal in the public arena, should create a generic type that will make her visible as a formal, but not substantive, group. Femininity should thus be a useful, diverse simulation, an area of freedom. We should use post-modern, fluid fragmentarity as a mechanism for reversing power/knowledge coagulation, without reductionist objectualisation. The gnoseological weakness of our time allows us to deconstruct and reconstruct the theories and criteria for subjectivisation.
As I have frequently stated, this is my proposal:
“So, in this symbiosis of simulation and transmodern gender theory, as opposed to the strong concepts of the main lines of modernity, we shall require: a strategic subject finding its strength not in its metaphysical fundamentals but in its permanence; a reason taken as an agreed forum for communication; a multiple, not unitary or single-dimensioned, history; a reality that is known to be an excessively hyperrealistic fiction, changing from factum to fictum, recognising action to be the element that generates identity” (Rodríguez Magda 1997, 98).

Having established the theoretical framework for transmodern feminism, a series of objectives appear: the place of such feminism within the schools of feminist theory, the provision of methodologies for archaeological and genealogical research, analysis of power relations and of the subjectivisation of gender identity, its incardination in the philosophy of today. But this is a broad field of study and derivations and applications constantly appear. Eroticism, the image of woman as the subject and object of desire, new female stereotypes. All of this will be covered in a book that will appear soon under the title of this article: The pleasure of simulacrum. Because being in control of our fictions, dismantling the traps that lie in wait for us and building increasingly full subjectivity are challenges but are also undeniably pleasures.




Rosa María Rodríguez Magda.








References

Foucault, Michel, L’archéologie du savoir, Paris, Gallimard,1969.
Foucault, Michel, La volonté de savoir, histoire de la sexualité, vol.I, Paris, Gallimard, 1976.
Foucault, Michel, L’usage des plaisirs, histoire de la sexualité, vol.2, Gallimard, 1984.
Foucault, Michel, Le souci de soi, histoire de la sexualité, vol.3, Paris, Gallimard, 1984.

Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María, Discurso/Poder, Madrid, EDE, col. teoría y práctica,1984.
Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María. La seducción de la diferencia, Valencia, ed. Victor Orenga, 1987. (2nd ed. Femenino fin de siglo. La seducción de la diferencia, Barcelona, Anthropos, 1994).
Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María, La sonrisa de Saturno. Hacia una teoría transmoderna. Barcelona, Anthropos,1989.
Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María, El modelo Frankenstein. De la diferencia a la cultura post, Madrid,Tecnos, December 1997.
Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María, Foucault y la genealogía de los sexos. Barcelona, Anthropos,1999.
Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María, El placer del simulacro. Barcelona, Icaria, 2003.
Rodríguez Magda, Rosa María, Transmodernidad, Barcelona, Anthropos,2004.


Other works by Rodríguez Magda:

En alguna casa junto al mar. Valencia, ed. Victor Orenga. 1987. (Fiction). Second edition: Valencia, ed. Palmart,2002
Tríptico. Madrid, ed. Endymion,1992. (Fiction)
Las palabras perdidas. Madrid. Huerga & Fierro. 1997. (Aphorisms)
Y de las pavesas surgió el frío. Valencia, ed. Palmart. 1998. ( Aphorisms)
El deseo y la mirada. Valencia, ed. Palmart,2003. (Poetry)

Editions:
Mujeres en la Historia del Pensamiento. Rosa Mª Rodríguez Magda (ed). Barcelona, Anthropos, 1997
Y después del postmodernismo ¿qué?. Rosa Mª Rodríguez Magda, Mª Carmen Africa Vidal (eds.). Barcelona, Anthropos.1998.
El sentido de la libertad. Amelia Varcárcel and Rosa Mª Rodríguez Magda (eds.) Edicions Alfons el Magnànim. Valencia. 2000.