“Do You Know Your Place?” Displacing of Revolutionary Subjectivity in Reinaldo Arenas

Abstract

This article analyzes the many forms of subjectivity developed in the short stories book Con los ojos cerrados (1972) and the novel El palacio de las blanquísimas mofetas (1975) written by the cuban Reinaldo Arenas (1943-1990). It is proposed that these texts displace the assumptions  of the official discourse, particularly the idea that the common locus founded in 1959 is the free territory for an ideal and morally superior new man . Arena´s writing, on the contrary, escapes from all of these beliefs by eroding identity boundaries, betraying every semiotic system rules and assuming errancy as the conditions for the emergency of a revolutionary subjectivity.