Truth is a “bird of prey”: interpreting the postcolonial dialectic in Agustí Villaronga’s El ventre del mar (2021) with Frantz Fanon

ABSTRACT

In this article, I argue that Agustí Villaronga’s 2021 film El ventre del mar (The Belly of the Sea) explores a post-Fanonian version of the Hegelian master-slave dialectic as a historical struggle between colonizer and colonized, and between the elite and the dispossessed in a limit situation. Villaronga’s cinematic vision of this historical struggle is neither progressive-linear nor simply non-linear, but iterative, as it casts light on uncanny analogies between necropolitical strategies (Mbembe 2019) marking different periods and political regimes: from the absolutist and colonial nineteenth-century France to the democratic European Union of the twenty-first century. To this end, Villaronga interweaves three hermeneutic layers into his filmic fable: the memory of a nineteenth-century historical event as mediated through pictorial and literary representations, a critique of the present marked by refugee crises and postcolonialism and an exploration of the human condition in its agonistic-tragic dimension. In Villaronga’s cinematic vision, the agon between master and slave ends neither in reciprocal recognition (as theorized by Hegel) nor in the emergence of the “new humanity” overcoming the Manichaean, “compartmentalized world” of colonialism (Fanon [1961] 2005. The Wretched of the Earth. New York: Grove Books), but in an open dialectic of resistance and radical uncertainty.

KEYWORDS:

• Truth
• postcolonialism
• Agustí Villaronga
• Frantz Fanon
• Spanish cinema

“En la película se dice: ‘El mar lo era todo’”

– Agustí Villaronga (quoted in Parra 2021)

Introduction: El ventre del mar as a political-existential parable

The concern with history is a common denominator in Agustí Villaronga’s cinema, from his first feature movie, Tras el cristal (1987), dealing with the Nazi past, to the famed trilogy dedicated to the Spanish Civil War: El mar (The Sea) (2000), Pa negre (Black Bread) (2010) and Incerta glòria (Uncertain Glory) (2017). Yet, Villaronga did not make standard historical movies focused on representing prominent events and political leaders. Instead, he generally relied on fiction and literary imagination to explore, through a gritty cinematic neorealism, hard essential truths and marginalized points of view of children, teenagers and women who are generally absent from standard history books (Chappuzeau 2007; Espinós 2013; Pedraza 2007; Rosenstone and Parvulescu 2013; Terrasa 2007; Zamora 2016).¹ As Villaronga explicates, “La historia es historia. Está en libros y documentales. Abordar una ficción supone ir a lo más esencial” (Villaronga, quoted in Europapress 2013). Villaronga’s uncompromising visions exploring evil and violence disclose, to paraphrase Alain Badiou (2013), “cinema-truths” that avoid any comfortable ideological box and question Manichaean visions of the past (Capilla 2019; Espinós 2013; 2019; Imbert 2019). In particular, by engaging with fictional scenarios in the context of the Spanish Civil War, Villaronga’s trilogy has become part of the unfinished debate about historical memory, truth and democracy in Spain today (Imbert 2019; Smith 2009).²

Villaronga’s recent El ventre del mar (The Belly of the Sea) (2021)³ interprets the tragic shipwreck immortalized by Théodore Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (1818–1819) by introducing relatively novel elements such as collage and an aesthetics of the sublime with a clear-cut political significance.⁴ Conceived initially as a theatrical project and shot under the limiting conditions of the pandemic, the script of El ventre del mar is based on and takes its name from the second book in Alessandro Baricco’s novel Ocean Sea (2013 [1993]), which gives a fictional voice to the tragic events represented by Géricault. Halfway between cinema and theater,⁵ El ventre del mar fictionalizes the violent events on the raft of Medusa, thus carrying on Villaronga’s interest in historical circumstances that represent – to use Karl Jaspers’s term – “limit situations” (Grenzsituationen) that have a truth-revealing role and trigger shifts in consciousness (Jaspers 1970; Seguró 2015).

I argue that Villaronga’s El ventre del mar is interpretable as a political-existential parable echoing Frantz Fanon’s Marxist and anti-colonial reading of Hegel’s master-slave dialectic (Fanon [1952] 2008; Fanon 2005; Gibson 2003; Popa 2023). Based on Géricault’s and Baricco’s artistic representations, Villaronga’s film places race and class at its center and focuses on the dialectical struggle between the colonial power and the “colonized subject” (Fanon [1961] 2005, 90), the elite and the common people as represented by Doctor Savigny (Roger Casamajor) and the Black helmsman Thomas (Òscar Kapoya). Villarronga discloses strong continuities between the necropolitical strategies (Mbembe 2019) that characterize seemingly opposite types of political regimes: Louis XVIII’s colonial absolutist empire and the democratic European Union.⁶

In the following pages, I explore how Villaronga’s film is structured through the conflicting testimonies of Doctor Savigny and the Black helmsman Thomas, representing, respectively, the colonizing elite and the “wretched of the earth” (Fanon [1961] 2005). The development of this clash is, I contend, analyzable as a master-slave dialectic progressing through three phases. First, there is unity between master and slave, given that the colonized internalize the colonial gaze (Fanon [1961] 2005; Beistegui 2018) and the class and racial hierarchies are naturalized. In the second phase, antagonism erupts between the two camps, the officers and the “lower classes”: in Villaronga’s scenario, the dispossessed⁷ become self-conscious and emancipated, not through labor (Hegel [1807] 2017) but through force and resistance. However, in Villaronga’s cinematic fable, Thomas symbolically refuses to resort to violence against the colonizer, even when he gains the upper hand. Thus, he aims to break what Fanon calls the “circle of hatred” (Fanon [1961] 2005, 47). Third, I argue that the cinematic dialectic does not result in either reciprocal recognition (Hegel) or the creation of a “new humanity” (Fanon [1961] 2005; [1964] 1994). In contrast, in Villaronga’s more skeptical view of history, despite the inspiring resistance of the colonized as personified by Thomas, the last phase of the dialectic remains politically inconclusive, marked by agon and a lack of equal recognition.

The master-slave dialectic: from unity to antagonism

Villaronga’s starting point

Villaronga’s El ventre del mar fictionalizes a real-life historical tragedy involving the Alliance frigate that led to a trial and a scandal at the beginning of the nineteenth century in Louis XVIII’s France. The Alliance frigate was the flagship of a small force that sailed from the port of Rochefort in June 1816 with more than 360 people on board (Alhadeff 2002; 2008; Boudon 2016; Grigsby 2002). The frigate was on an official mission related to France’s colonial ambitions: it was sent to reclaim a strip of land on the West African coast, the island of Saint-Louis and a few trading posts in what is today part of Senegal. The ship captain was Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, who had served Louis XVI and was now serving Louis XVIII; past loyalties to Bourbon royalty ensured this latest appointment. De Chaumareys was a political appointee without proper navigating experience and, as a result, the massive Alliance – “un bosc flotant” (a floating forest), in Thomas’s words (Villaronga 2021) – ran aground, began to list and gradually fell apart. Realizing the frigate was lost, De Chaumareys and his officers abandoned it, embarked on a longboat and rowed to safety on the island of Saint-Louis. At once, with just a few lifeboats, panic ensued on the frigate. A raft was hurriedly assembled, which was initially towed to the boats. A handful of officers (together with Savigny) and more than one hundred people from the “lower classes” embarked on the raft (Alhadeff 2008; Grigsby 2002). Scandalously, the raft was cut off and cruelly abandoned in the ocean. Tragedy ensued: after fourteen agonizing days, a mutiny on the raft and horrific acts of cannibalism, the ship and its fifteen survivors were rescued by the brig Argus, which happened to be sailing nearby.⁸

Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa (see Figure 1), inspired by Edmund Burke’s theorization of the sublime, mixes horrific images of dying and decomposing bodies with sublime beauty to make a political statement denouncing the criminal abandonment of people to the ocean’s mercy (Boudon 2016; Eitner 1983; Grigsby 2002). At the same time, Géricault’s painting captured a moment of hope: the composition tellingly culminated with a Black figure waiving at the ship Argos that would eventually rescue them. Through a remarkable symbolic inversion at odds with the common sense of the age (slavery was still legal), Géricault boldly placed a Black man, incarnating the hope of salvation, at the center of the composition (Alhadeff 2008).

Figure 1. Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa in black and white, as part of Villaronga’s filmic collage. Still from El ventre del mar (© Agustí Villaronga 2021).

Painting representing a group of desperate people on a raft in the middle of an agitated ocean.

This historical tragedy and Géricault’s hypnotic representation continue to inspire artistic and political interpretations (Boudon 2016; Grigsby 2002). To grasp the specificity of Villaronga’s foremost sources of inspiration, consider first Jonathan Barnes’s literary reading of the historical tragedy and Géricault’s masterpiece. In A History of the World in 10 ½ Chapters (1989), Barnes strikingly empties Géricault’s pictural representation of its political, colonial and racial significance. Ironically, Barnes does so through a prosaic style replete with historical knowledge and meticulous detail.⁹ Whereas Géricault and his contemporaries denounced the captain for imperiling the life of hundreds through his incompetence and his disregard for the crew and the people on the ship, in Barnes’s view, “nowadays … it is hard to feel much indignation against … [the] captain of the expedition” (Barnes 1989, 133). For Barnes, the shipwreck is a historical episode that no longer resonates with us (Barnes 1989, 132; Alhadeff 2008). Barnes excuses De Chaumareys’s captainship with the observation that “time dissolves the story into form” (Barnes 1989, 133). He ignores the political dimension regarding the arbitrariness of De Chaumareys’s appointment by the powers that be in addition to the colonialist and classist underpinnings of the tragedy (those abandoned were mainly from lower classes or were slaves). Barnes’s otherwise thorough discussion glosses over and even ridicules the key moral-political aspects of the affair.¹⁰ He goes as far as to characterize one of Géricault’s preliminary drawings representing the desperate cannibalism on the Medusa as “almost comic” (Barnes 1989, 128). For Barnes, the mutiny on the raft represented by Géricault with paroxysmic dramatism in one of his preparatory drawings, resembles “the saloon-bar fights in B-Westerns where every single person is involved throwing a punch, smashing a chair, breaking a bottle over an enemy’s head, swinging heavy-booted from the chandelier” (Barnes 1989, 127–128).

No interpretation could be farther from the reimaingings of this famous painting offered by Baricco’s Ocean Sea and, even more emphatically, Villaronga movie. While Barnes severs the present from the past and art from its political context, Baricco and Villaronga reconnect them. In El ventre del mar, the tragic shipwreck and Géricault’s work speak about our political-existential condition. As in Géricault’s painting, the Black helmsman is at the center of Baricco’s and Villaronga’s imagining of a dialectical confrontation between, on one side, those who embody authority and, on the other, the dispossessed on the raft of Medusa (see Figure 2). From here, I move to Villaronga’s staging of the conflict between master and slave.

Figure 2. Image from The Belly of the Sea echoing Géricault’s The Raft of the Medusa. Still from El ventre del mar (© Agustí Villaronga 2021).

A group of agitated people on a raft.

The master-slave dialectic (1): unity

While Villaronga’s script draws on Baricco’s literary work, he resorts to specific filmic devices (from cinematography to editing) and narrative-dramaturgical modifications to construct a three-stage dialectic with anti-racist and colonial underpinnings. Cinematically, Villaronga’s movie is primarily black-and-white and uses stark lighting contrasts, close-ups and contrasting body movements to articulate and intensify the clash between the two protagonists. Echoing Lars von Trier’s Dogville (2009), Villaronga constructs a non-realistic and abstract-minimalist setting¹¹ with a similar essentializing impact. Most of the action on the raft ostensibly occurs in an abandoned, run-down building. Villaronga’s cinematic epoche is unprecedented in his filmography and confers his movie a certain theatricality. Whereas this limited setting was initially the result of constraints imposed by the pandemic and his intention to direct a work of theater, it becomes an organic aesthetic choice with an essentialization effect inherent in the exploration of truth in a limit situation.

The film starts by showing Thomas and Savigny in a courtroom (see Figure 3), opening their testimonies about the shipwreck: the emptiness of the courtroom, the absence of color and the contrasting light falling on their faces contribute to the essentialization of the dialectical conflict between the two protagonists. The courtroom scenes are purposefully unrealistic: the public, the lawyers and the prosecutors are absent. The director is not concerned with reconstituting the particulars of the nineteenth-century trial: in El ventre del mar, the judges are largely invisible and do not intervene, no legal procedure is followed and no verdict is pronounced. The two sides testify but not as in a tribunal. Instead, the courtroom represents a symbolic space that opens up the call for justice to a wider audience: the two sides engage in a confrontation about events whose meaning transcends the 1817 trial and questions our political-existential condition.

Figure 3. Thomas and Savigny testifying before a symbolic tribunal. Still from El ventre del mar (© Agustí Villaronga 2021).

Thomas and Savigny testifying before the tribunal in an empty courtroom.

Dramaturgically, in Baricco, the two testimonies occur one after the other, while in Villaronga, they are intermingled, one confronting the other from the very beginning. Villaronga interweaves the two testimonies and the unfolding of the events in a way that simplifies and further politicizes Baricco’s narration.¹² Through montage, Villaronga explicitly sides politically with Thomas’s perspective – that is, with the perspective of the Black, colonized and downtrodden figure – against the officers, as led by Savigny. Thomas’s and Savigny’s opposing testimonies and the film’s narrative build to a crescendo as the horrors of the shipwreck intensify. As in Baricco, their two testimonies differ in style and content.¹³ The latter’s testimony is a poem of horrors written as a spiritual incantation, with each day marked by a keyword and an experience in his disclosure of the events:

Primer de tot, és el meu nom. Savigny. Després venen els ulls d'aquells que ens van abandonar. Tercer, un pensament. Quart, la nit que s'acosta. Cinquè, aquells cossos destrossats. Sisè, la gana. Setè, l'horror. Vuitè, els fantasmes de la bogeria. Novè, carn aberrant. I desè, un home que em mira i no em mata. (First, there is my name. Savigny. Second, there are the eyes of those who abandoned us. Third, a thought. Fourth is the night that closes in. Fifth, those mangled bodies. Sixth, hunger. Seventh, horror. Eighth, the ghosts of madness. Ninth, abhorrent flesh. And tenth, a man that looks at me but does not kill me.) (Villaronga 2021)

At this moment, the camera moves on to a close-up of Thomas’s defiant look. He interrupts Savigny's incantatory testimony with the piercing words that set the tone of his testimony: “Em diuen Thomas. I aquesta es la història d’una infàmia” (My name is Thomas. And this is the story of an infamy) (Villaronga 2021). In contrast to Savigny’s poetic testimony and its depoliticizing intent, Thomas’s observational style is narrative and prosaic: Thomas symbolizes the voice of the lower classes gaining self-consciousness and rising against the master’s abusive power.

Savigny and Thomas advance opposing explanations about the origins of the disaster of the Medusa. In Savigny’s testimony, a few officers (with Savigny as their leader) “naturally” take center stage on the raft and oversee the food and wine distribution. Savigny defends the role of the officers: “Els oficials ens van col·locar al centre del rai on hi havia les poques provisions que no s'havien caigut a l'aigua durant el caòtic transbordament” (The officers placed us in the center of the raft where the few provisions that hadn't fallen into the water during the chaotic transfer were located). (Villaronga 2021) However, as Thomas and the others had rightly intuited, embarking on the raft was a death trap. The officers have to point guns at them to compel the multitude to board the raft. As Fanon writes, characterizing the violent nature of colonial power:

The colonial regime owes its legitimacy to force and at no time tries to hide this aspect of things. Every statue, whether of Faidherbe or Lyautey, of Bugeaud or Sergeant Blandan – all these conquistadors perched on colonial soil do not cease from proclaiming one and the same thing: “We are here by the force of bayonets”. (Fanon [1961] 2005, 79)

Thomas details how the officers sat at the center of the raft, taking control of the food supply by threatening violence through the use of their guns: while the officers stood up, on a chest, the rest were standing around them, with the water up to their knees as the raft sank under their weight. As Thomas bitterly observes, “Vam acabar amuntegats com animals en aquella barcassa sense vores, sense quilla, sense timó” (We ended up crowded together like animals on that boat without sides, without a keel, without a rudder) (Villaronga 2021).

At this initial point of the two testimonies, Villaronga uses a filmic collage to convey an indirect but explicit political message in favor of Thomas’s testimony and to construct an iterative vision of history marked by cyclical evil, hierarchy and violence. He interrupts the narrative to introduce real-life images and audio of African refugees trying to cross the Mediterranean and of Italian coast guards responding to their calls for help: “Hello sir, we need help. … Women are dying, children are dying, everybody is dying”, shouts a voice on the radio. “Don't cry. Try to stay calm. Give me your position” (Villaronga 2021), says another voice (seemingly a coast guard) in English, with an Italian accent. Villaronga further sets the tone by inserting real-life images from Francesco Zizola's photographic essay In the Same Boat (2015) documenting the tragedy of the “boat people” aiming to cross the Mediterranean Sea:¹⁴ never have Villaronga’s political critique and intentionality been more apparent.

In the courtroom, Savigny and Thomas clash about the origin of the separation of the raft from the rescue boats. For Savigny, “Per covardia o per incompetència, mai ningú va aconseguir establir la veritat. … El rai va perdre el contacte amb el convoi perquè la soga que el remolcava es va trencar” (Due to cowardice or ineptitude, nobody ever found out the truth. … The raft became separated from the lifeboats because the rope that was towing it snapped) (Villaronga 2021). Thomas sharply intervenes to correct Savigny and accuses the officers: “La van tallar. La van tallar” (They cut it. They cut it.) (Villaronga 2021). The Black helmsman bitterly reflects on the condition of the lower classes: “Només la fortuna podria salvar-nos. Però els derrotats mai no tenen fortuna” (Only fortune could save us. But the defeated never have good fortune.) (Villaronga 2021).

However, the people on the raft initially gather around the officers and Savigny. There is unity among the people of the Medusa. Thomas explains: “Els quatre oficials i Savigny es van fer amb el control de la situació. Tenien les armes i controlaven les provisions. Els homes s'hi refiaven” (The four officers and Savigny took control of the situation. They had the weapons. And they controlled the provisions. The men trusted them) (Villaronga 2021; emphasis added). As the self-styled leader of the officers, Savigny skillfully appeals to people’s negative and positive emotions (hatred towards those who abandoned them; hope for being rescued) to generate a unity of purpose and a circle of trust and recognition: “Escolteu-me tots. Aquesta vela ens portarà a terra. I allà perseguirem a tots aquells que ens han traït i abandonat. I no ens aturarem fins que no hagin tastat la nostra venjança” (Listen to me, everyone. That sail will carry us to land. And there, we will go after those that betrayed and abandoned us, and we will not stop until they taste our vengeance) (Villaronga 2021). Savigny acts as a populist leader who creates a form of mutual recognition and affective unity. Galvanized by his discourse, people shout in unison with Savigny: “Venjança, venjança!” (Vengeance, vengeance!) (Villaronga 2021).

Yet, as Fanon points out, this recognition is but a form of alienation and submission: “Every colonized people – in other words, every people in whose soul an inferiority complex has been created by the death and burial of its local cultural originality – finds itself face to face with the language of the civilizing nation” ([1952] 2008, 18). Moreover, the master even poses as equal to the slave. Savigny acts like a populist leader, pretending to be a commoner: “Un bon discurs. Ni tan sols semblava un oficial. Semblava un de nosaltres” (A good speech. He [Savigny] did not even look like an officer. He seemed like one of us) (Villaronga 2021; emphasis added). In this first phase of the dialectic, there is a unity between the master and the slave, as the seductive leader projects an imaginary equality between the elite and the dispossessed. But, as Gibson comments on Fanon’s reinterpretation of Hegel (Fanon [1952] 2008), the “slave who embraces the logos of the master can at best hope for only a pseudo-recognition – a White Mast” (Gibson 2003, 29). Through pseudo-recognition, the colonized subject initially internalizes the hierarchical order as natural. The master gains, in this initial phase, the allegiance of the slave, who accepts violence and hierarchy as “natural”.

The master-slave dialectic (2): articulating antagonism

The initial unity based on pseudo-recognition and the internalization of the hierarchical order between colonizer and colonized would not last long. Despite the apparent unity, as Fanon underscores, conflict and antagonism are simmering given that “colonialism is, essentially, the organization of a Manichaean world” in which ultimately “’it’s us or them’” (Fanon [1961] 2005, 43). Soon, the unity will turn into a state of war between the “elite” and the “people”, as the latter rebel against the master’s tyranny and raise to the level of “self-consciousness” (Fanon [1952] 2008).

For Hegel, the engine of the dialectical development is the slave’s labor ([1807] 2017). Fanon rejects his interpretation: for the colonized, labor is “forced labor” performed out of “dread”, and no self-consciousness emerges through “forced labor” ([1952] 2008, 218). The key trigger of emancipation and self-liberation is the assumption of the risk of counterviolence against the criminal colonial regime: “It is only by risking life that freedom is obtained” (Fanon [1952] 2008, 218). As Gibson comments, without such risk, there is no freedom, independence or authentic recognition according to Fanon (Gibson 2003, 34).

In Villaronga’s representation, the gradual process of attaining self-consciousness also goes through the exercise of force and risk. On the raft of the Medusa, changing circumstances put the unity under increasing strain: first, a night tempest sweeps away some people on the raft. Through discontinuous editing, Villaronga alternates dramatic images of the night storm with beautiful pictures of Thomas and Therèse’s love story: from their initial courtship to them making love (see Figure 4).

Figure 4. Thomas with his beloved Therèse (Muminu Diayo), the only woman on the raft. Still from El ventre del mar (© Agustí Villaronga 2021).

Thomas with his beloved Therèse looking at each other while eating.

Then, after the night tempest takes the first victims of the ill-begotten journey, despair and hunger set in, intensifying the tensions on the raft. A turning point in the articulation of the antagonism is the night of mutiny that occurs on the seventh day (the day of horror, in Savigny’s words), which results in several killings. Once again, Savigny and Thomas advance conflicting interpretations of the events. Savigny frames the mutiny as an act of madness of a few people who accidentally gained access to a barrel of wine and got drunk. He and the officers had to kill people, Savigny claims, in self-defense. In turn, Thomas reveals the gruesome calculation that results in the violent mutiny. Given the scarcity of food, wine and water, the officers led by Savigny provoked the violence in order to kill some of those on the raft and thus decrease the number of mouths to feed: the officers got one of the three barrels of wine out of the chest and let it slide towards the others, thus generating a great chaos, as everyone desperately wanted to have a drink of the wine. The drunkenness led to conflict and, in the end, to shooting. Thomas accuses Savigny of a cold-blooded and planned murder: “Vaig veure com un home desarmat s'abraçava a Savigny i li implorava pietat. L’home no va deixar de cridar quan el primer cop de sabre li va penetrar el ventre. I després, el segon. I el tercer. Vaig veure com l’home es desplomava” (I saw how an unarmed man embraced Savigny and pleaded for mercy. The man didn't stop screaming when the first blow of the saber pierced his stomach. And then, the second. And the third. I saw how the man collapsed) (Villaronga 2021). The Black helmsman then has the revelation that the real enemy is Savigny: “Vaig mirar la cara de Savigny i vaig comprendre qui era l'enemic. I que l'enemic guanyaria” (I saw Savigny’s face and I knew who the enemy was. And that the enemy would win) (Villaronga 2021).

After the mutiny, Savigny imposes a regime of terror on the raft, leading to more deaths. Thomas reflects on the situation: “Els febles només poden fugir. Però no es pot fugir d'un rai perdut al mar. I ells, científicament, mataven. Una meticulosa carnisseria” (The weak can only flee. But one cannot flee from a raft lost at sea. And they, scientifically, killed. A meticulous slaughter) (Villaronga 2021). Yet Thomas takes the risk of rebelling against the “rational” regime of fear: with a quick move, he catches Savigny and puts a knife to his throat (see Figure 5). This violent gesture begins the rebellion and sets the dialectic in motion. Thomas threatens to kill him unless the “lower classes” get provisions and guns.

Figure 5. Thomas threatening Savigny, the leader of the officers: a key moment in the rebellion against the officers. Still from El ventre del mar (© Agustí Villaronga 2021).

Thomas violently grabs Savigny from behind and threatens to cut his throat with a knife.

In the second stage of the master-slave dialectic, the lower classes gather around the new leader, acquire self-consciousness and become constituted as a collective: “Els homes s'apilonaven al meu voltant. … Vam entregar viu a Savigny a canvi d'uns pocs aliments i armes” (The men gathered around me. … We returned Savigny alive in exchange for some supplies and weapons) (Villaronga 2021). Thomas pleads with the dispossessed on the raft to organize a resistance:

Ens estan matant un a un i no pararan fins que només quedin ells. Aquesta nit han aconseguit que ens emborratxem. Però a la propera no necessitaran ni coartades. Tenen les armes i nosaltres ja no som molts. No hi ha provisions per a tots. No deixaran en vida ni un sol home més del que necessiten. (They are killing us one by one and will not stop until they are the only ones left. Tonight, they’ve managed to get us drunk. But the next time they won’t even need an excuse. They have the weapons, and there are not many of us left. There are not supplies for everyone. They will not leave any more men alive than they need to.) (Villaronga 2021)

The oppressive regime breaks down and is thus replaced by an open confrontation between the two camps: Savigny, his officers and the people. During the day, the two camps are on standby; during the night, however, some get murdered. Savigny takes revenge on Thomas by killing his beloved and innocent Therèse in cold blood. As the days go by, a fragile balance between the two opposing parties emerges, with each side seemingly facing a sure death.

The slave-master dialectic (3): reconfiguring antagonism

From self-transcendence to the nihilism of the will

On the ninth day, the lack of provisions and the desperate hunger lead the survivors to desperate acts of cannibalism. Savigny explains in poetic cadence what occurred on the day of the “carn aberrant” (abhorrent flesh):

Es va acabar el vi, l'aigua, tot. Ja no quedava cap cosa per la qual matar-se. … Fins que un, cec de fam, es reclina sobre el cadàver de l'amic. Cadascú amb el seu esquinçall de carn d'aquells cossos oberts, com crits, com taules preparades pels animals que som. Carn aberrant assecant-se dels obenques d'una vela. Carn a les meves mans. Carn d'homes que van ser amb mi. Carn que tenia un nom. I que ara devoro. (The wine, the water, everything was finished. There was nothing left to kill for. … Until one, blinded by hunger, leans over the corpse of his friend. Each one with their own morsel of flesh from those open bodies, like screams, like tables set for the animals that we are. Aberrant flesh drying on the stays of a sail. Flesh in my hands. Flesh of men who were with me. Flesh that had a name. And that I now devour.) (Villaronga 2021).

During Savigny’s testimony, Villaronga shows Thomas cutting a piece of flesh that he gives to the others. The camera centers then on Savigny, who is also eating human flesh and is struggling to overcome his disgust. Still, it is in such limit situations – when one is facing death or the absurd – that shifts in consciousness can occur (Jaspers 1970). Reaching this extreme triggers an epiphanic experience of self-overcoming and spiritual insight in Savigny. In the absolute lowest moment of inhumanity, Savigny rises above himself, as the doctor has a revelation regarding the futility of his ego-centered actions and the infinite totality of all beings, as symbolized by the sea:

És allà on jo, per primera vegada després de dies i dies, el veig. Veig el mar. Tot desapareix i només queda Ell. El mar semblava un espectador silenciós, còmplice i pacient. Semblava marc, escenari, teló. Però ara ho veig i comprenc: el mar ho era tot. Ho ha estat des del primer moment, tot. … No hi ha rai, no hi ha homes, no hi ha paraules, sentiments, gestos. No res. No hi ha culpables ni innocents, condemnats ni salvats. Només mar. Totes les coses s’han convertit en mar. Nosaltres abandonats per la terra, som el ventre del mar, i el ventre del mar som nosaltres, i en nosaltres respira i viu. (It is there that, for the first time, after days and days, I see him. I see the sea. Everything disappears and only He remains. The sea seemed like a silent, complicit, and patient spectator. It seemed like stage, scenery, backdrop. But now I see it and understand: the sea was everything. It has been everything from the very beginning. … There is no raft, men, words, feelings, or actions. Nothing. There are no guilty persons, no innocent, condemned, or saved – only the sea. Everything has become the sea. We, abandoned by the earth, we are the belly of the sea, and the belly of the sea is us, and it lives and breathes in us.) (Villaronga 2021)

Savigny’s mystical experience echoes Baruch Spinoza’s Deus, sive Natura: the sea becomes alpha and omega, “horror and splendor”, God and nature (Sánchez de León Serrano and Shein 2019). Deus, sive Mare: the sea is everything, the beginning, the path and the end. God and the sea are the interchangeable figures of an all-encompassing infinity. In this epiphanic moment, Savigny overcomes the limits of his ego and experiences totality as unity and the futility of dialectic. The world ceases to be divided between I and other, master and slave. In a different context, Gaston Bachelard captures this experience of sublime infinity: “To disappear into deep water or to disappear toward a far horizon, to become part of the depth of infinity, such is the destiny of man that finds its image in the destiny of water” (Bachelard 1994, 88).

During Savigny’s confession, Villaronga combines images of shocking horror (the acts of cannibalism) and sublime beauty (the poetic representations of the sea), echoing Géricault’s aesthetics. The director resorts to a filmic collage by introducing images of Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater sculptures of a submarine cemetery.¹⁵ The shots of Taylor’s underwater cemetery convey Villaronga’s choice of a political aesthetics of the sublime. He thus moves away from the earlier neorealism towards an aesthetics that engages with the “infinite” (Burke [1757] 1998), that is, the experience of incommensurable horror and otherworldly beauty. Through montage, the two “infinities” (extreme evil; sublime beauty) become interwoven, as in the poetic and disquieting images of slowly sinking bodies or of Jason deCaires Taylor’s underwater sculptures (Murray 2021). The uncannily beautiful images are politically charged: they are the uncomfortable reminder of the horror of the deaths of refugees trying to cross large expanses of water on their way to Europe.

Savigny's confession edges towards the infinite, taking on a distinctly religious tone:

Finalment sé que aquesta no és la derrota de cap home, sinó el triomf del mar, i de la seva glòria. … Davant d'Ell s'inclinen tots els homes i eleven el seu cant de glòria. Sé que Ell està dins d'ells, en ells creixen, ells viuen dins d'Ell, i moren. Ell és per ells el secret, la fi, i la veritat, la condemna i la salvació, i l'únic camí cap a la eternitat. (Finally, I know that this is not the defeat of any man, but the triumph of the sea, and of its glory. … Before Him, all men bow and sing of His glory. Because He is in them, and He grows in them, and inside of Him they live, and die. He is to them the secret, the end goal, the truth, condemnation and salvation, and the only path to eternity.) (Villaronga 2021)

As in Baricco’s fictionalization of Savigny’s testimony, his choice of words echoes the New Testament and Christian prayers.¹⁶ Symbolically, Villaronga inserts a scene that is not present in Baricco and which reflects Andrei Tarkovsky’s spiritual cinema (Bradatan and Ungureanu 2014; 2016): during his monologue, Savigny looks at a cross hanging on the wall in a mystical halo. Savigny concludes his monologue as a prayer to the sea god as he closes a door that opens unto the sea: “I així continuarà sent, fins al final dels dies, que serà el final del mar, si és que el mar té fi. Amén” (This is how it is, and this is how it is going to be until the end of days, which will be the end of the sea, if the sea has an end. Amen.) (Villaronga 2021).

The revelation-cum-prayer expresses Villaronga’s self-declared interest in conveying a spiritual-existential experience, no matter how fragile, even in the most savagely egotistic moments in the struggle for survival. Ostensibly infinite, the sea stands for an absorbing and all-encompassing transcendence that abolishes the limits between myself and others, life and death, inside and outside: when asked about what the sea means in the movie, Villaronga remarks that it is “la parte espiritual de las personas, donde puedes hablar de Dios, de la naturaleza, de todo lo que te haga reflexionar”; in the film, the sea is, he continues, “todo … es un espejo donde te puedes reflejar, capaz de mostrar tu parte más espiritual; un lugar privado y alejado de todo, como el útero” (Villaronga, quoted in Parra 2021).

However, Savigny’s experience of self-transcendence is, ultimately, morally and existentially irrelevant. After their rescue, the revelation of a mystical unity is replaced by the Manichaean world of the agon between the colonizer and the colonized. Before the tribunal, Savigny argues that no moral or legal criterion can be applied to such a limit situation: the “truth” means simply trying to stay alive by any means (including murder) and succeeding in doing so. In a final dialogue with Thomas, Savigny exhorts him as follows:

No pensis tant. Els morts són morts i els vius esperem, i prou. Aquesta és la nostra veritat. I si encara som vius, és perquè vam matar sense pietat, perquè vam menjar la carn arrabassada als cadàvers dels nostres companys, i ens vam beure la sang. (Do not overthink it. The dead are dead, the living wait, and that’s it. That’s our truth. And if we are still alive, it is because we killed without mercy, because we ate the flesh that we tore from our comrades’ bodies, and we drank their blood.) (Villaronga 2021; emphasis added)

Ironically, whereas Savigny’s mystical experience leads to the dissolution of the I into the unity of beings, once saved, his “truth” becomes the affirmation of the I. The master overcomes his limits to reaffirm himself even more radically as mere egotistic willpower in the realm of immanence: the “truth” is nothing but the degree of success in the struggle for survival. The mask of the colonizing elite's power (i.e. its civilizing discourse) is taken off in the dialectical confrontation: the nihilism of self-affirmation is all that remains. The spiritual experience of transcendence collapses into the colonizer’s nihilism of the will: I have the power, therefore, I am. In the last dialogue with Thomas, the sea becomes for Savigny a “mirall de mi mateix” (mirror of myself) (Villaronga 2021).

Thomas’s refusal of violence and his inconsolable truth

In turn, the limit situation generates a double shift in Thomas’s consciousness, both moral-political and existential. First, the colonized develop a self-consciousness by recognizing the master as the enemy, personifying a criminal “rationality”. This new “colonial subject” (Fanon [1961] 2005), turning into a self-conscious agent, confronts the master and mobilizes the “people” against the regime of terror on the raft. Soon, Thomas will have to make a fundamental choice in his confrontation with the master. The power balance between him and Savigny turns in his favor. While both are exhausted and close to dying, Thomas is more resilient. Gradually, the power relation on the raft between the master and the slave is turned upside down. In a dramatic scene, Thomas gets closer to and overpowers a drained Savigny, who can no longer move. As he prepares to take revenge on Savigny and bring him to justice, the two engage in an intense dialogue:

Savigny: Veig la mort als teus ulls.

Thomas: Abans de morir, jo et mataré. És el que em queda. El record de Therèse i el desig d'una mena qualsevol de justícia. … Encara que tornéssim alguna vegada a qualsevol lloc, ja mai ens podríem salvar. I ara, resa!

(Savigny: I see death in your eyes.

Thomas: Before dying, I will kill you. It is all I have left. The memory of Therèse and the desire for some sort of justice. … Even if we somehow were to return to some place, we could never be saved. And now, pray.) (Villaronga 2021).

Yet unexpectedly, Thomas stops short of killing the master who was the origin of various atrocities on the raft, including the murder of his beloved Therèse. Thus, in the master-slave confrontation, Thomas shies away from the Fanonian “reciprocal homogeneity” of violence/counterviolence. For Fanon, “the violence of the colonized regime and the counterviolence of the colonized … respond to each other in an extraordinary reciprocal homogeneity” (Fanon [1961] 2005, 45). Moreover, Fanon argues that “violence is a cleansing force. It frees the native from his inferiority complex, despair, and inaction; it makes him fearless and restores his self-respect” (Fanon [1961] 2005, 150).

In contrast, in Villaronga’s representation, violence has neither a “cleansing force” for Thomas nor does he need it to affirm his dignity. His emancipation lies in resistance and solidarity with the dispossessed from the Medusa. Before the tribunal, Thomas reminds Savigny of the power of moral consciousness. He evokes the image of one of the criminal officers, Marcus, obsessively washing his body as if to cleanse his conscience before allowing himself to drown in the sea. Beyond Fanon’s justice-driven revolutionary violence and Savigny’s nihilist survivalism, Thomas affirms a nonviolent moral truth and justice under the law. This is a risky decision: tellingly, there is no verdict in the movie, and, in actual life, the culprits escaped imprisonment. Villaronga’s disenchanted view of dialectical development conceives the emancipatory stage as one of uncertainty, ongoing conflict and lack of mutual recognition. In the master-slave dialectical confrontation, the two parts neither reach reconciliation through mutual recognition (Hegel) nor the superior stage of a “new humanity” (Fanon). The shifts in consciousness between the master and the slave lead in opposite directions: Thomas embodies the affirmation of nonviolent justice, even in the direst of situations, in contrast with Savigny's “rational violence”, which is devoid of any moral-spiritual dimension.

Thomas’s moral-political emancipation is, further, severed from spiritual assurance. He remains existentially inconsolable. Salvation is, reflects Thomas, possible only for those who had stayed ashore. Thomas conveys this existential realization by telling the story of Darrell, an old sailorman whom he had befriended as a child. For the old Darrell, remembers Thomas, there were three types of men: those who stay ashore, those who go to sea and never return, and those who return. Darrell was of the last type, having survived two shipwrecks, including one in which he had navigated alone for more than 3000 kilometers. Only now, reflects Thomas, was he able to understand Darrell, and his truth. As a child, Thomas yearned for truth, for exploring the sea: “Vull arribar al fons del mar. Jo imaginava … una veritat que era quietud i dolçor. Una veritat feta per nosaltres. Que ens esperava, i que ens acolliria a la falda, com una mare retrobada” (I want to get to the bottom of the sea. I imagined … a truth that was tranquil and sweet. One truth made for us. That waited for us and would welcome us in its arms, like a mother we are reunited with). (Villaronga 2021). Yet the experience on the raft shook off this dream of truth: “Però ara que sóc al més profund del ventre del mar, he vist com la veritat, meticulosa i perfecta, hi construeix el seu niu. I allò que he vist ha estat una rapinyaire, majestuosa en el vol, i ferotge” (But now that I’m in the depths of the belly of the sea, I’ve seen how the truth, meticulous and perfect, builds its nest there. And I saw a bird of prey, majestic in flight yet ferocious.) (Villaronga 2021).

As Thomas reflects on this experience of disenchantment and disclosure of truth, the image of Therèse singing appears. Her ghost returns only for a fleeting moment: the truth emerges from the loss of love, motherly protection and childhood illusions. Now he identifies with and understands Darrell: “Darrell … era un home inconsolable. Això és el que m'ha ensenyat el ventre del mar. Que qui ha vist la veritat es mantindrà per sempre inconsolable. I veritablement salvat està qui no ha estat mai en perill” (Darrell … was inconsolable. That is what the belly of the sea taught me. That those who have seen the truth will always be inconsolable. And those who are truly saved are those that have never been in danger.) (Villaronga 2021). In an uncanny scene bringing together past and future, as Thomas pronounces these words, the child Thomas tenderly caresses his future self’s head.

In short, the confrontation between Savigny and Thomas does not end in reconciliation (Hegel) or revolutionary transformation (Fanon). The limit situation transforms the slave and removes the master’s mask. Yet, it does not bring them together in a superior Fanonian “ethics of reciprocity” that overcomes the Manichaean world separating colonizers and colonized (Gibson 2003). On the contrary, Villaronga’s film discloses the chasm and unresolved agon between the powers that be and the people; radical evil and transcendence expressed through an aesthetics of unreconciled extremes (radical evil, infinite beauty). Nevertheless, Villaronga's dialectic of uncertainty conveys a sense of exemplarity and hope, carried by the resistance and solidarity of the dispossessed, as represented by Thomas.

Conclusion: there is no “sweet truth”

Villaronga’s movie explores, I have argued, a post-Fanonian version of the master-slave dialectic as a historical struggle between colonizer and colonized, the powers that be and the dispossessed in the accelerated temporality of a limit situation. Villaronga’s vision of history is neither progressive-linear nor simply non-linear, but iterative, as it casts light on uncomfortable continuities between necropolitical strategies (Mbembe 2019; Tulbure 2022) that mark different historical periods and political regimes: the absolutist and colonial France of the beginnings of the nineteenth century and the democratic European Union of the twenty-first century. The sea remains “un immens jardí de morts, sense creus, sense límits” (An immense garden of death, without crosses, without limits) (Villaronga 2021).

In Villaronga’s cinematic vision, the agon between master and slave ends neither in reciprocal recognition (Hegel) nor in the emergence of the “new humanity” that overcomes the Manichaean, “compartmentalized world” (Fanon [1961] 2005; Gibson 2003) of the colonizer and the “perpetual conflict” between the White and the Black (1952 [2008], 27). First, the master’s trajectory is paradoxical. Upon reaching the bottommost limit of evil and inhumanity, Savigny rises above himself through a spiritual experience that involves a radical dissolution of the ego into the infinite totality of the sea. But Savigny’s experience of self-transcendence turns out to be morally and existentially inconsequential. The master supersedes his limits only to reassert himself more thoroughly as mere self-centered willpower: “truth” is determined by one’s success in a struggle for survival. Thus, the elite power represented by Savigny loses any symbolic cover and emerges as solipsistic facticity.

Second, Thomas builds a moral-political consciousness by mounting a courageous resistance and mobilizing the people on the raft against Savigny’s “rational” regime of fear. He resists the temptation of Fanonian cathartic violence even after he physically overpowers the master. Thomas breaks the cycle of violence/counterviolence and opts for testimony and legal justice. However, this is a precarious choice. In Villaronga, the emergence of the collective self-consciousness of the dispossessed comes with the tragic sense of unending (decolonial) struggle and uncertainty. In contrast, in Fanon’s revolutionary fervor, decolonization “is simply the substitution of one species of man by another” (Fanon [1961] 2005, 1) and “truly the creation of new men” (Fanon [1961] 2005, 2).¹⁷ What’s more, Thomas’s moral-political transformation is accompanied by existential disenchantment. The horrific events of the Medusa leave Thomas’s soul disfigured. In Villaronga’s vision, there is no “sweet truth” for those who do not face the sea and comfortably remain ashore. Thomas reflects in a final dialogue with Savigny:

Havíem de passar per aquell infern per comprendre la veritat. Destruir-nos els uns als altres, convertir-nos en bèsties, i esqueixar-nos de dolor. Però … per què? Per què? Qui ha trastocat el món perquè la veritat hagi d'estar al costat fosc i els humans siguin l'única terra immunda on hi creix? Quina mena de veritat és aquesta? Què put a cadàver? S'alimenta de sang i dolor i neix quan l'home s'humilia, i triomfa quan l'home s'acaba? (We had to pass through that hell to understand the truth. Destroy one another, turn into beasts, and be torn apart by pain. But … why? … Why? Who has made the world so mad that the truth must be on the dark side, and humans are the only foul land it grows on? What kind of truth is this, that stinks of corpses, feeds on blood and pain, is born when men become humiliated, and wins when men lose?) (Villaronga 2021)

El ventre del mar leaves this litany of questions unanswered. In Villaronga’s vision, there is no guarantee of attaining justice or of the law being applied fairly; salvation and reconciliation, whether political or spiritual, are out of reach.

Neither a soothing theodicy nor an unshakeable faith in a revolutionized future is available. Truth is not a consoling and transparent certainty but a “bird of prey, majestic in flight yet ferocious”, as Thomas poetically describes it. No “sweet truth” comes out of the sea’s womb. However, moral rebels like Thomas serve as sources of inspiration for an ethics of resistance, an art of navigating the ocean of moral-political agon and spiritual uncertainty.

Acknowledgements

I wish to acknowledge the feedback of the two anonymous reviewers as well as the editors for their meticulous and exacting work on this manuscript.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Camil Ungureanu

Camil Ungureanu is the Serra Húnter Associate Professor of Political Theory and coordinator of the MA in Political Philosophy in the Department of Social and Political Sciences at the Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain. He is interested in critical theory, contemporary political thought, art and political imagination. He is also a founding member of the Barcelona Network for Critical Thought and Social Research. Email: [email protected].

Notes

1 When Villaronga portrays political leaders, as in his television miniseries Carta a Eva (2012), it is not to reconstruct their key role in a standard historical context. Carta a Eva fictionalizes a minor episode from Eva Perón’s life: her visit to Spain in 1947. Villaronga employs a perspective of displacement, as he constructs the story as an interaction between three women: Perón, Carmen Polo (Franco’s wife) and Juana Doña, a communist sentenced to death.

2 Villaronga’s oeuvre contributes to a substantive body of Spanish films that deal with the Civil War (Araüna and Quílez 2017; Espinós 2019; Imbert 2019).

3 El ventre del mar won the Golden Biznaga for the best Spanish feature film at the twenty-fourth Málaga Film Festival. Villaronga also won the award for the best director of the contest. In addition, Roger Casamayor won the best leading actor for playing the character of Doctor Jean-Baptiste Savigny. For the critical reception of El ventre del mar, see, for instance: Martínez 2021; Hristova 2021; Tordera 2022.

4 Villaronga cited in Prieto (2021). Villaronga’s cinematic work has been often interpreted in an ethical or metaphysical key, whereas I will emphasize its political and spiritual significance. Scholars such as Pedraza (2007) and Espinós (2019) go as far as to argue that Villaronga is uninterested in politics. For Pedraza, Villaronga’s films are not about politics or a historically specific war, but about evil and its perpetuation (Pedraza 2007, 18; Prieto 2011). Villaronga seems to condone this line of interpretation. For instance, he argues about Pa negre (2010) that what mattered most to him was to avoid impregnating the film with political ideology (Villaronga 2011, quoted in El Mundo 2011). However, Pedraza’s dichotomy is unpersuasive. Villaronga’s filmic representations are not unconcerned with or ambivalent about moral-political issues: unveiling forms of immorality and violence (political/social/sexual), as well as their transversality, is at the core of his films. Consider Pa Negre, Villaronga’s most acclaimed movie: the Republican idealist (Andreu’s father) ends up as an executioner, thus uncannily resembling his fascist enemies, which are portrayed as morally and politically evil. Evil in Villaronga's cinema has a political dimension, even if it is not reducible to politics.

5 For Villaronga’s brief turn to the theater, see Gomila (2023). Like Badiou, Villaronga was interested in the political-emancipatory function of the theatre, and in its function as parrhesia (as theorized by Foucault) or, speaking truth to power. As he puts it, with reference to the adaptation of Colm Tóibín’s Clytemnestra in House of Names: A Novel, “la base de esta función es que cuestiona los poderes absolutos y analiza todos los condicionamientos de la libertad desde las estructuras de poder” (Villaronga, quoted in López 2020). This interpretation of Clytemnestra applies to Thomas in El ventre del mar as well.

6 Villaronga’s concern with iterative resonances between different historical contexts occurs in other movies as well. See, for instance, the treatment of disease and the references to AIDS in El mar (Capilla 2019). I take “iteration” from Derrida (1988) to refer to phenomena that involve at once repetition and difference (Ungureanu 2008; 2019a; 2019b).

7 It is noteworthy that Villaronga’s interest in the Indignados movement and the struggle of the dispossessed for “Democracia Real Ya” El ventre del mar is interpretable as symbolically conveying a cinematic form of populist confrontation with the powers that be (Ungureanu and Pintor 2021). This theme of people’s struggle is also evident in Villaronga’s theater (López 2020).

8 A trial ensued, yet those responsible for this tragedy were largely exonerated. Savigny eventually co-wrote a book about the ordeal and even posed for Géricault.

9 Paradoxically, Baricco’s and Villaronga’s poetic mode is, in certain ways, more “realistic”, as it recovers the colonial background of the tragedy, as will be discussed later.

10 The formal emancipation of Blacks from all French territories occurred in 1848. For a detailed and convincing criticism of Barnes’s apolitical and trivializing interpretation, see Alhadeff (2008).

11 For Villaronga on Von Trier as a source of inspiration, see Villaronga (2021).

12 Villaronga simplifies the narrative to essentialize the story. For example, while Baricco's narrative features various members of the "elite" taking center stage at different points, Villaronga condenses these roles into Doctor Savigny, who collectively embodies the authority figures.

13 Villaronga’s film moves away from his earlier neorealism toward an aesthetics that engages, in Géricault’s footsteps, with the “infinite” (Burke [1957] 1998, 101), namely the experience of incommensurable horror and beauty (a theme that will be discussed later in greater detail).

14 Zizola was on board of Argos in August and September 2015, documenting the rescue of over 3,000 migrants. The ship's name is an allusion to the nineteenth-century tragedy represented by Géricault.

15 Villaronga makes explicit the political significance through the use of filmic collage, including not only the use of footage from Zizola’s In the Same Boat, but also of images of the Nazi concentration camps and the sculptures of the activist-artist Taylor (Murray 2021). It is noteworthy that Taylor is the creator of the installation of the Museo Atlántico: the first underwater museum in Europe and the Atlantic Ocean, located off the coast of Lanzarote, roughly halfway between the southern edge of mainland Spain and Senegal, where the shipwreck took place.

16 For the use of religious imagery in Villaronga’s previous movies, see Pedraza (2007); Capilla (2019); Espinós (2019, 481).

17 In an alternative interpretation, Villaronga’s portrayal could be deemed too conservative: although Thomas's successfully rebels against the master, he ultimately opts to yield to the legal system. As Fanon emphasizes, "the colonial subject wastes no time lamenting and never seeks for justice in the colonial context" (Fanon [1961] 2005, 43). However, Villaronga's perspective on history is, in my view, thoroughly dialectical, not rooted in a belief in the Marxist revolution.