An X-ray of ‘I Love Dick,’ the book of feminine sexual desire that has fascinated Rosalía (and generations of women before her)

“Being in love with you, being ready to take this ride, made me feel 16, hunched up in a leather jacket in a corner with my friends. A timeless fucking image. It’s about not giving a fuck, or seeing all the consequences looming and doing something anyway.” So goes an excerpt from I Love Dick, the novel which recently led Rosalía to appear on Instagram, reading it aloud.

Every so often, Chris Kraus’s iconic novel seems to take on new life. Ridiculed and reduced to a literary scandal when it was originally published in 1997, it took nearly 10 years to sell out its first edition. It wasn’t until much later when Semiotext(e) — one of the most influential independent editorials in the United States, at which the author still works as an editor — published another edition in 2006. It was at this moment that a younger generation discovered and adopted the book as a symbol of feminism. It was also turned into an entertaining television series directed by Joey Soloway (which is available on Amazon Prime) and published in Spanish less than a year ago by Alpha Decay. Its family of readers continues to grow, from writer Gabriela Wiener (who wrote an intriguing prologue for its recent Spanish edition) to filmmaker Lena Dunham and the aforementioned superstar singer from Catalonia.

When I Love Dick first came out, it was seen as a thinly veiled retelling of Kraus’s obsession with British sociologist and cultural critic Dick Hebdige (author of such books as Subculture: The Meaning of Style). The novel tells the tale of the author’s infatuation with the charismatic theorist in the mid-1990s. She and her then-husband, renowned university professor Sylvère Lotringer, begin a correspondence between the two of them that freely imagines a romance between her and Hebdige, and Kraus decides to pursue the object of her desire across the United States.

If the Kraus character’s biographical information in the novel are those of the author herself in the moment she wrote the book (only certain details were changed about Hebdige before publishing, in order to protect him), it becomes evident that her goal goes beyond that of the purely personal, as the writer herself argues throughout the text. It is as Annie Ernaux says, regarding her lover in Simple Passion: it’s not a book about “him”, or even her. “She uses Dick for discourse. She uses Dick for liberation. She uses Dick for revenge. She uses Dick to construct theory. And beauty. And what this serves to denounce is abundant,” writes Wiener in her prologue.

A few decades had to pass before the debate no longer centered on Dick, but rather all that this “Dick” represents and unleashes. In the revealing title of I Love Dick, the “I” of the author displaces the “Dick” as the dominant term, and he becomes simply a motive for her to find her own voice, to in reality, write about herself. “I guess in a sense I’ve killed you. You’ve become Dear Diary,” writes the author in a passage from the book.

Just like her character, during the era in which she wrote the novel, Kraus was a frustrated artist on the brink of turning 40, struggling to find a distributor for her film in New York. Gravity and Grace (the movie inspired by the work of Simone Weil that is continuously mentioned in the book) was her last attempt at making movies and was rejected several times by noted international festivals like the Berlinale. Kraus was truly overwhelmed by being the partner of Lotringer, a well-known cultural theorist and Columbia University professor. She felt invisible in the circles of intellectuals with whom they spent their time. Also an editor at the publishing company that had been founded by Lotringer, Kraus wanted to do something on her own, which is which she decided to accept an offer from a friend to become a teacher at the Pasadena Art Center and move to Los Angeles. But soon before she did, one night in December 1994, Kraus and her husband dined with one of his colleagues, Hebdige. And here is where Kraus’s novel begins.

Beyond the book’s correspondence, which is suspended between reality and fiction (as Joan Hawkins writes in the epilogue of Alpha Decay’s latest edition, it is difficult to know if certain things that Kraus relates actually took place), its truly revolutionary aspect is how the author utilizes Dick in the search for “I” and how this performative “I” becomes the universal subject. Ultimately, what Kraus relates in the book has nearly nothing to do with Dick, and it is of little importance that he responds or does not respond to the letters that she sends him. He is simply a vehicle for something that is able to transcend the individual. First and foremost, I Love Dick is a novel about so-called female empowerment (as trendy as the term may seem), about a woman who, beyond attempting to find her life’s meaning, decides to create that meaning. Kraus uses Dick to break with order — social, literary and academic — and speak freely of the experience of desire, love, sex, female abjection, her tie to madness, and the relationship of all this with power, writing and the capacity to transform.

Translation by Caitlin Donohue.

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