Pleasure Against Ideology in Gabriel Ferrater

This paper examines the works of Catalan poet Gabriel Ferrater (1922–1972) in relation to the economy of dilapidation that traverses his poetry, which is mostly devoted to his experiences of love and sex. I analyze the poetization of these experiences as an attempt to find a nonideological space that escaped the reality of Francoism, or, in Freudian terms, as an embrace of the pleasure principle against the reality principle that structured Ferrater’s historical situation. I relate these poetics, and politics, of “pleasure against ideology” to the Barcelona School, particularly to Jaime Gil de Biedma and Carlos Barral. But the facts that, unlike these two poets, Ferrater wrote in Catalan and his family went bankrupt after the Civil War make his “dilapidating enterprise” more distressing but also more significant. Finally, I interpret Ferrater’s abandonment of poetry in the late 1960s as a sign that the pursuit of pleasure had lost its subversive content and was now channeled into mass consumerism.