Keys to reading Camila Sosa Villada's new book, a work that problematizes desire and identity.

The first line of The Betrayal of My Tongue (Tusquets) by Camila Sosa Villada says: “My desire is not original, it's ordinary, it surprises no one. May my writing continue in ellipsis.” This link between desire and writing , evident from the beginning of the text, demonstrates the tone of a book without genre, or at least one that moves between a diversity of registers: essayistic, fictional, autobiographical.

However, the author of Las malas and Tesis sobre una domesticación has declared that desire is a problem and that it would be better to stop desiring, so that her latest work is not so much a desiring writing as a writing that problematizes desire and its adjacencies: eroticism, sexuality, affectivity.

In this irreducible character, the anomalous way in which the voice we read here escapes is played out, reminiscent of Marguerite Duras, but also of the writings of the limit or the outside that Michel Foucault described in his magnificent “Preface to Transgression,” inspired by Maurice Blanchot and Georges Bataille due to their proximity to the murmuring of the unspeakable , which is always the same: finitude, disappearance, the other. Sosa Villada: “My pleasure is having death breathe down my neck. Perhaps that is eroticism: approaching death and not dying.”

The libidinal knows no plots but enclaves in the body , hence the author from Cordoba points out: “The radioactive, unstable, invincible energy of the ass that taught you more than any teacher in your life.”

The proximity to Bataille's The Solar Anus or Paul B. Preciado's Anal Terror is suggestive. There are continuities in all cases, since the anus is the anti-identity organ par excellence . The anus has no gender, it is degenerate, it has no use, it hides in the darkness of waste.

While it is true that there may be anal politics, there are no anal identity politics precisely because the force of this opening breaks all binary limits , all separation, and nullifies all reassuring devices.

Like the writing of The Betrayal of My Tongue, anal potency knows no clear boundaries. That's why Camila, from her transvestite (non-trans) conception, positions herself as a clear critique of identity when she states: "I recently decided that identity was nothing. That identity was a prison. In the end, identity was only a consolation. I accepted that what mattered was the experience (…) It was the experience that shaped the transvestite."

The experience of identity is another way of stating that we are traversed by mobile, fleeting processes, by relationships with other bodies that show the extent to which closed and crystallized identity is an illusion, a chimera.

In times when everything seems to be a perpetual game of identities (political or sexual) in opposing trenches, Camila's counter-current stance is a breath of fresh air. In other words, beneath the security of the ghetto, tectonic plates are shifting.

There is much of the notion of desire as production according to Deleuze and Guattari in Sosa Villada's position, that place where everything is left over, not where something is always missing . Against the hegemony of desire read as lack, deficiency or dissatisfaction, characteristic of the psi monopoly, which does nothing but reassure itself time and again from the identity shield (hetero, homo, bi, trans, etc.), the author maintains, contrary to experience, that is, the event or the agency that modulates us and that reveals the naivety of watertight compartments: to each minority a box.

In this sense, it is inevitable not to read The Betrayal of My Language in tune with the literary project of Néstor Perlongher , who also made a fierce critique of gay identity in favor of a conception focused on the creation of experiences that destroy solipsistic categories.

The River Plate Perlongherian reception of Deleuze's thought has a contemporary tributary in the literature of Sosa Villada. Perhaps echoes of Copi's narrative can also be found: the delirious camp war in the stories of queers against paranoid authority.

So, as the author says, “to write is to betray.” A betrayal of the demand for muteness, silence, and silence, but also a betrayal of identity and desire. Writing and transvestism are forms of artifice, of disguise, of the “dirty,” insofar as they imply miscegenation and contamination; there is no purity whatsoever. Camila says: “I am an emancipated whore.”

This perhaps reveals the most appropriate characterization of female freedom, which does not ask permission, which pays the price of writing whatever it pleases, even if the readers are not the same, or are fewer.

The Betrayal of My Language is the book of a “comechona geisha,” as its author defines herself, who offers in a rough and beautiful way the seams of the disguise that is language , which is perhaps “possibly the first disguise.”

A magnetic writing that makes any attempt at classification or taxonomy look ridiculous. Camila Sosa Villada's transvestite experience necessitated this extraordinary book.

The betrayal of my tongue , by Camila Sosa Villada (Tusquets).