ABSTRACT
Since the last decade of the fifteenth century, a blossoming printing press helped create an unpreceded spread of lay literacy giving rise to an expanding body of readers avid to engage silently with entertaining imaginative prose. In this context, stories increasingly sought to encapsulate human subjectivity, which translated into an increase in the representation of violence and eroticism, the crux where feelings of abjection converge. In this movement toward abjection resides the key for understanding textual pleasure as we experience it, as well as the immediate success of Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina. In a break with the literary tradition that precedes it, which highlighted meditation, moral consolation, and ethical reading, Fernando de Rojas’s Celestina is strategically built upon the materiality and sensual potential of language. By underscoring the Christian and didactic content of the work in its paratexts and juxtaposing this message with the violent force of desire, Celestina captures and conveys the disquieting emotions that the self and the symbolic system that it inhabits abandoned in order to exist. Confronted with a shadow of abjection, the reading subject experiences a rupture and horror, the two emotions that classical and modern philosophers associate with catharsis and Greek drama. In this way, the book came to satisfy a craving for textual pleasure, which is deeply connected to foreclosed desires and anxieties.
