Lacanian realism: <i>Literatura de la crisis</i> and Ángel Zapata's aesthetic of failure

Abstract Since Spain's socio‐economic crisis of the 2010s, critical approaches have analysed the surge in literature which addresses the crisis's political and socio‐economic consequences. These approaches have largely assessed literature by its capacity to raise readers' awareness of capitalist exploitation. However, if we follow Slavoj Žižek's claim that capitalist ideology operates not by hiding its exploitation process but by cynically disavowing it, this raises the question: how can the role of literature be to raise readers' awareness if they are already cynically aware of capitalist exploitation? To explore whether this question of cynicism is applicable to Spanish politics and literature, I contend that Ángel Zapata's book Luz de tormenta (2018) proposes an aesthetic experience in which no awareness is raised. Rather, following a Lacanian theory of subjectivity, I argue that through Zapata's book readers experience subjectivity as inherently lacking, thereby interrupting the process by which capitalism perpetuates itself (its promise to fill that lack).