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Cruelty is idealistic, because it strives for a promise of accomplishment and totality, and it is also compulsive, as it becomes a ‘sustaining fantasy’, supporting the continuous return to a scene of desire through the unwarranted suggestion that this time around satisfaction will be attained. The scene of seduction, more, in fact, than the scene of atrocity - or even as structuring the very scene of atrocity – connotes the work of cruelty as a striving, unaccomplished, and yet idealistic relation between the desiring subject and her object/victim. Looking back to Mozart and Da Ponte’s Don Giovanni’s perverse and contradictory compulsion to repeat , the talk will follow a wider discussion of cruel seduction in contemporary Portuguese filmic production, most specifically that which deals with the memorialization of colonialism, such as Miguel Gomes’ Tabu.

Isabel Capeloa Gil is a Full-Professor of Culture Studies and the current Rector of Universidade Católica Portuguesa. For further details of her biography, please see the attached webpage.