Significant Violence focuses on five works by one of Spain's most important writers, Juan Goytisolo. Swinging between nihilism and utopianism, Goytisolo presents writing as incendiary, even revolutionary. Revolution is here a movement of destruction and liberation, textual, sexual, and political: a movement of the word, the body, and the world.

But it is also a highly problematic movement, tending to cut the word from the world, to celebrate only the masculine body, and to reinstate the very oppression that is its object of critique.

Drawing from a range of theoretical materials, Significant Violence examines the complicated turns of Goytisolo's writing and pays special attention to such issues as the crisis of representational language; sexual politics; Western constructions of Otherness; terrorism, anarchy, violence, and the critique of ideology.

It contributes to the ongoing revision of Hispanism by opening up Goytisolo's texts to discussions of gender, sexual orientation, race, religion, and nationalism; and the relations between aesthetics, ethics, politics, and criticism itself.