Anne Carson, winner of the 2026 Nobel Prize in Literature, published an essay on the artist Rosalía in the London Review of Books on September 10. The poet was captivated by the LUX concert in Chicago, which she was able to attend. The text begins with the phrase “I have a Rosalía hangover.” We find several powerful statements in the text, in true Carson style, including: “Unlike Björk, who vanishes from femininity by delving into other species, Rosalía sinks deeper into the feminine itself, piercing it downward”^[1].

We could say, to paraphrase Lacan, that Rosalía does not retreat from femininity^[2].

What strikes the Nobel Prize winner is not so much religion and its explicit references in the aesthetics of the LUX tour—despite the fact that Rosalía has shown a certain mysticism, having walked the Camino de Santiago herself and written a book about that experience. What intrigues Carson about this unparalleled concert is La Rosalía as a vocal object. This object is central to the artist’s libidinal economy, as evidenced by her essay The Gender of Sound, in which she revisits ideas from ancient Greece where women’s high-pitched and loud voices were associated with evil and excess, in contrast to men’s voices, which were thicker and deeper:

“It is largely by sounds that we judge people as sane or insane, men or women, good, evil, trustworthy, depressed, nubile, dying, prone or not prone to causing us conflict; a little better than animals, beings created by God”^[3].

Of Rosalía’s voice, she would say: “That voice can do anything”^[4], and she describes it as a “silver arrow” that shoots through the surrounding clamor (an arrow we already encountered in the poems of Saint Teresa of Ávila when she narrated her mystical ecstasy). The audience’s excessive screams did not leave her indifferent either: “With every breath, the entire audience screamed as if she were running her fingernail down each person’s spine.” This would place the singer’s voice on the side of the real, one that touches the body. It’s also interesting that she refers to fingernails, La Rosalía’s trademake. Furthermore, a few months ago, Rosalía paid tribute to the author in The Paris Review by reading an excerpt from the poem ‘Salon’, about an everyday situation in which a woman is getting her nails done at a beauty salon. Her taste for the insignificant and the real aspects of existence permeates Carson’s entire body of work. When she received the call announcing that she had won the Nobel Prize, she replied, “I’m in Iceland, listening to the wind.” The wind — the total absence of the voice-object at the very moment when the Big Other comes to sublimate its artistic creation. We can say, with Lacan, that the artist becomes aware “of being inside an object, because she has already regained this object through her art”^[5].

* Psychoanalyst member of WAP and ELP. Practices psychoanalysis in Paris

^[1]  https://elpais.com/cultura/2026-09-04/tengo-resaca-de-rosalia-la-poeta-anne-carson-analiza-un-concierto-de-la-artista-global-espanola.html

^[2]  Lacan said in 1977 that psychosis is that from which an analyst must never retreat under any circumstances.

^[3]  https://periodicodepoesia.unam.mx/texto/el-genero-del-sonido/

^[4] https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n16/anne-carson/on-rosalia

^[5]  Lacan J., (1965) : Hommage fait à Marguerite Duras, du ravissement de Lol V. Stein, Autres Écrits, p. 195.