Some time ago I spoke with the writer Elisenda Solsona about a shared sensation: the dissociation that we writers sometimes have when we read our own text written some time ago. It is a strange sensation because you know you wrote it, but you don't recognize yourself in it, as if someone else had written it. This dissociation also appears when a reader talks to you about a book or article, or discovers an intention that you don't remember, or that you weren't aware of having put there.This week I read Intermezzo, Sally Rooney's latest novel. The Catalan edition by Periscopi (translated by Ferran Ràfols) includes several laudatory reviews of the work and the author. Although I really enjoyed the book, reading them I felt the dissociation again, as if I had read one book and they had read another. Zadie Smith, one of the authors on the list, describes it well: few imitators come close to Rooney's level, and even fewer critics understand what is really going on in her novels. I wonder if Rooney experiences this amplified dissociation: thousands of readers constructing a book that doesn't quite resemble what she has in mind.In 1981, the French artist Sophie Calle created the work La filature. Calle asked her mother to hire a private detective to follow her for a whole day. She, meanwhile, wrote a diary with all her impressions of the day. When she put together the detective's photos and observations with her own material, she was struck by the discrepancy between the external gaze and the intimate experience. Calle wondered who we are and how these two experiences fit into our own identity. Those of us who write, perhaps, do this tracking but in reverse: we leave traces so that someone (a reader or ourselves in the future) can follow us and return a version of ourselves that we no longer recognize.Dissociation, problem or opportunity?

The British philosopher Derek Parfit argued that personal identity is not absolute but a matter of degrees: we are not the same person we were, but someone connected to that person, more or less depending on how much we have changed. The regeneration of body cells would accompany this idea: skin, bones, or blood are continuously renewed, but most neurons accompany us throughout life. So the brain that thought that text remains the same, but the body that wrote it, does not. Perhaps it is the condition of all published writing, and dissociation is not a problem but an opportunity for encounter. The text is the place where two readers coincide without having read quite the same book, and where writers greet a past self, a body that no longer exists, from the other side of time. Perhaps writing consists precisely in this: accepting that our identity always ends up in the hands of someone else, even when that someone is ourselves.

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A few weeks ago, Sally Rooney expressed in theIrish Times her support for Palestine Action, declared a terrorist group in the United Kingdom, and announced that, from then on, she would allocate the royalties from her books and audiovisual derivatives to finance the pro-Palestinian direct action network. A few days later, the Global Sumud Flotilla set sail for Gaza, led by icons such as Greta Thunberg and Ada Colau, along with activists, musicians, doctors... Likewise, at the Venice Film Festival, writer Annie Ernaux and filmmaker Céline Sciamma read a statement denouncing the "worst genius."

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