QUERER

 

"Male domination is so deeply rooted in our unconscious minds that we no longer perceive it as such." — Pierre Bourdieu 

I. The Wille without representation: Schopenhauer in the marital bed 

Arthur Schopenhauer, in his capital work The World as Will and Representation, locates in the Wille — the cosmic, irrational, insatiable will — the dark foundation of all existence. The will, for Schopenhauer, knows no reason, knows no limit, knows no other: it manifests as a blind impulse that appropriates reality without ethical mediation, without any possibility of redemption outside of total renunciation. The individual who identifies entirely with his own willing — who recognises only his own hunger, his own desire, his own necessity — becomes the unwitting instrument of a force that transcends and determines him. 

The male protagonist of Querer, Iñaki, is not a villain in the dramaturgical sense of the term. He is something more unsettling: a man who possesses no critical representation of himself. He is pure will that exerts itself, that demands, that takes — and calls it love. The horror of the series lies precisely in this: in the absence, within him, of any distance between impulse and act. Between querer and tomar. Between wanting and claiming as an acquired right. 

This blindness is not narrative fiction: it is cultural diagnosis. Iñaki is the embodiment of a symbolic system — patriarchal, bourgeois, self-perpetuating — that has never produced, for men like him, the conceptual tools necessary to interrogate their own desire. The Schopenhauerian Wille, here, is not metaphor: it is sociology. 

II. Economy as a device of subjugation 

The control that Iñaki exerts over Miren — his wife, the woman, the opposing party in the trial — does not pass solely through bodies. It passes through money. Through the bank account. Through the one thousand euros monthly allocated for family management within an economic regime in which he earns nine thousand, in which everything is registered in his name, in which she — who left her job because it was deemed an act of selfishness — does not even possess her own financial autonomy. 

This mechanism, which contemporary jurisprudence still struggles to name with sufficient precision as economic violence, constitutes one of the central axes of domination in the series. Material dependency is not merely practical: it is ontological. It redefines the subject who falls under it as a being devoid of their own will, as an entity that depends for every act — for every activity of the children, for every purchase, for every small deviation from domestic norm — on another's wanting. Miren is not merely subordinate: she is defined by subordination. It is existence as a condition of perpetual minority, imposed not by statute but by daily practice. 

Hannah Arendt would say that violence, in its most effective form, need not manifest itself: it suffices that the threat remain always present, structural, embedded in the very architecture of common life. Iñaki does not need to strike every day: he accelerates the car when asked to slow down, punches walls, disappears for days depriving the family of money, withholds speech as punishment. Terror is exercised through unpredictability — that same unpredictability which, in law, is so difficult to prove, because it leaves no visible traces, because it operates in the silence of domestic normality. 

III. The letter as legal act and as gesture of ontological reconquest 

The deposition that Miren drafts — that pitiless and necessary catalogue of violations, of coercions, of sexual acts imposed after childbirth, of gynaecological injuries on medical record, of an ignored episiotomy, of a body treated as an object of use — is one of the most powerful elements of the series not because it is sensational, but because it is banal. Because that letter could exist in thousands of homes. Because its language — precise, documentary, almost aseptic — is the only language the legal system knows how to hear, and at the same time the language most remote from what those nights truly contained. 

The law, in Querer, is represented in its structural inadequacy to contain the abyss of lived experience. Iñaki's defence constructs its strategy around a concept that the series stages with almost academic precision: the erroneous perception of consent. The husband did not rape his wife: he simply misread the signals, read silence as assent, interpreted resignation as willingness. As though the wife "hoped the other would read something illegible" — a phrase from the defence that contains, in its technical perfidy, the entire history of the power asymmetry between the sexes. 

The erroneous perception of consent is, in phenomenological terms, the structural inability to recognise the other as a subject. It is the failure of intersubjectivity. It is treating the conjugal body as a space devoid of its own intentionality, as a semantically neutral territory awaiting interpretation by the only subject who counts — the male one. 

IV. Patriarchy as a structure unconscious of itself 

The most devastating — and philosophically densest — scene in Querer is not a violence. It is a forgiveness. 

In the hospital, after an accident that forces the two former spouses to meet, Iñaki approaches Miren and tells her he forgives her everything. He forgives her everything. Him. The man who kept her prisoner for years, who exercised over her every imaginable form of domination, who is now on trial for sexual violence — he offers her his forgiveness as though it were a gift, as though it were the supreme act of magnanimity of which only he, in that relationship, would be capable. 

This scene is the generative nucleus of the series. Not because Iñaki acts in bad faith: it is, perhaps, all the more horrifying for that — he does not understand. He has never understood. He does not possess the conceptual tools to comprehend what he has done, because the value system in which he grew up, in which he constructed his own identity, does not admit the category of marital abuse. Patriarchy does not present itself as ideology: it presents itself as nature. As self-evidence. As the only possible way of being in the world. 

When Miren answers him — with a calm that is already healing, already the fruit of years of therapy and reconstruction — saying "you've already told me that," the series performs its most precise gesture. There is no scream, no drama: there is only the lucidity of a woman who has passed through the fog and now recognises the mechanisms for what they are. Repetition as revelation: he continues to use the same words, the same instruments of verbal violence, even in the attempt at reconciliation. He cannot do otherwise. He does not know how to do otherwise. 

V. The children as deferred mirror 

The next generation — Jon and his brother — embodies in Querer the complexity of traumatic inheritances. Jon, the more sensitive son, is the one who has most deeply absorbed the consequences of the paternal domestic regime: he knows the fear of the shouting, has seen his mother weep, has understood — with the silent lucidity of children who grow up in coercive environments — that something was structurally wrong. And it is significant that it is he who, in a homosexual relationship with Unai, says "stop," who withdraws when something feels wrong: as though trauma, passing through the body, had taught him to recognise the boundary of consent in the very man who had witnessed it violated. 

The other son — the one whom the screenplay characterises with the traits of comfortable bourgeoisie and unconscious privilege — follows an opposite arc: initially impervious to the accusations against his father, gradually forced by the reality of facts to revise his perspective. The moment in which he intervenes in defence of his mother against the paternal family who denigrates her is not a sentimental conversion: it is an epistemic act. It is the slow comprehension that what he had always perceived as normality had a name, and that name was abuse. 

VI. The invisible femicide and the form of the series 

Querer chooses concentration as both its aesthetic and its ethic. Four episodes, approximately two hundred and forty minutes, no narrative dilution, no melodramatic device. The series has the structure of a case file: every scene is a deposition, every dialogue is an act of inquiry, every silence is evidence. This formal sobriety is not authorial asceticism: it is respect. It is the refusal to transform pain into spectacle. 

And here a distinction must be named that contemporary reporting still struggles to make with sufficient rigour: femicides are not only those that end up in newspapers, those with a body, those with a perpetrator in handcuffs. There exist femicides that are carried out slowly, over the course of years, inside bourgeois apartments with well-equipped kitchens and well-dressed children. They are the deaths of identity, the deaths of autonomy, the deaths of one's own desire — that form of systematic annihilation that leaves no visible marks on the body but irreversibly deforms the subject who endures it. 

Querer renders them visible. It names them without rhetoric. It places them within a legal context that registers their existence while struggling to punish them. In the end, Miren loses the case — or rather, the case concludes without the hoped-for conviction — and decides to appeal. This ending is not a defeat: it is the faithful representation of a legal system that still does not possess the adequate tools to prosecute what cannot be seen, what takes place in the darkness of marriage, in the grey zone of conjugal consent that for centuries has been assumed rather than requested.
Philippe — the man in Un amour impossible — gives Rachel Thus Spoke Zarathustra and Beyond Good and Evil as the first books they read together. The choice is not incidental: it is the will to power presenting itself in the guise of education, legitimising its own dominion through culture rather than through shouting. Iñaki never cites Nietzsche, but he practises the same logic: everything is owed to him, the other person does not exist as an autonomous subject, the woman is a space that waits to be interpreted. The intellectual narcissism of Philippe and the bourgeois blindness of Iñaki are two inflections of the same Wille — one conceals it behind books, the other behind domestic normality. The result for the women is identical.

The will that does not question itself 

Querer is, in the last instance, a meditation on the will that never turns upon itself. On the will that does not question itself, that knows no doubt, that exerts itself as a given of nature and calls itself love, calls itself family, calls itself normality. It is the most radical critique of the Schopenhauerian instance of the Wille in its culturally codified form: for whereas Schopenhauer invoked ascetic renunciation as a way out of the tyranny of willing, the series shows us that the problem is not desire in itself — it is desire that does not recognise the subjecthood of the other as an inviolable ethical limit. 

Miren, in the end, does not seek to destroy Iñaki. She only wants him to leave her be, and perhaps — perhaps — to understand. It is an impossible demand, as the series demonstrates with harrowing lucidity — because understanding would require dismantling the entire identitary architecture upon which he has built his existence. It would require an ontological crisis he is not equipped to sustain. 

And so the series closes — not with an answer, but with a posture. Miren puts on makeup, goes out, embraces the son who invites her to the grandchild's birthday. He says something to her. She answers: "I know." 

Two words that contain an entire history of self-reconquest. Two words that are, perhaps, the most sober and most truthful form of justice this story could afford itself. 

The series Querer is available on streaming. It lasts as long as a hearing. It weighs as much as a life. 

"No woman should be so dependent on a man that she forgets she is a person." — Simone de Beauvoir