Restos de la ideología: la "idea siniestra" en la literatura de César Aira

Abstract

This article explores the function of humor in the narrative of the contemporary Argentinean writer César Aira. I focus on his novel Los dos payasos (1995), based on a circus act that performs a comical misunderstanding, a mistake in which the consistency and the rationality of language and its master lose stability. Humor highlights the fact that writing could transform itself in a dictation that reproduces and perpetuates mechanisms of domination naturalized in a certain field of languages. I use Jacques Lacan's theory to analyze the misleading gesture in which the master appropriates to himself slave's knowledge over meaning; but I also analyze a remainder that exceeds the master's appropriation enabling its partial failure. Writing becomes a possibility for reproducing structures of domination and repetition, or in the contrary, for interrupting them with a symptomatic laughter.