Cuerpos marginados como territorio de lo fantástico en Pichis de Martín Lasalt

Abstract

The article presents a possible reading of the short novel Pichis by Martín Lasalt, centered on the plastic and critical potentiality of the marginalized body of the “pichi” as an invisibilized character in consumer society. The borderline position these bodies are bound to occupy is problematized within the urban diagram at a physical level and within the diagram of social interaction. The marginal place acquires significance as a space of flight, of new possibilities that transcend and defy the biological laws of these bodies and from that position denounce the frivolities of an excluding social hegemony. The condemnation to a “noplace” inside the social scheme becomes a line of flight at the level of affectivity and potentiality of the body in shape, movement and interaction with an another. Life in constant risk and the tension of the socio-economically marginalized body, also tense the conventions of “reality”, in the blind spots of the hegemonic view they nest, from an impossible. For this reading the focus is placed in the connection between physical exclusion through “hostile architecture” policies and the exclusion of the mode of existence through the dichotomy reality-unreality: the body-pichi, as a marginalized body, becomes a fertile ground for the fantastic development that from the frontier, defies and tenses the conventions of reality.