The carnivalization of the world as criticism: laughter, political action and subjectivity in social life and speech

Abstract

Taking the notion of carnival as developed by Mijail Bakhtin as starting point, in this text I evaluate the possibility of vindicating a carnivalization of the world as a practice of social resistance and transformation in the face of the hegemony of an established dialogicity or a dominant, institutionalized discourse. I analyze the resource of parody and the exercise of subversion of the official –solemn– text, as well as the collective insertion of laughter, as means of inaugurating an alternate, or “second”, existence through which any identitary congruence linked to the reiteration of a discursive regime associated with power relations is contradicted. Thus, I conceive of carnivalization as a milieu generator of specific forms of language and communication that, availing itself of grotesque corporality and masking as well, contravene established patterns of functional, ordered conduct, thereby opening a path that leads to other practices of freedom and the production of subjectivity.