A Philosopher in El bazar de Ramón Gómez de la Serna

Abstract

This is a critical approach to the book's author's analysis of Ramón Gómez de la Serna's anticipations to key considerations and proposals in twentieth-century culture. Marinas deals with philosophical, aesthetic, social and commercial views that Gómez de la Serna was able to foresee with lucidity and literary intuition. Urban, linguistic, avant-garde and psychoanalytic views in which Walter Benjamin, Roland Barthes, Freud or Lacan appear. The idea of the bazaar as an allegorical setting where the spectacle of consumer fetishism is produced is first discussed. Later, the treatment of the self as an incorporation into that same bazaar of fragments of the unconscious, also pointed out by Gómez de la Serna. In general, it is stressed the precise stylistic and conceptual interpretation made by Marinas of the aforementioned findings and procedures.