The morphology of desires: a semiotic and psychoanalytic interpretation of Alan Pauls’ “The 70’s trilogy”

Abstract

This article proposes an interpretation to “Trilogy of the 70s”, composed of Historia del llanto (2007), Historia del pelo (2010), and Historia del dinero (2013) by the Argentine writer Alan Pauls, situated at the intersection of semiotics, psychoanalysis, and literature. These three everyday elements (tears, hair, and money) reveal the politics of the symbolic that facilitate the conventional process of signification. Revolving around a structural deficit, the social discourses in the 1970s feed on fantastic representations and endow everyday objects with a phantasmagorical transcendence in order to present them as objects of desire. This paper aims to explain how a gestalt structure is unraveled by author to reclaim a corporeal autonomy which is pre-discursive and impossible to pinpoint with language. Based on the lacanian real, two strategies (excess and dissociation) come into play to detach the subject from the ymbolic logic that hides its volatile and irrational essence under a neutral and infallible appearance.