What a reader can in El aire

Abstract

The publication context of El aire, by Sergio Chejfec, coincides with the moment of hegemonic consolidation of neoliberalism, whose fundamental feature consists in the displacement of the precariousness from the margins that capitalism can’t integrate towards the center of society. The novel, written and published in a time that is characterized by a normalization of precariousness, produces a strangeness from normalization. Chejfec proposes an alternative reflection on the relationship between the novel as a statement and its own enunciation conditions. This reflection can be read in the positions that the protagonist assumes as a cultural consumer of different textual materials and in the distance that separates him from the possibility of a particular poetics, which in the novel is articulated in the narrator's word.