A sort of enchanted calm.Praxis of estrangement and poetic transcendence(Walking along the «Rastro» with Gómez de la Serna)

Abstract

This article aims to look into the practice of estrangement that Gómez de la Serna carries out in The madrilenian Flea-Market (El Rastro, 1914), practice that will be essential in order to understand one of the key vectors of the (subsequent) surrealistic Objectology. Such practice involves at least eight practices or possibilities of undoing that concern the Limit (which discriminates and organizes into a hierarchy), the Future (ingenuous and dictatorial), the bourgeois familiarity of home (which imprisons and causes drowsiness), the useful functionality (which trivialises), the false ideality (of prestiges of the city), the property (of our things), to oneself (practice of release) and the text itself. These practices constitute a massive although serene estrangement, with a clear projection of poetical, existential and metaphysical transcendency.