Utopías carnavalescas. Políticas de lo imposible

Abstract

Carnival is a ritual shot through with profanations that, beyond the calendars and ritual spaces, the games, masks, dances and anti-establishment disguises, it makes use of the grotesque aesthetic as a means of invoking subversion at any time and place. If utopia is the impossible insofar as it is the horizon-yet-to-come, the carnivalesque irruption is what allows us to find its anchor, that festivity where the radically other, the ineffable, finds its port, ephemeral arcadia where antagonism and concrete negativity appear as the condition and rehearsal of what has never been. Popular and rebellious, the carnivalesque grotesque expands the spaces of freedom. This paper is a tour of the indigenous carnivals of different regions, but also drinks in the carnivalesque expressions present in the popular anti-establishment mobilizations, seeking to reveal the microphysics of carnivalesque irreverence as an emancipatory tool at the hand of all rebels who make the impossible their vocation and reason for being.