Me veo a mi mismo leyendo: Ricardo Piglia’s Aesthetic Education in Los diarios de Emilio Renzi

Abstract

This article examines Ricardo Piglia’s relationship to the literary field as an aesthetic education that emerges from the encounter between his field-shaping poetics and its reflection among critics, or critical mimesis. Piglia’s field poetics are exemplified by the disjunctive “I” that narrates the diaries, the misattribution of their authorship to Piglia’s longtime alter ego Emilio Renzi, and a constant representation of acts of self-observation. The architecture of the diaristic subject is wedded to its institutional inscription; that is, the form of this subject is the communion of readers and writers in the autobiographical and autofictive genres. Similarly, material inscription not only reflects Piglia Renzi’s life to others; it transforms self-reflection into second-order observation by turning the writer into a reader of his own life-become-text. Raised in this way to the second degree, the diaries exemplify Piglia’s poetics by engaging readers in the form of a conspiracy. This is the political lesson of our Piglian aesthetic education: a willingness to challenge the reality of reality and build alternatives in a community of co-conspirators convened by the author’s work.