Resumen de On literary bullshit: discursive wrongdoing and modernity in Fray Gerundio de Campazas
José Francisco Isla’s Fray Gerundio de Campazas is one of the first and most complete accounts of the insidious omnipresence of bullshit in modern culture. Drawing on recent debates on bullshit as well as ordinary language philosophy, this paper conceives of bullshit as both a language game and a form of life. Bullshitting alters linguistic exchanges, moral standards and social relations in decisive and unsettling ways. Relating bullshit to ignorance, self-interest, the bewitchment of language and the individual’s emancipation from authority, Fray Gerundio warns us of the dangers lurking behind bullshit by uncovering its condition of possibility, its lexicon, its grammar and its pragmatics. Isla denounces the problems that arise when words are taken out of their ordinary context. In its final chapter, Fray Gerundio playfully acknowledges itself to be an instance of bullshit, thereby hinting at a crucial dimension of this phenomenon, namely the points of overlap between fiction and bullshit. Ultimately, this paper hopes to shed new light on bullshit as well as on Fray Gerundio by treating this novel as a lesson in moral philosophy that relates to present concerns about the pervasiveness of dishonesty, concealment and deceit in personal relations as well as public discourse and institutions.
