Sim sala segno. Semiotica dello spettacolo magico fra sospensione dell’incredulità e dispositivi della censura

The illusionist enunciates his texts on the basis of calibrated exercises in self-censorship. He is above all an actor performing a narrative plot and, as such, embodies a dual agency divided between what is concealed – that is, the action really executed for the realisation of the trick – and what is revealed – the moment of conjury effected through the staging of appearance disguised as being. On the level of cultural semiotics this scheme, fruitfully related to Greimas' square of veridiction, persists from semiosphere to semiosphere, in space and time. Whether it be prestidigitation, escapology, mentalism or card manipulation through sleight of hand, the magician conceals in order to reveal. The objective of this paper is to investigate the semiotic mechanisms underpinning this relationship of significant complementarity between self-censorship and mise-en-scène shared, what's more, by both the main currents of magic identified in the anthropology of magic: teleological sorcerers, those who give their magic a “pseudo-scientific” value designed to explain (or act upon) otherwise inexplicable cause-effect relationships, and the fairy-tale magicians who create textuality in order to entertain. This dichotomy is enriched by the presence of figures inserted in a domain of otherness, able to overturn the popular imaginary by means of extra-physical marvels, but which concern rather different semiospheres. In the present case the entertainment illusionists insert themselves in the semiosphere of show-business, in cultural topologies endowed with marked contexts of limelight and backstage, where they perpetrate their conjuring by collocating themselves in the liminal interstice which is the space of self-censorship, the place where the success of the trick is decided. Finally, but equally important, the magician is catharctically conceded the possibility of crossing the frontier towards areas of culture commonly associated with zones of censorship: he dialogues with death, penetrates minds, dissects bodies.