Seeing Politics Otherwise: Vision in Latin American and Iberian Fiction 9781442695283

Table of contents :
Contents
Acknowledgments
Introduction: Shadows of Vision
1 At the Blink of an Eye: Vision, Ethics, and Politics
1.1 Vision and Blindness in Greco-Roman Mythology
1.2 The Greek Philosophy of Light and Darkness: Parmenides and Plato
1.3 Judaeo-Christian Representations of God: The Question of the Image and the Excess of Brightness
1.4 Dark Spots in the Sun: Viewing the Enlightenment Project
1.5 Twentieth-Century Fragments of Vision in Ruins
2 Darkness and the Animal in Graciliano Ramos’s Memórias do Cárcere (Memoirs of Prison)
2.1 Darkness in a State of Emergency
2.2 The Ghost of the Animal
2.3 Autobiographical Twilight
3 Twists of the Blindfold in Art, Fiction, and Film
3.1 Blindfolds, Hoods, and the Exercise of Power in the Art of Ana Maria Pacheco
3.2 Torture and Sociality in Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden
3.3 Filming the Blindfold: Garaje Olimpo (Garage Olimpo) and O que é isso Companheiro? (Four Days in September)
4 The Reason of Vision: Variations on Subjectivity in José Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Blindness)
4.1 The Reason of Blindness
4.2 Becoming Blind, Becoming a Subject
4.3 Collective Vision
Conclusion Readings in the Dark: Shades of Criticism
Notes
Works Cited
Index
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D
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Citation preview

SEEING POLITICS OTHERWISE: VISION IN LATIN AMERICAN AND IBERIAN FICTION

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PATRÍCIA VIEIRA

Seeing Politics Otherwise Vision in Latin American and Iberian Fiction

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS Toronto Buffalo London

© University of Toronto Press Incorporated 2011 Toronto Buffalo London www.utppublishing.com Printed in Canada ISBN 978-1-4426-4299-7 (cloth)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper with vegetable-based inks.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication Vieira, Patricia, 1977– Seeing politics otherwise : vision in Latin American and Iberian fiction / Patricia Vieira. (University of Toronto romance series) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-1-4426-4299-7 1. Latin American fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. 2. Portuguese fiction – 20th century – History and criticism. 3. Latin American literature – Political aspects. 4. Portuguese literature – Political aspects. 5. Motion pictures – Political aspects – Latin America. 6. Art – Political aspects – Latin America. 7. Blindness in literature. 8. Political violence in literature. 9. Blindness in motion pictures. 10. Political violence in motion pictures. I. Title. II. Series: University of Toronto romance series PQ9108.V53 2011

869.3⬘4209358

C2011-900145-4

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for its publishing activities.

For Michael

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Contents

Acknowledgments

ix

Introduction: Shadows of Vision

3

1 At the Blink of an Eye: Vision, Ethics, and Politics

8

1.1 Vision and Blindness in Greco-Roman Mythology 9 1.2 The Greek Philosophy of Light and Darkness: Parmenides and Plato 13 1.3 Judaeo-Christian Representations of God: The Question of the Image and the Excess of Brightness 19 1.4 Dark Spots in the Sun: Viewing the Enlightenment Project 23 1.5 Twentieth-Century Fragments of Vision in Ruins 27 2 Darkness and the Animal in Graciliano Ramos’s Memórias do Cárcere (Memoirs of Prison) 40 2.1 Darkness in a State of Emergency 2.2 The Ghost of the Animal 50 2.3 Autobiographical Twilight 58

40

3 Twists of the Blindfold in Art, Fiction, and Film 65 3.1 Blindfolds, Hoods, and the Exercise of Power in the Art of Ana Maria Pacheco 67

viii

Contents

3.2 Torture and Sociality in Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden 78 3.3 Filming the Blindfold: Garaje Olimpo (Garage Olimpo) and O que é isso Companheiro? (Four Days in September) 93 4 The Reason of Vision: Variations on Subjectivity in José Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Blindness) 98 4.1 The Reason of Blindness 98 4.2 Becoming Blind, Becoming a Subject 4.3 Collective Vision 116

105

Conclusion Readings in the Dark: Shades of Criticism 125

Notes 137 Works Cited 177 Index 191

Acknowledgments

This book would not have been possible without the support of Professors Joaquim-Francisco Coelho, Doris Sommer, and Nicolau Sevcenko, who have commented on the various drafts of the study. I would also like to thank the faculty and students of the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard University, with whom I have discussed my work at various stages, as well as my colleagues at the Department of Spanish and Portuguese of Georgetown University, who have supported me in the final steps of the project. In particular, I would like to thank Vivaldo Santos and Alfonso MoralesFront for their constant encouragement of my scholarly activity. The research for this book was greatly aided by the generous support of the Fundação para a Ciência e a Tecnologia, the Fundação Gulbenkian, and Harvard University, as well as by the travel grants made available by the Lemann Fund, the Department of Romance Languages and Literatures at Harvard, the Nancy Clark Smith Fund, and the Graduate Student Council of Harvard University. I am also grateful to the David Rockefeller Center for Latin American Studies at Harvard University, as well as the staff of the center’s branch in São Paulo, who went out of their way to help me in my research stay in the city, and the staff of the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros from the University of São Paulo. Likewise, the continued engagement of my editor at the University of Toronto Press, Richard Ratzlaff, in this project is greatly appreciated. The publication of this book was made possible by a publication grant from the Graduate School of Arts and Sciences of Georgetown University. The insightful comments and suggestions of Pedro Serra and Yêdda Dias Lima have contributed to shaping various sections of the text. I would like to thank my colleague Héctor Campos from George-

x Acknowledgments

town for his invaluable suggestions regarding the Greek terms in the book. I bear a debt of gratitude to my family for the support they have offered and continue to offer me. Finally, I dedicate this book to my husband, Michael Marder, a permanent source of knowledge and inspiration.

SEEING POLITICS OTHERWISE: VISION IN LATIN AMERICAN AND IBERIAN FICTION

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Introduction: Shadows of Vision

Abre-me sonho Para a loucura a tenebrosa porta, Que a treva é menos negra que esta luz. Fernando Pessoa, Fausto1

Blindness runs like an invisible thread through many twentieth-century Latin American and Iberian literary and cultural creations thematizing political violence.2 This is, perhaps, not surprising, given that the waves of aggression perpetrated against dissidents by the dictatorial regime of Francisco Franco in Spain (1939–75), the Estado Novo in Portugal (1933–74) and in Brazil (1937–45), and the military dictatorships in Brazil (1964–85), Chile (1973–90), and Argentina (1976–83), to name but a few, led many of those who lived through the periods in question to experience them as ‘dark times.’ The metaphorical darkness of the situation was paralleled by the literal blindness of countless political prisoners who were often blindfolded, held in solitary confinement, and tortured. Nevertheless, the blindness featured in the works of art that responded, either contemporaneously or in retrospect, to these veritable states of emergency was not a phenomenon with purely negative features. In addition to its undeniably debilitating character, lack of vision was often conceived as an empowering condition: as a locus of resistance to violence, as a site of ethical and political reflection, or as the last refuge for the psychic interiority of the victim. If the ability to see were to be regained after the end of the historical nightmares, then blindness would be entrusted with the task of reconstituting a vision

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Seeing Politics Otherwise

that would no longer yearn for absolute visibility, but would welcome shadows and obscurity in its midst. A consideration of the positive connotations of blindness in literature, art, and film, or, at least, of its ambiguous nature, is, at the same time, a rejoinder to the theological, philosophical, and political traditions of the West, where heliocentric discourses have been predominant. Despite their reliance on obscurity and secrecy, twentieth-century dictatorships may be construed as the crowning moments of this heliocentric tendency, since their opaqueness is the underside of a desire for the sheer transparency of the social body, for a totalitarian, all-encompassing vision capable of penetrating even the darkest recesses of the citizens’ souls. Dictatorial regimes, thus, attempted to recapture the status of the European absolutist monarchs, who also claimed full control over society. But in order to do so, they had to compensate for the loss of legitimation of the political order that previously hinged upon a direct link between the institution of kingship and God. By reserving for themselves the asymmetrical right to see without being seen, dictatorships imitated the omnipotence of divinity, thus becoming a secular, earthly replacement for the former theological deity, a condition that substantiated their claim to unlimited power.3 From the perspective of the oppressive ideology enthralled with vision, the blindness of the victims concretely expresses their disempowerment, so that even their bodies are stripped of their minimal capacities. Yet, as an alternative narrative would intimate, lack of sight may be re-coded by those who are thrown into darkness in terms of an ‘enabling violation,’ in the words of Gayatri Spivak. Not only do dissidents counteract the secrecy of dictatorships with an equally clandestine political activity of the underground, but also, based on such experiences, they fashion themselves otherwise. Even where blindness stands for the dismemberment of a past mold of subjectivity, it turns into a condition of possibility for the subjects’ self-remaking, a re-creation of a new, positive identity on the ruins of its shattered predecessor. Whether the works discussed in this book challenge an existing political regime, or conjoin the wish to denounce aggression with a desire to keep the memory of past brutality alive, or, again, reduce totalitarian governments to serving as a point of reference for violent practices that continue to go on in democratic societies, they are united in their goal to imagine and, perhaps, call forth an alternative form of subjectivity. Let some of its features be sketched already: this will be a finite, mortal, and vulnerable subject devoid of any illusions of transcendence; one born

Introduction

5

in and through blindness and no longer clamouring for a totalizing, unitary vision; one who is both deeply personal and intensely political. Aside from the blinded protagonists of the novels, films, plays, and other works of art discussed here, these characteristics would apply to those collective subjectivities that could germinate in post-dictatorship societies under the injunction to recollect what is, precisely, unrepresentable: the horror and darkness of a recent period in their history. Rather obliquely, then, the narratives and the images I analyse below diagnose the permutations of collective blindness through the individual characters who turn this traditional signifier of absence into a fertile resource. The description of social and political phenomena in terms of physical impediments and illnesses such as blindness is fairly common both in everyday language and in literature. In her work Illness as Metaphor, Susan Sontag points out that epidemics, for instance, are a common figure for disorder and illness imagery is often employed in the characterization of a corrupt, unjust or repressive society (72).4 Sontag condemns this overmedicalization of the body politic and defines her study as an attempt to free illness and those who suffer its effects from metaphorical thinking (4). Building upon Sontag’s work, Naomi Schor’s essay ‘Blindness as Metaphor’ delineates a different approach to imagery related to disease. Whereas Sontag criticizes the use of allusions to illness, Schor argues that images such as the metaphor of blindness are inevitable. She proceeds to propose a reversal of values where lack of sight and other physical constraints would no longer be interpreted negatively, since deprivation is the general condition of the human body (83). The impossible ideal of plentitude would, therefore, be replaced by a language that stresses the productive aspects of limitations, defining the very being of the human. In the wake of Schor’s study, I put forth a generative concept of blindness that reverses the pernicious aspirations to transcendence of individual and collective subjects. The works I discuss in the following pages share a critique of the dream of full visibility as a potentially reifying ethico-political chimera and an understanding of blindness as a possible path to break free from this illusion. In chapter 1 I trace the interrelation between vision, ethics, and politics from classical Antiquity to the twentieth century, and discuss the connection between the literary and philosophical tropes of seeing and blindness, as well as the turn to the other in ethics, coupled with the denunciation of social and political oppression. Whereas in ancient Greek and early Chris-

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Seeing Politics Otherwise

tian texts, and all the way until the Enlightenment, sight and light were perceived as ambiguous, in that they were simultaneously valued as a model for knowledge as well as a metaphor for political emancipation, and denigrated as a source of distraction from the work of the mind, Romantic and post-Romantic thought have accused vision of a reductionist approach to the object of the gaze and praised darkness and blindness as a liberation from the tyranny of an all-seeing totalizing eye. The twentieth century has witnessed a proliferation of texts, films, and artworks that echo philosophical discourses on vision and where blindness, in one form or another, appears intertwined with a critique of the violent practices of dictatorships. In the next three sections of this study, I concentrate on literary, cinematic, and artistic productions on this topic from Latin America and from Portugal. In chapter 2 I focus on the deprivation of vision caused by darkness or smoke, as depicted in novelist Graciliano Ramos’s Memórias do Cárcere (Memoirs of Prison 1953), an autobiographical account of the author’s imprisonment during the regime of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil. Graciliano portrays darkness as a mechanism used by the police to dehumanize prisoners, who are reduced to a state of semi-animality. In the text, the protagonist resorts to writing, in the form of notes he takes on the various events he goes through, as a way to escape the debasement brought about by incarceration, but he soon finds himself trapped between the fragmentation of the I in the dire prison circumstances in which he finds himself and the desire for self-expression translated into the creation of his autobiographical sketches.5 Chapter 3 deals with another prevalent topos of blindness, namely, the blindfold related to the systematic use of torture by dictatorial political systems. I begin with a discussion of the work of Brazilian artist Ana Maria Pacheco, where hooded and blindfolded figures are frequently represented in a situation of torture or mutilation, often tainted with religious undertones. Subsequently, I analyse the figure of the blindfold in Ariel Dorfman’s play Death and the Maiden (1990). The blindness caused by the eye cover goes hand in hand in the text with the invisibility of the psychological scars left by torture. Yet the blindfold has an ambiguous role since it prevents the tortured from seeing their henchmen but, in turn, constitutes a barrier for the perpetrators of atrocities, making it more difficult for them to penetrate their victims’ interiority. I end the chapter with an interpretation of the use of the blindfold in the films Garaje Olimpo (Garage Olimpo, 1999), directed by Marco Bechis,

Introduction

7

and Bruno Barreto’s O que é isso Companheiro? (Four Days in September, 1997), two cinematic productions that focus on periods of dictatorial government in Argentina and Brazil, respectively. In chapter 4 I address the issue of blindness as a societal phenomenon in José Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Blindness, 1995). The inability to see appears in the novel as an illness that contaminates a whole state and the authorities do not hesitate to employ repressive methods in order to contain the spread of the disease. The narrator’s critique of these mechanisms goes hand in hand with his belief in the emancipative potential of human solidarity. In the narrative, the plague of blindness becomes a necessary step in rendering the main characters conscious of their political allegiances and in their realization that only a collective subject can hope to create a more just society. I end with a reflection on subjectivity in the artworks analysed in this book and by sketching out the figure of a reader who grounds her or his interpretations in both the seen and the unseen.

1 At the Blink of an Eye: Vision, Ethics, and Politics

El ojo que ves no es ojo porque tú lo veas; es ojo porque te ve. Antonio Machado, Proverbios y Cantares1

The inherently relational character of vision binds together the seer and the seen. The gaze focuses on its target, arresting it in the field of perception, and risks transforming it into a property to be possessed. At the same time, what is seen has an imperium of its own, in that it magnetizes the look of the beholder. Through this mutual attraction the two elements of seeing are locked in a reciprocal exchange, a relation that betrays the ethical grounding of vision as a commerce with alterity, ethics being understood here, lato sensu, as relationality, where at least one of the two sides is human. This does not imply that ethical motivations are the source of all acts of beholding, but rather that there is a latent potential for ethics in the specular dynamics between the eye and its object. I contend that blindness can be conceived as the means to realize this potential by way of resisting the appropriation of the seen on the part of the seer. The power of what is beheld, or of the ethical other, hinges then on the fact that it determines the beholder, even as she or he attempts to define it. One is individualized in the face of alterity and constituted as a subject of philosophy, theology, etc. at the moment when one sees. Such imbrication of vision with the ethical relationship is prevalent in the history of Western thought, ranging from Parmenides and Plato in Greek Antiquity, through the Hebrew and Christian Bibles, all the

At the Blink of an Eye

9

way to twentieth-century debates on the phenomenality of truth and the non-phenomenality of the other in the philosophies of Heidegger, Adorno, Levinas, or Derrida. But, beneath the evident correlation between ethics and vision, there has always been a political subtext that triangulates the dyadic character of the nexus between the I and the other and that often expresses itself also in terms of blindness or visibility. A salient example of the interweaving of vision and ethics with the political is the European Enlightenment, where individual emancipation, conveyed through metaphors of light, should lead to a more progressive social arrangement. Twentieth-century philosophy has questioned the ethical and political implications of the Enlightenment and its reliance on the primacy of vision, raising the possibility that it might have been conducive to totalitarianism. Consequently, blindness is frequently invoked as a pathway toward more inclusive conceptions not only of the ethical but also of the political. In what follows, I delineate the evolution of the understanding of blindness in its relationship to both ethics and politics, through an analysis of some of the most significant writings on this subject in the Western literary and philosophical traditions. I briefly refer to conceptions of vision in Greek Antiquity and early Christianity in order to set the background for modern and contemporary discourses on the subject. My goal is, therefore, not so much to reconstruct fully the original meaning and implications of these texts but rather to trace the ways in which they have survived in Western culture. I, then, focus on the ways in which theories of vision, in their association with ethics and politics, have been inherited and reworked by twentieth-century philosophy, which, in turn, informed the portrayal of the subject in the literature of this period. 1.1 Vision and Blindness in Greco-Roman Mythology In Antiquity, vision and blindness were at the core of numerous myths and marked the foundation of philosophy as a system of thought. Some acts of seeing were depicted as a transgression often punished with blindness, while another form of transgressing was encapsulated in the concept of ate, which stood both for a physical and a metaphorical inability to see. Furthermore, there was a prevalent belief that blindness was not only a physical affliction, but also possessed an inherent, deeper meaning, which gave rise to the figure of the blind seer and, in a metaphoric register, to the idea of the philosopher’s formative journey toward light and the truth.

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Seeing Politics Otherwise

In the mythological narratives of Greco-Roman Antiquity, the theme of transgression and its aftermath played a central part. Acts of disobedience of a theo-political law, such as the rules of hospitality, could result in blindness, as in the episode of Polyphemos in the Odyssey. In other cases, the defiance of communal or divine injunctions took the form of glancing at something forbidden.2 In the myth of Orpheus, Hades and Persephone consent to release Eurydice from the underworld on the condition that the protagonist should not look back at her until they reach the realm of the living. When Orpheus breaks the divine dictate, Eurydice is forever lost to him. The story presents vision as instrumental in witnessing and verification. Yet, it also stands as a reminder that the ability to see is not all-encompassing, insofar as the beloved cannot be turned into an object to be appropriated by the lover’s gaze. Orpheus lacks trust in the word of the gods and, therefore, feels the urge to resort to his own sense-perception to ascertain the presence of Eurydice. From this standpoint, his transgression shares common traits with the narrative of Prometheus, in that it foregrounds human experiential knowledge in opposition to unquestioned faith in divinity. By looking, Orpheus reclaims the space for human action and responsibility but, in so doing, represses the ineluctable passivity pertaining to the human being-in-the-world. His turning back also evokes his artistic achievements, in that it prefigures the Romanticist notion of the artist as a god-like genius who crafts a different reality. In this sense, the protagonist was not only ahead of his time but also undertook to accomplish the impossible, which is why his goal remained unrealized. The myth of Narcissus represents another variation on the entwinement of vision and transgression. The hero is absorbed in the contemplation of his own reflection in water to the point of becoming oblivious to his surroundings and, eventually, meets his demise by falling into the pool he was contemplating. By becoming enamoured with his image, Narcissus attempts to exclude alterity and, concomitantly, the collective sphere from his field of vision. Nevertheless, the communal realm proves to be irreducible and his endeavour fails, when he plunges into the very exteriority he wished to evade. In The Writing of the Disaster, Maurice Blanchot proposes an alternative interpretation of the myth. For Blanchot, Narcissus is unable to recognize himself in the reflection he admires and because the protagonist lacks the concepts of identity and selfhood, he cannot relate to what is other (127).3 Here, vision and blindness coalesce, in that, seeing nothing but himself, Narcissus ignores not only the outside world, but also his own interior-

At the Blink of an Eye

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ity. He thereby violates a basic law enunciated by Aristotle in Politics, according to which no human being can subsist outside of a socio-political arrangement that presupposes the intersubjective constitution of personhood.4 The downfall of Narcissus may be attributed to seeing a reflected image that mediated between his subjecthood and objecthood, which appeared to him as an immediate presence. As for the myth of Medusa, a reflection was, again, required for establishing a separation between subject and object. Perseus’s shield provided such a mediation, in that it functioned as a panacea against the intensity of Medusa’s direct stare, preventing it from petrifying those who dared to face her. As the subject of the gaze, the female character literally transformed her male contenders into objects. Perseus inverted this process and, thus, tamed the subversive power of femininity. He broke the spell of Medusa’s gaze by introducing an intermediary, namely reflection, which may be regarded as the moment of entry into the political realm since it opens up the relationship between the I and the other. The entrance into the collective represented by the ‘third’ element of the shield is here predicated on domination and leads to Medusa’s defeat. The Greco-Roman tradition linking vision and transgression culminates in the mythological figure of Tiresias, who was blinded by Athena because he inadvertently saw her naked.5 When his mother intervened on his behalf, the goddess endowed him with prophetic powers. The idea that physical blindness might go hand in hand with the ability to come into contact with another reality was widely held in Antiquity and was perpetuated in European culture (Barasch 29). Tiresias, thus, constitutes an intersection between the literal and metaphoric notions of vision and blindness. For the protagonist of the myth, his physical deficiency became the enabling cause for his gift as a seer: the obverse of his incapacity to behold the empirical present was his insight into the future, a disjunction condensed in the term ‘blind seer.’ In the case of Tiresias, blindness could not be reduced to a limiting affliction, but put him in a position of authority, allowing him to counsel the rulers of his time. Oedipus, a king advised by Tiresias, is another paradigmatic figure embodying the connection between mental clarity and physical blindness. Following the Greek tradition, his loss of vision came as a result of self-punishment for a transgression of the law, in this case, the fact that he unknowingly killed his father and married his mother. By blinding himself, Oedipus renounced the life of the body, which was the cause

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Seeing Politics Otherwise

of his ruin, and focused on his own interiority, thus anticipating the Platonic privileging of the eye of the mind. In the Sophoclean rendition of the narrative, Oedipus embraces his guilt to the point of taking the blame for actions, the real significance of which was unbeknown to him. Therefore, he stands for an exacerbation of the ethical demand to accept one’s responsibility even for that which lies beyond one’s conscious control. Abandoning the position of a king who rules over and dominates the land, Oedipus turns into a wandering exile, a transformation marked by his self-blinding. The conceptual expression for the convergence of the various layers of signification contained in blindness was the Greek notion of ate. One could translate the term as ‘sightlessness,’ which was probably its original meaning, even though it progressively acquired a wealth of other connotations, as Moshe Barasch points out: ‘While the sense of physical blindness, permanent or temporary, is never altogether excluded [from the concept of ate], more often the term denotes mental blindness, infatuation, folly. It may also mean actual ruin, calamity, or disaster’ (34). It follows that ate stands for the exact opposite of the blind seer’s clear mental vision. Its excessiveness is at odds with the Greek ideal of a balanced psychic life that would lead to the establishment of a moderate and harmonious political regime. In this sense, the negative undertones of ate foreshadow the philosophical repression of the irrational and the parallel emphasis on equilibrium and light that predominate in the Platonic system of thought. The cultural heritage of Antiquity testifies to an ambivalent valuation of vision. While the term ate expressed an unfavourable approach to blindness, many of the mythological narratives were more nuanced in their appraisal of sight. For Orpheus, the act of looking back signified human emancipation from the gods, but it simultaneously objectified Eurydice and led to her disappearance and to the protagonist’s defeat. Narcissus’s fixated stare enthralled and paralysed him, as he looked at his image and turned a blind eye to his surroundings. As for Medusa, she achieved her dominating stance through the petrifying force of her gaze, which nonetheless proved to be impotent in saving her from the cunning of Perseus. Finally, in the myth of Tiresias, although blindness resulted from divine punishment, it gave rise to his clairvoyance. In all these accounts, transgression emanated from an excess of vision, bespeaking immoderate self-confidence, self-love, or untamed femininity. Concrete or metaphorical blindness ensued as a hypostatization of this extreme. The heroes’ trespassing of the established boundaries vio-

At the Blink of an Eye

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lated the Greek socio-political ideal of moderation, which is why they were punished. From a more contemporary perspective, their excessiveness was incompatible with their coexistence alongside alterity, to the extent that they stifled difference by either ignoring it or beholding it in a reifying way. The protagonists’ actions, thus, proscribed the possibility for sociality and the result of their gestures of defiance is their tacit reinscription into the harmony and moderation against which they rebelled. Nevertheless, their punishment by blindness does not necessarily reinstate a normalizing objectification of the other. Tiresias, for instance, embodied the kind of blindness that was open to exteriority in his orientation toward the future.6 This productive tension between darkness and insight resurfaced in the thought of some early Greek philosophers, such as Parmenides and Plato. 1.2 The Greek Philosophy of Light and Darkness: Parmenides and Plato Parmenides’ fragmentary poem ‘On Nature’ oscillates between the poles of light and darkness.7 One of the pre-Socratic philosophers whose thought had the greatest influence on the formation of the Platonic system, Parmenides remained a constant point of reference throughout Western intellectual history. His text describes the protagonist’s voyage to the realm of a goddess who lays out two paths before him: the way of the truth and the way of doxa. The latter is based upon a distinction between opposite substances, one bearing the properties of ethereal brightness and the other characterized by a thick and heavy darkness. According to Parmenides, the flaw in this division is that both light and obscurity are ascribed equal value and existence: ‘[…] from here onwards learn mortal beliefs, / […] For they established two forms in their minds for naming, / Of which it is not right to name one – wherein they have gone astray’ (VIII, 51–4). The error of mortals is that they contemplate nothingness as though it were something present, i.e., as an ontological entity. The way of the truth, on the other hand, postulates the unity of substance, which is qualified by the fact that ‘It is’ and, therefore, exists in logos: ‘It must be that what is there for speaking and thinking of is; for (it) is there to be, / Whereas nothing is not’ (VI, 1–2). While what is distinguishes itself by immutability, completeness, atemporality and discursive articulation, that which is not is ineffable and unthinkable: ‘For you cannot know what-is-not (for that is not feasible), / Nor could

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Seeing Politics Otherwise

you point it out’ (II, 7–8). For Parmenides, the possibility of uttering what exists is coupled with its luminosity.8 What is shines forth with an internal light that renders it perceptible and meaningful. In the text, darkness can be interpreted as the dimension of what is not, in that it encompasses everything unspeakable. The non-existent would, therefore, correspond to what Parmenides describes as the doxological night to which mortals wrongly attribute an ontological status. However, there is another possible reading of darkness in the poem, whereby it would be defined as something that lies on the side of being and light, as their privative modification. Here, both luminosity and obscurity find themselves included, albeit in different ways, in what is. Whereas light is the primordial mode of being, darkness is its derivative, lesser form that belongs to what exists, since it can be inserted into discourse.9 The ambiguous valuation of darkness haunts Parmenides’ poem from the beginning: […] the daughters of the Sun, hasting to convey me into the light, threw back their veils from off their faces and left the abode of Night. There are the gates of the ways of Night and Day, fitted above with a lintel and below with a threshold of stone. They themselves, high in the air, are closed by mighty doors, and Avenging Justice keeps the keys that open them.

(I, 8–14)

The movement of the protagonist is heliotropic, in that he reaches the wisdom of the goddess with the aid of the ‘daughters of the Sun,’ who lead him away from ‘the abode of Night’ and guide him toward the light. The character appears to abandon not only mere opinion, but also the obscurity of what is not. It is only when he reaches the ‘gates of the ways of Night and Day’ that he learns to distinguish between the luminosity of being and the darkness of doxa, as well as of that which does not exist. Yet, the convergence of the paths of Night and Day at the gate might also suggest their dialectical interplay within the domain of existence and true knowledge. The light of being seems to harbour ineluctably shadows in its midst since, in the Parmedian onto-epistemology, the philosophical itinerary necessarily entails contending with darkness. Justice guards the gates of the ways of Night and Day and holds the keys to the divine knowledge that lies behind them. The overlap

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between the juridical and the epistemological arenas revolves around the ability to pass judgment on truth and falsity, i.e., what is and what is not. Justice is, thus, the foundation of thought, whereas the deficiency of the doxa derives from its failure to evaluate each entity on its own terms or, more concretely, from its tendency to ontologize what is not, as opposed to leaving nothingness in silence. The doxological essentialization of light and darkness, therefore, could not undergird a just political space. The legacy of Parmenides is predicated on this problematization of the fixed dualism of night and day. The Parmenidean narrative describes a journey through which the protagonist leaves behind the preconceived notions of the mortals and is initiated into the wisdom of the goddess. Analogously, Plato conceives the formation of a philosopher as a voyage toward the eidetic sphere. Unlike his predecessor, however, he emphasizes the verticality of the movement in the direction of ideas, in that he postulates a hierarchical chain of appearances that culminates, at the top, in the full reality of the forms. The best-known representation of this schema is the allegory of the cave portrayed in The Republic (514a–17c). In this episode, Socrates conjures up a scantily lit underworld inhabited by prisoners who observe the shadows of objects projected on the walls. While inside the cave, humans are prevented from seeing the reality that surrounds them, grasping nothing but its pale copies and reflections. An upward ascent is required for the dissipation of darkness and for coming into the light of truth.10 At the summit, one finds the ideas, which, similar to the Parmenidean being, are classified as ‘what is always the same in all respects’ (Republic 484b) and as ‘the being that is always and does not wander about, driven by generation and decay’ (485a–b). Plato’s discourse on these entities routinely resorts to metaphors of vision and light that contrast their luminosity to the obscurity of appearances. Indeed, the Ancient Greek term for ‘idea’ (id-ein) was the perfect infinitive of the verb ‘to see’ (oroo), which originally meant ‘form’ or ‘the look of a thing, as opposed to its reality.’ Furthermore, ‘knowledge’ (eidenai) signified a ‘mental perception’ that often originated in sight, and ‘theory’ (theooria) stood for a ‘look’ or ‘glance,’ among other related meanings.11 The main idea, governing all others, is the Good, which Plato analogizes with the Sun. The rest of the ideas shine forth in its light, which imbues them with an ethical meaning. In The Republic, Socrates spells out the comparison between the Sun and the Good: […] say that the sun is the offspring of the good I mean – an offspring

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Seeing Politics Otherwise the good begot in a proportion with itself: as the good is in the intelligible region with respect to intelligence and what is intellected, so the sun is in the visible region with respect to sight and what is seen. (508b–c)

The Good and the Sun are the conditions of possibility for knowing and seeing, respectively, and, as such, they precede knowledge and sight.12 Yet, despite the prevalent association of ideas with vision and light in Plato’s thought, the passage above makes it clear that the intelligible and the visible occupy two distinct regions. Eidetic luminosity can only be grasped with the eye of the mind, that is, with a trained philosophical intellect. Concrete vision falls short of perceiving ideational objects, or, as Socrates puts it, ‘I, for my part, am unable to hold that any study makes a soul look upward other than the one that concerns what is and is invisible’ (Republic 529b, emphasis added). The Platonic standpoint, therefore, involves a distinction between figurative and embodied sight. Limited to appearances, the latter becomes tantamount to intellectual obscurity. At the same time, physical blindness serves here as a prerequisite for entering into the transcendent sphere of ideas, echoing the mythological construction of sightlessness as a condition of possibility for a knowledge that goes beyond what is present in everyday life. Contrary to ideas, appearances are multiple, shifting, and derivative, since they arise as copies of these immutable entities. It is this perpetually changing world that presents itself to our physical senses and that constitutes doxological reality. When, having experienced the fullness of ideas, the philosopher returns to the darkness of the cave, he witnesses the mental confusion of the prisoners who behold the appearances without realizing that they are misleading. In the face of this situation, he feels the obligation to lead others toward the light that he has beheld. However, the transition from appearances to eidetic light does not follow a straightforward path, in that the one who undertakes this ascent runs the risk of being dazzled by the brightness of ideas. Socrates warns his interlocutors of this danger in the allegory of the cave: Take a man who is released and suddenly compelled to stand up, to turn his neck around, to walk and look up toward the light: and who, moreover, in doing all this is in pain and, because he is dazzled is unable to make out those things whose shadows he saw before […] And when he came to the light, wouldn’t he have his eyes full of its beam and be unable to see even one of the things now said to be true? (515c–16a)

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When they are all too rapidly exposed to the luminosity of ideas, those accustomed to the shadows of the cave are blinded by this light.13 For Plato, education is a process where the subject, first, wilfully turns toward what is and, second, recognizes it as the truth, gradually getting accustomed to the light of ideas. Therefore, to attain wisdom is to learn how to see and to discern the difference between appearances, registered with the physical eyes, and ontology, perceived with the eye of the mind. The peril of psychic blindness reemerges in Phaedo, a dialogue where Socrates compares a direct approach to ideas with looking straight at the sun during an eclipse. The precaution he advocates is glimpsing the reflected image of the celestial phenomenon in water. Socrates associates this mediation with logos: ‘I thought of that danger, and I was afraid my soul would be blinded if I looked at things with my eyes and tried to grasp them with any of my senses. So I thought I must have recourse to conceptions [logous] and examine in them the truth of realities’ (Phaedo 99e).14 In the allegory, the eidetic sun is eclipsed by appearances but still possesses the power to blind those who gaze at it. Discourse is presented as a medium in which ideas and their shadows overlap. The task of the philosopher is to overcome the conflation of the two within ordinary language and conceptual thought, by means of a logical and systematic investigation into the essence of truth. This would be the antidote to the sophists’ blind play with words that instrumentalizes logos and ascribes equal value to its veridical and deceptive elements. Plato draws the ethical implications of remaining in the sophistic world of doxa in the story of the ring of Gyges, which Glaucon recounts in The Republic. This episode relies, once again, on imagery pertaining to vision in order to demonstrate the social consequences of the predominance of appearances. The narrative deals with a shepherd who found a ring that renders the person who wears it invisible. When he became cognizant of the ring’s properties, he committed regicide, usurped the throne, and took the king’s place next to his wife (360a–b). Since the idea of the Good is absent from the environment of the cave, unjust actions that are invisible are committed with impunity. In other words, in the sphere of appearances that the shepherd inhabited, what mattered was what was seen, public opinion, and one’s naked self-interest, not the essential character of each individual. In contrast, in the realm of ideas, interpersonal relations are guided by the universal desire for the Good. Here, we find once again a distinction between physical sight and the metaphorical seeing of ideas. What seems to be positive from the standpoint of physical visibility ceases to function as a yardstick

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for determining human conduct. In the eidetic realm, all acts become instantiations of the ontological notion of the Good, which translates, at the level of the community, into a practice of a politics of transcendence. In opposition to the everyday, doxological understanding of the political, which consists in trying to find the best way to respond to a given set of circumstances with limited resources, a politics of transcendence is indifferent to contingencies and posits instead a course of action governed by the universal idea of the Good. This uncompromising stance precludes deliberative decision-making, since those who accessed the eidetic domain would necessarily follow the path it prescribes. The absence of argumentation from a politics grounded on transcendent ideas raises the question whether Platonic philosophy is authoritarian.15 This issue is linked to the hierarchical structure of the ideal polity envisioned in The Republic, where the philosopher-king, the guardians, and the producers are assigned their respective positions based on their proximity to the world of forms. These social strata are vertically organized in a pyramid, which leaves some space for upward mobility, the task of the philosopher-king being to facilitate this movement and to guide his subjects out of the cave. Thus, Plato devises a transitional political arrangement that, foreshadowing a pure politics of transcendence, is still negatively associated with the realm of appearances that it strives to leave behind. This schema might be considered as a harbinger of paternalism, in that the all-powerful figure of the philosopher-king autocratically governs the rest of the populus. Nevertheless, one cannot be forced to look into the truth by an external coercive authority. The turn toward ideas with the eye of the mind necessitates an individual decision and presupposes a wilful endeavour, in that one only recognizes their existence if one decides to embark on a laborious upward path toward their light. Plato’s dialogues emphasize the positive value of vision, since he utilizes metaphors of seeing to describe the knowledge afforded by ideas. In Timaeus, for instance, the philosopher groups the creation of the eyes together with the emergence of human intelligence and the soul, which suggests the close connection between beholding and understanding (Jay, Downcast 26). In his privileging of ocular imagery, Plato maintains the Hellenic appraisal of sight as the noblest of the senses. Various authors, including Martin Jay and Moshe Barasch, have emphasized this visual bias and pointed out that, in Greek Antiquity, blindness was frequently portrayed as a calamity (Jay, Downcast 24, Barasch 7). Yet, as Jay contends, the approach to sight was not always celebratory

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(28–9). As noted above, in Plato, for instance, physical blindness is indispensable for the subject to open her- or himself to the beholding of ideas with the eye of the mind, i.e., it is necessary to become physically blind to appearances in order to contemplate the eidetic domain. As a result of this inescapability from the vision/blindness dyad, part of the Platonic heritage in subsequent philosophy is constituted by the centrality of optics. Divergent strands of thought, such as idealism and empiricism, have appropriated different aspects of the contradictions inherent in Plato’s conception of sight. The former stresses the eidetic seeing of the light at the expense of the senses, while the latter isolates the perceptual apparatus, and the eyes in particular, as the exclusive source of knowledge to the detriment of the ideas. Thus, ocularcentrism in post-Platonic thought results, to a large extent, from an essentializing compartmentalization of the philosopher’s multifaceted take on visuality. Parmenides and Plato have been instrumental in a systematic conceptualization of the categories of vision in Greek thought. In their texts, one’s itinerary toward knowledge necessarily passes through the crossroads of sight and blindness as, in both authors, the philosopher makes a metaphorical transition from darkness to brightness and achieves enlightenment by renouncing the doxological world of appearances mediated by the senses. Drawing on some of the ancient Greek imagery related to vision, the Christian version of revelation retraces parts of this path, in that approximation to God is frequently expressed in terms of a coming into light. 1.3 Judaeo-Christian Representations of God: The Question of the Image and the Excess of Brightness The depiction of God in Christianity results from a development of the earlier Judaic doctrine, coupled with Hellenic elements. One of the central commandments in Judaism proscribes the crafting of likenesses of God, as stated in the Book of Deuteronomy: ‘Thou shalt not make unto thee a graven image, even any manner of likeness, of any thing that is in heaven above, or that is in the earth beneath, or that is in the water under the earth’ (Deut. 5:7).16 This ban is derived from the condemnation of idolatry and pagan worship of images of the divine. Judaism defined itself against the polytheistic worshipping of idols and formulated the notion of God as abstract and disembodied, which precludes his hypostatization within the finite borders of a material

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portrayal. Likewise, the commandment forbids the representation of heavenly and earthly entities, since these are a part of creation and, as such, partake of divine nature. This is particularly true in the case of human beings, who were conceived in God’s image and whose depiction, therefore, would be an attempt to capture God’s essence and to repeat the divine act of creation. The Christian belief in God’s incarnation in Jesus modified the Jewish ban on representation. The divine takes the form of man, who had been created in God’s image, and becomes, therefore, concrete and embodied. As Martin Jay suggests, this has led to the calling into question of the earlier prohibition and, subsequently, to a progressive acceptance of iconicity. Concomitantly, the Hellenization of Christianity has also contributed to a valorization of vision in religious practices by way of a recoding of the allusions to hearing in the Old Testament into references to sight (see Jay, Downcast 36). As a result, the veneration of sacred artefacts that comprised the visible church became widespread. The significance of vision in Christianity is expressed in the centrality of the episodes depicting the healing of the blind in the New Testament. If, in the Old Testament, the healing of the blind was perceived as a nearly impossible miracle, the restoration of sight to the blind by Christ manifested his ability to perform miracles and testified to the fact that the Messianic age had arrived.17 One such episode is narrated in the Gospel according to Matthew: And when Jesus departed thence, two blind men followed him, crying, and saying, [Thou] Son of David, have mercy on us. And when he was come into the house, the blind men came to him: and Jesus saith unto them, Believe ye that I am able to do this? They said unto him, Yea, Lord. Then touched he their eyes, saying, According to your faith be it unto you. And their eyes were opened; and Jesus straitly charged them, saying, See [that] no man know [it]. (Matt. 9:27–30)

This passage is symptomatic of the interrelation between faith and salvation in Christian doctrine. The two blind men address Jesus by the designation ‘Son of David,’ which implies that, from their first encounter, they accept him as the Messiah. Faith permeates the rest of the story and functions as the factor that facilitates their cure, since Christ performs the miracle only after the men explicitly profess their belief. Thus, the sincerity of their devotion materializes in the restoration of their eyesight. The healing touch of Jesus’ hand relies on the fact that

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the blind have already been metaphorically touched by the light of revelation. Moshe Barasch points out that early Christian representations of scenes depicting the healing of the blind were often found in places and objects related to the dead, such as sarcophagi and the catacombs. This portrayal of the restoration of sight connotes the transition from death to eternal life as a beholding the divine (50–1). For Barasch, such miraculous and sudden changes are characteristic of religions of salvation that hinge upon moments of radical inversion (54). The improbability of curing the blind turned it into an apt figure for an even more impossible feat, namely Christ’s revival from the dead and, by extension, the promise of eternal life for the converted. This idea that conversion to Christianity takes the form of an illumination lies at the core of the narrative describing God’s revelation to Paul on his way to Damascus. All three versions of this episode related in The Acts of the Apostles utilize the imagery of light and darkness in order to emphasize the extraordinary nature of the event. In the three accounts, Christ appears in the form of a bright heavenly light, ‘above the brightness of the sun, shining round about’ Paul and his companions (Acts 26:13). The luminosity emanating from Jesus exceeds the intensity of the midday sun, which sets up an implicit comparison of the divinity with the celestial body, thereby evoking Plato’s Sun/Good analogy. Similar to the brightness of the Good, the light of God outshines its solar counterpart. Furthermore, this passage seems to incorporate the Judaic ban on images, since Christ’s luminosity conceals the contours of his figure. Yet, the earlier prohibition undergoes an alteration here, as the inapparent character of God does not preclude a certain appearance in the form of light. The excess of divine light results in Paul’s temporary blindness: ‘And when I could not see for the glory of that light, being led by the hand of them that were with me, I came into Damascus’ (Acts 22:11). His physical sense of vision is overwhelmed by the force of Christ’s luminosity in the same way as the eyes of those who exit the Platonic cave are unprepared to behold the light of ideas. Paul’s blindness lasted beyond the initial encounter with God: ‘And he was three days without sight, and neither did eat nor drink’ (Acts 9:9). During this period, he found himself in a condition that resembled that of a dead man, since he could not see, and did not eat or drink; in fact, Paul persisted in this state for three days, which is the amount of time that passed between Jesus’ Crucifixion and Resurrection. The regaining of vision marks the completion of the conversion and is, then,

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tantamount to a rebirth into a new life.18 Thus, not only was physical blindness a necessary step toward Paul’s spiritual enlightenment, but his restored eyesight was also transformed, since it was rendered back to him by divine grace. Paul’s experience confers upon him the responsibility to convert others to Christianity, as Jesus intimates to him: ‘Now I send thee, To open their [the Gentiles’] eyes, and to turn them from darkness to light, and from the power of Satan unto God’ (Acts 26:17–18). The quote equates obscurity with evil, while the evangelical message of salvation is linked to heavenly luminosity.19 Paul emphasizes his mission of spreading the new religion and, thereby, makes it clear that he intends to lead whole communities into the light of Revelation. His theological-political intention comes into sharper relief given that in this passage he is addressing King Agrippa and, therefore, implicitly establishing a contrast between the worldly authority of the monarch and the ultimate Kingdom of Heaven, presided over by God. Paul’s role is thus subversive, insofar as it relativizes the power of the existing political regimes and subordinates these to the realm of the divine. Christian mysticism builds on the prior association between God and light. In order to reach a communion with the luminosity of the transcendent sphere, the mystic needs to become figuratively blind to mundane affairs.20 In turn, proximity to the holy heralds the possibility of another kind of blindness, where the finite human being, overwhelmed by the unmediated contact with the brightness of the Almighty, loses the sense of seeing. As Juan Cruz Mendizábal points out in his discussion of Iberian mystical writings, fusion with the divine gives rise to a sightlessness caused by an excess of light: ‘Iberian mysticism [is] full of strife and conquests, of a dazzling of sight that is the same as blindness. Luminous blindness, a blindness that guides the soul’ (132–3, my translation). Ecstatic union with God is translated into a luminous blindness, which does not constitute an impasse but represents the bridging of the rift between the Creator and his creation.21 Christianity revoked the Judaic ban on images and permitted the depiction of both divine and earthly beings. Nevertheless, the earlier prohibition lived on in many narratives of revelation, where God’s presentation in the form of light deflects the focus from his concrete appearance. This spectacle overpowers those who directly contemplate its awesome luminosity and results in their blindness, which becomes a pathway toward transcendence. The prescient question is, then, whether the encounter with the holy source of light moves the faithful

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to action or leaves them in a state of passive beholding. Whereas Paul is enjoined to a mission of disseminating the revealed truth that entails a religious and political engagement in the world, the mystics withdraw from the reality of the everyday and communicate with the ecclesiastical community mostly through their writings. 1.4 Dark Spots in the Sun: Viewing the Enlightenment Project The conception of the divine right of kings prevalent in the Middle Ages was influenced by the Christian link between God, the messianic revelation, and luminosity, in that the monarch was presented as the channel through which heavenly light descended upon the subjects. Under absolutism, rulers progressively usurped the role of the divinity as the source of illumination, a tendency that culminated in the reign of the French Sun King, Louis XIV. His court at Versailles, with its emphasis on the spectacular and its dazzling display of visual effects, such as mirrors and artificial lighting, was intended as a concrete embodiment of his luminous aura. The monarch’s figure thus came to the foreground, as it took the place of God, drawing legitimacy from his authority, whereas the divine receded into a more narrowly circumscribed theological domain. This change presaged the severance of the link between politics and religion that came to fruition in the philosophy of the Enlightenment. One of the goals of the philosophes was to transmute absolute rulers into illuminated despots, who would found their reign upon the values of enlightened reasoning. In this way, monarchs would recuperate their role as the intermediaries between their subjects and a higher principle, which would now be the light of Reason, and not the shining forth of a divinity. The enlightened despots would, thereby, pave the way for a transition toward an ideal political system, where citizens would have the capacity for self-government in accordance with the universal laws of rationality. Such a social arrangement would entail the eradication of superstition and prejudice as well as blind faith and would predicate understanding and action upon scientifically authenticated experience. This co-implication of illumination and reason is the source of the word ‘Enlightenment.’22 The privileging of experiential data united a number of thinkers from the Enlightenment, including John Locke and Denis Diderot, in the tradition of empiricism. This current of thought postulated that the source of knowledge is the raw information of sense perception, and not the

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apriori ideas innate in the mind. The eye, in turn, was considered to be the noblest of the senses, while the ear was often the subject of mistrust as the conduit of ‘unreliable “hearsay”’ (Jay, Downcast 85).23 In this view, the deprivation of eyesight in blindness would amount to nothing less than a deficiency in knowing. Yet, the hegemony of vision and light in Enlightenment thinking was not absolute. Diderot’s ‘Letter on the Blind’ contests the notion that those who do not see are inferior to the ones who do. Further, the philosophy of Immanuel Kant questions metaphorical vision, instantiated in the boundless power of the light of reason, and, through the practice of a critique, attempts to stave off human inquiry from inaccessible regions. Diderot’s ‘Letter on the Blind,’ published in 1749, moderates the significance of vision vis-à-vis the other senses. To be sure, the text states that blindness is an impediment to various human activities: for instance, according to the letter, a blind person should find it more difficult to learn how to speak than someone who can see, since speech presupposes establishing analogies between the visible object and the invisible word that are inaccessible to the blind (79–80). Subjects deprived of vision also do not possess a keen sense of compassion because they cannot visually identify with the other,24 nor do they feel the urge to be modest, since they are unable to behold nudity (81). Likewise, the blind have an impoverished notion of beauty, in that they associate it with utility based on the object’s proportionality and aptness to fulfil its function (70–1). These and other constraints prompt Diderot to conceive of the life of the blind as a prison.25 Nonetheless, the philosopher does not depict blindness as an incarceration without exits and, at the same time, he contends that those who can see have their own limitations. In broader terms, he argues that even though the morals and ideational capacities of the blind are different from those of the rest of the population, they are not necessarily inferior.26 The inability to see sharpens conceptual thought and analytical sense because touch is more abstract than vision, so that ‘in questions purely speculative, he [the blind man] is perhaps less liable to be deceived’ (‘Letter’ 87). Furthermore, lack of modesty in the blind might be interpreted as a sign of progress, if it means that they have rid themselves of moral prejudices (81).27 And even if their conception of beauty is restrictive, the blind have a deeper perception of it: ‘their [the blind’s] ideas of beauty, though less extensive, are more definite than those of many keen-sighted philosophers who have written prolix treatises on the subject’ (71). Diderot’s favourable evaluation

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of the capacities of the blind is associated with the possibilities inherent in the sense of touch, which is presented as an essential source of knowledge. The philosopher bemoans the fact that there is no haptic language, which would complement the alphabet, created for vision, and speech, intended for hearing: ‘Knowledge has three entrances by which it reaches our mind, and we keep one barricaded for want of signs’ (89–90). In this sense, vision is not irreplaceable, since the experiences accessed through touch could compensate for the lack of sight. For Diderot, blindness can be an advantage, as those who cannot see do not fall into the conceptual and moral misrepresentations resulting from vision. The second part of ‘Letter on the Blind’ addresses the Molyneux problem, which inquires into whether a person who has always been blind would visually recognize a cube or a sphere, previously known only through touch, if she or he were suddenly to regain sight.28 Diderot’s solution is consistent with his empiricist belief that there are no innate ideas. He stresses the constitutive function of learning in all perception and states that if someone born blind were to acquire vision, that person would need to train that sense before being able to behold the surroundings with clarity. In addition, past learning would determine the aptitude for visual recognition in a subject who has been hitherto deprived of sight. The philosopher denies the existence of a priori universals that would permit one to translate tactile into visual knowledge; such transference would only occur thanks to a reasoning built upon practical experience (Diderot, ‘Letter’ 134–5).29 A later Enlightenment thinker, Immanuel Kant, attempted to reconcile the empiricist position represented by Diderot with the philosophical tradition of rationalism worked out by Descartes and Berkeley, among others.30 Kant does not share the optimistic belief in the possibility of endlessly reshaping the human subject through the experiential knowledge of the senses, but he also doubts reason’s power to shed light on every ontological region, thereby overextending its legitimate jurisdiction. For Kant, it is the task of an ongoing critique to put reason in its proper place and to distinguish between what it can illuminate and what will necessarily remain in the dark.31 Thus, he harnesses the boundless faith of the Enlightenment in reason’s promise to dispel all shadows. The Kantian critical moment is auto-reflexive because, according to it, reason sheds the light of understanding back on itself. The critique of knowledge stands for its self-limitation, for the creation of boundaries that circumscribe its brilliance, which dazzles those who

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have unlimited faith in it. This is a necessary moment in the Kantian version of the maturation of humankind, a process in which humans supplement their scientific consciousness of the surrounding world with a self-consciousness that is aware of the conditions of possibility for knowing. Therefore, human emancipation entails the capacity to accept one’s necessary limitations and the inevitability of the shadowy halo that surrounds the sphere of what is cognizable. The acknowledgment of limitations plays an equally crucial part in Kant’s attempt to draw the socio-political implications of his thought in the renowned essay ‘What is Enlightenment?’ Here, the philosopher establishes a distinction between the public use of reason, which is practised in freedom, in the public sphere, and the private use of reason, limited by one’s already defined social role.32 It was hoped that through the free exercise of reason, a societal change would gradually take place, so that the fixed hierarchical positions where reason is used privately would also evolve. Nonetheless, the gap between the enlightened public reason and its obscure private counterpart would never be entirely filled. The individual emancipation sought by Enlightenment philosophers, whether through a scientific approach to the world of perception, or through a rigorous deployment of reason, was to culminate in political liberation. The concrete historical instantiation of this ideal was the French Revolution, which, like the philosophical background it arose from, relied on metaphors of light and vision to enunciate its promise of freedom. Martin Jay ennumerates the ocularcentric features of the revolutionary imaginary. For instance, the Republic adopted as one of its symbols the image of Diogenes illuminating his quest for truth with the light of a lamp. The all-seeing Masonic eye placed inside of a triangle and surrounded by rays visually expressed the aspirations of the new movement (Downcast 94–6). These markers of political illumination coexisted with the worst excesses of revolutionary Terror, which became the dark spots in the Enlightenment sun. The project of the emancipation of reason and its political consequences came under scrutiny with the advent of Romanticism, which recovered topoi that included the emotional, the hidden, and the irrational. German Romantic writers such as Herder and Novalis praised the darkness of the night and contributed to a dethroning of the primacy of sight by the senses of hearing and touch. This critique of ocularcentrism continued in twentieth-century thought and aesthetics that aimed to free itself from the theoreticism and objectification heralded by an excessive reliance on vision.33

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1.5 Twentieth-Century Fragments of Vision in Ruins The fascination of Romanticism with the unconventional, the subterranean, and the obscure gained a scientific expression in the beginning of the twentieth century with psychoanalysis, which privileged the unconscious as a key to the hermeneutics of human comportment. This formalization of the principles governing psychic life acknowledged the interplay between the visible and the invisible as indispensable for the deciphering of psychic reality, as well as for the understanding of the subject-object, analyst-analysand relations. Yet, even though psychoanalysis espoused a multifaceted approach to vision, it did not turn the impressions resulting from seeing into the cornerstone of depth psychology. Rather, sight was contextualized within the larger framework of psychological processes that extended below the surface level of sense perception toward the underlying structure of subjectivity. Otto Fenichel is one theorist who, within the psychoanalytic tradition, explicitly addresses the correlation of vision and other phenomena of the psyche. His thesis on the scoptophilic instinct states that ‘looking has the unconscious significance of devouring’ (327) and that such devouring entails the abolition of the distance between the onlooker and her or his object. The seer strives either to imitate the object by empathically identifying with it, or to violently force it to become like her or him (329–30). In both cases, scoptophilia falls under the aegis of the sexual instinct and derives from the wish to eliminate the difference between the subject and what is looked upon by means of incorporation.34 Yet, for psychoanalysis, vision does not necessarily involve the complete erasure of otherness. In his definition of the fetishistic impulse and its connection to sight, Sigmund Freud conceives of a psychic mechanism where difference is, paradoxically, both obliterated and maintained. According to his essay ‘Fetishism,’ the fetish is defined as a substitute for the lost object, namely, the woman’s phallus. Here, the prototype is the male sexual organ, and fetishism arises when a boy is confronted with the perceived lack thereof in the female body, a trauma that can trigger in him a fear of castration. On the one hand, the traumatized child refuses to accept sexual difference and creates a fetish to replace an absent object. On the other hand, he knows that the replacement does not coincide with the ‘thing itself’ whose presence continues to haunt him. Such is the structure of disavowal, where a slice of reality is simultaneously registered and repudiated, thus effectuating a splitting of the ego between the demands of the reality principle and

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the desire to respond to an unconscious drive. Fetishism begins with a transgressive visual experience, whereby the child tries to see something forbidden, and yet fails to behold what he had anticipated. For the fetishist, the woman’s phallus is hidden from sight, creating in him the need to substitute something visible for it. The choice of a fetish is determined by the particular ocular perspective of a little boy looking up at a woman, which explains why objects such as feet, shoes, or underwear are often fetishized (‘Fetishism’ 155). The moment when the woman’s phallus would be seen is permanently deferred, but the subject constructs the illusion that its invisibility is provisional. This disavowal combines the visible and the invisible in the acknowledgment and rejection of the reality of sexual difference.35 The fetish, therefore, occupies the structural position of a trace suspended between presence and absence, since it represents the missing thing and, in so doing, maintains the memory of its loss. In Freudian psychoanalysis vision is, in general, described as being more conducive to the development of perversions than other senses, such as touching. While tactile exchanges are part of normal sexual activity, as long as they culminate in the sexual act, the pleasure in looking often becomes perverse: ‘(a) if it is restricted exclusively to the genitals, or (b) if it is connected with the overriding of disgust […], or (c) if, instead of being preparatory to the normal sexual aim, it supplants it’ (‘Three Essays’ 251). Seeing acquires a pathological dimension when there is an overvaluation of the gaze, which replaces the action of exercising adult sexuality. In many instances, fetishism triggers this economy of substitution, since it might prevent the fulfilment of the sexual impulse. In contrast to the theoreticism of scoptophilic fixation, Freud places an emphasis on normative sexuality and contends that, in the sexual arena, vision derives from touching, which is a sense more in keeping with praxis. If vision as a devouring identification with the object entails a complete violation of difference, disavowal permits otherness to exist, but only alongside its negation. In opposition to these two visually mediated ways of relating to alterity, psychoanalysis advocates a non-theoreticist engagement with exteriority that rejects the primacy of vision. Even in its self-understanding, Freudian psychology privileges a metaphorically invisible object conceived as the text of the unconscious. It claims that much of human psychic life takes place below the threshold of what stands in the full view of consciousness and that the work of analysis consists in deciphering what is articulated by the analysand in order to reach the invisible script of the id.

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This process cannot be understood as an attempt to know and conquer the unconscious by fully illuminating its depths but rather as a way to teach those in analysis how to come to terms and live with the irreducible darkness of their psyches. Post-Romantic philosophy, like psychoanalysis, has inherited a nonhomogeneous tradition of reflection on seeing in such a way that it favours the shadows dwelling in vision. In his groundbreaking work Downcast Eyes, Martin Jay had already identified this theoretical shift from an unflinching faith in the promises of vision to a growing pessimism about sight: By the 1960s […] the antiocularcentric discourse became a pervasive, if not always coherent or self-consciously articulated feature of French intellectual tradition. Fueled by a politically inflected indictment of the dominant intellectual traditions and cultural practices of Western culture, it coalesced into a full-fledged attack not merely on ocularcentrism, but often on visuality in any and all of its forms. (327–8)

Jay persuasively stated that, particularly from the beginning of the twentieth century onwards, French philosophy became progressively disenchanted with vision as a means of acquiring knowledge and of relating to others. Drawing on Jay’s exhaustive work, I would argue that this development was not limited to French philosophy but has pervaded a great number of reflections on vision, not only in the philosophical but also in the literary arena. In the following pages, I focus on discourses linking a critique of vision with the formulation of an ethics that resists the reduction of the other to a phenomenon to be appropriated by sight and with a politics that tries to avert the traps of an all-encompassing gaze that levels and controls everyone in its field. Martin Heidegger was a foundational thinker in this critique of sight, in that he recoded vision and the theoreticism it betokens as a deficient mode of understanding things that should not be extended to the philosophical study of human beings. He suggests hearing as an alternative to the pitfalls of seeing, a position that is echoed by Jean-Luc Nancy. In the wake of Heidegger, Emmanuel Levinas highlights the significance of hearing in the ethical relation to the other, whose call enjoins one to respond to his needs. Similarly, Jacques Derrida conceives of the movement of phenomenality as inaccessible to vision, a spectral apparition of something inapparent that transforms the subject into an object of contemplation. At the same time, politics becomes a spectacularization

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of the ethical relation from the standpoint of the third, or a theatricalization of human action. This questioning of sight has led David Levin to propose a new kind of vision that would encompass not only light but also blindness and obscurity. In his magnum opus, Being and Time, Heidegger portrays vision as a deficient derivative of action. The two modes in which one can relate to things, the ready-to-hand and the present-at-hand, correspond to two kinds of seeing. The former is practically engaged in the world, in such a way that seeing and understanding are conditioned by a set of routinized habits (Heidegger, History 39). When this routine is disrupted, the disconnection between praxis and sight is experienced as paralyzing: ‘When we merely stare at something, our just-having-itbefore-us lies before us as a failure to understand it any more’ (Being 190). Pure vision, which gives rise to the category of present-at-hand, is a sterile, defective, and inactive way of being in the world. In an attempt to formulate a philosophy of praxis where sight would be dependent upon the exigencies of action, Heidegger criticizes the theoreticism that has dominated the history of Western thought up until Husserlian phenomenology. Embracing the category of the present-at-hand as the basis on which all beings ought to be understood, science and philosophy utilize the privative experience of mere looking, at the expense of the active engagement in the world that immediately understands what it sees. Therefore, ‘[w]hat is decisive in the “emergence” of the theoretical attitude would then lie in the disappearance of praxis’ (Being 409). Throughout the intellectual history presupposed by Heidegger, the ancient Greek origin of theooria is gradually rendered more passive, culminating in the ideal of the scientific standpoint withdrawn from the world of the everyday. Valorization of vision, thus, nourishes the fiction of transcendence, where the thinking subject is depicted as an external onlooker contemplating reality.36 Heidegger contends that the categories of presence-at-hand and readiness-to-hand are inadequate for the conception of a human being (Dasein) who does not exist in the same way as visible material things. That is why, in reference to a subject, vision as a mode of making-present must give way to hearing. Dasein’s relation to itself takes the form of hearing a call of conscience emanating from its futural self.37 It is only because human beings are never fully present to themselves before the moment of their death that self-relation is not given to vision but happens through hearing:

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If we analyze conscience more penetratingly, it is revealed as a call [Ruf]. Calling is a mode of discourse. The call of conscience has the character of an appeal to Dasein by calling it to its ownmost potentiality-for-Being-its-Self […] To the call of conscience there corresponds a possible hearing. (Being 314)

The invocation of conscience constitutes Dasein in that, contrary to vision, it allows one to relate to one’s different temporalities.38 Therefore, the ethical relation, which presupposes conscience, is experienced through hearing and supplies the ontological ground for subjectivity. Following Heidegger’s recovery of the sense of hearing, Jean-Luc Nancy further contrasts it to the presencing of vision. Nancy distances himself from a philosophical vocabulary that foregrounds forms understood, in the last instance, through categories of vision, and suggests re-imagining conceptuality on the basis of inflections in sound that would lead to the distension of form: ‘The sonorous, on the other hand, outweighs form. It does not dissolve it, but rather enlarges it; it gives it an amplitude, a density, and a vibration or an ondulation whose outline never does anything but approach’ (Listening 2). This breaching of boundaries affects the process of subject formation. Without explicitly citing Husserl on the vital role of the voice in self-affectation, Nancy claims that the sonorous is more attentive to subjective interiority, while sight remains tethered to its superficial manifestations: ‘Why, in the case of the ear, is there withdrawal and turning inward, a making resonant, but, in the case of the eye, there is manifestation and display, a making evident?’ (3). The movement of interiorization is not conceived on the model of the monadic closure of the subject; rather, the ear opens up psychic space unto itself as much as unto exteriority, whose intrusion lies beyond one’s control.39 This conception of subjectivity entails the existence of a primordial level of sociality at the core of the self. Any individual is at once a sonorous body for itself and a ‘listening body that, itself, resounds as it listens’ to the soundings of others (Nancy, Listening 40). Contrasting with visual stimuli, sound penetrates us from within and propagates itself from one body to the next: ‘The visual is tendentially mimetic, and the sonorous tendentially methexic (that is, having to do with participation, sharing, or contagion)’ (10). In this quotation, Nancy is delineating two diametrically opposed political arrangements. The first mimetic system presupposes the existence of an original that is subsequently reproduced ad infinitum. In its extreme incarnation, it would

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imply a totalitarian structure, where a leader, regarded as a universal subject, is replicated in each of his individual subjects. The other political model, predicated on sound, relies on methexis, which, in this case, is not understood traditionally as two or more individual beings partaking of a common substance but, instead, as potentially different or even diverging entities momentarily united in experiencing the same impulse, thus yielding an assemblage of singularities akin to Hardt and Negri’s notion of the ‘multitude.’ Here, sonorous reverberations parallel the circulation of affect that allows for the temporary coherence of otherwise disparate beings into a political subject. Such an agent is temporal through and through, in contrast to the spatially constructed and visually oriented subjectivity: ‘One might say: there is the simultaneity of the visible and the contemporaneity of the audible’ (Nancy, Listening 16). Its temporal dimension does not permit the agency fashioned through hearing to congeal into a stable substance; rather, it is a priori, manifold, and dispersed. Another appropriation of Heidegger’s call of conscience is its tranfiguration into the ethical call of the other by Emmanuel Levinas. For Levinas, what appeals to me is the exposedness and vulnerability of the other’s face that obligates me to come to her or his assistance. This expressive address emanates from a source that is not open to vision and, therefore, cannot be thematized as an image: ‘The way in which the other presents himself […] we here name face. This mode does not consist in figuring as a theme under my gaze, in spreading itself forth as a set of qualities forming an image’ (Totality 50). The invisibility of the face does not preclude an encounter with the other, which, positively understood, occurs in the modality of discourse. Although the call of the other is not formulated in empirical language, it functions as the precondition for signification, in that all speech requires the alterity of an interlocutor. Unlike an entity with a fixed set of qualities locked in an image, the other possesses an intentionality of her or his own that overflows my conceptual horizons. The impossibility of imagining the other harks back to the Judaic prohibition to represent God, which resulted in a ban on images, as the interiority of the other is, to some extent, a modification of the divinity that cannot be seen or known.40 This invisibility transcends the ontological order of being, given to sight and ideation through the exhibition of appearances: ‘What can this signification more ancient than exhibition mean? […] In exhibition, can it enter into another time than that of the historical present, which already annuls the past and its dia-chrony by re-presenting it?’

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(Collected 161).41 For Levinas, this signification older than what can be exhibited refers to the trace of the other, or the trace of God, which takes place in the immemorial past preceding consciousness and which cannot be rendered present without losing its uniqueness. Whereas the signification of the trace issues outside vision (for instance, in a discursive invocation), everything existing in the synchronicity of the ontological sphere may be visually represented. Thus, Levinasian ethical transcendence, striving for the invisible and the unrepresentable, follows a trajectory toward what is ‘otherwise than being,’ as the title of his second major book indicates. The aim of ethical transcendence is to come into the closest proximity to the other in what Levinas defines as the ‘straightforwardness’ of the face-to-face. This approximation is delineated in terms of metaphysical desire, whereby I infinitely approach the desired without hope of ever merging with it: The metaphysical desire […] desires beyond everything that can simply complete it […] Desire is absolute if the desiring being is mortal and the desired invisible. Invisibility does not denote an absence of relation: it implies relations with what is not given, of which there is no idea. Vision is an adequation of the idea with the thing, a comprehension that encompasses. (Totality 34)

The invisibility of the desired is conducive to ethics, in that the object of our desire escapes our grasp and efforts at controlling it; our conceptual and perceptual apparatuses are inadequate to encompass its radical alterity. Nonetheless, Levinas refuses to equate the non-givenness and invisibility of the other with absence and lack. Rather, he conceives of desire, in an anti-Hegelian fashion, as fullness and plentitude, since it can never exhaust the mystery of the other’s interiority. This impenetrable secrecy underlies all philosophical systems of explanation that run against it as an absolute limit and that are impotent to incorporate it into their world view. Instead of subsuming the singular invisibility of the other under the categories of thought, Levinas aims to make philosophy comply with it by redefining metaphysics: ‘To die for the invisible – this is metaphysics’ (Totality 35). Levinas invokes here the finitude of the desiring subject, who must be prepared for the ethical sacrifice for the sake of the invisible other, a sacrifice that will be the foundation for his thought, as well as for his reinterpretation of the political. In his early work, Levinas comprehends politics as a spectaculariza-

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tion of the ethical face-to-face relation from the standpoint of a ‘neutral’ third party that acts as an outside observer embodying the social. The gaze of the third party totalizes the scene of my approach to the other, turning the two terms in the relationship into a thesis-antithesis dyad: Thesis and antithesis, in repelling one another, call for one another. They appear in opposition to a synoptic gaze that encompasses them; they already form a totality which, by integrating the metaphysical transcendence expressed by the idea of infinity, relativizes it. An absolute transcendence has to be produced as non-integrateable. (Totality 53)

The dialectical logic that describes the detranscendentalization of ethics characterizes the political domain. Instead of representing two asymmetrical terms in the movement of metaphysical desire, the I and the other are positioned on the same plane of symbiotic opposition. The synoptic gaze of the third party functions as the synthesis in Hegelian terms, since it objectifies the subjective element and reconciles the standoff of the thesis and antithesis in the greater whole of the polity. Thus integrated under the gaze of the same beholder, the same and the other form a whole, which, according to Levinas, is the kernel of totalitarianism. Levinas’s conception of the political evolved as, in his later writings, he began to underscore the indispensability of the third party for any notion of justice. The relation to the other does not exclude the ‘other of the other,’ which stands for the social realm. On the one hand, the third is already intimated in the face of the other, in that the structure of discourse presupposes a language shared by a community. On the other hand, this inclusion harbours the aporia of comparing the incomparable: ‘There must be justice among incomparable ones. There must then be a comparison between incomparables and a synopsis, a togetherness and contemporaneousness’ (Otherwise 16). In other words, the encompassing gaze holds in a tense coexistence the absolute difference between singular subjects and the need to compare them in a social setting with the mediation of justice. Levinas expands his conception of the ethical to answer the demands of the political, which leads him to reintroduce synopsis, or a common vision into his theory. With this move, he risks lapsing back into a totalizing seeing, a peril inherent in the practice of justice. Levinas moderates this risk through his insistence on the temporal and disjointed dimension of the synoptic gaze and, in so doing, gives rise

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to something that might be understood as a contradiction in terms, namely, an ethical politics.42 This disjointed temporality of seeing, which could provide the model both for an ethical gaze and for a politics attuned to the singurality of its subjects, has been taken up by other philosophers influenced by the phenomenological tradition. Jacques Derrida developed this topic as early as his engagement with Husserl in Speech and Phenomena. For Husserl, ‘[d]espite all the complexity of its structures, temporality has a nondisplaceable center, an eye or living core, the punctuality of the real now’ (Derrida, Speech 62). According to Derrida, this Husserlian unblinking eye, conceived as the stable core underlying all ephemeral change, is a metaphor for the living present, that is, for the indefinite continuity of the moment. Yet, Derrida argues that this all-seeing, tirelessly vigilant organ is unable to sustain the ‘now’ in its purity and is forced to blink for a moment (Augenblick), temporarily losing its selfidentity. If it is to perpetuate itself, the living present must resort to repetition and re-presentation that relie on signs and inflect the instant of the ‘now’ with the past. It is here that ‘nonpresence and nonevidence are admitted into the blink of the instant. There is no duration to the blink, and it closes the eye’ (65), a closure connoting a momentary blindness that both disrupts vision and facilitates its continuation and renewal. The conjunction of presence and absence in the figure of the eye is a precursor of Derrida’s notions of the trace and différance. Breaking the uninterrupted flow of visual perception, the veils that are the eyelids play a role analogous to the irreducible contamination of the same with the other, speech with writing, and life with death. One instance of this blurring of boundaries is the notion of the spectre in Derrida’s work. The ghost is a living-dead apparition of the past that haunts the present and turns us into the objects of its regard while remaining concealed: One does not know if it [the spectre] is living, or if it is dead […] The Thing is still invisible, it is nothing visible […] Nor does one see in flesh and blood this Thing that is not a thing, this thing that is invisible between its apparitions, when it reappears. This Thing meanwhile looks at us and sees us not see it even when it is there. A spectral asymmetry interrupts here all specularity. It de-synchronizes, it recalls us to anachrony. We will call this the visor effect: we do not see who looks at us. (Specters 6–7)

Derrida is here analysing the character of the ghost in Shakespeare’s Hamlet in terms of the apparition of what is inapparent to our vision.

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The existence of this virtual entity is not exhausted by what presents itself to the eye; the ghost is still there, though in the mode of invisibility, ‘between its apparitions.’ The presence-absence of the spectre alludes to the figure of the trace as a remnant from the past, which, in this case, returns to perturb the linear progression of time. In Hamlet, time is ‘out of joint,’ an expression interpreted by Derrida in terms of the becoming-temporal of space, i.e., the desynchronization and the dissemination of the spatial totality. The ethical expression of this disjointure is the asymmetry in the relation between the revenant and those it disturbs. The interruption of the specular exchange uniting the two parties originates in a failure inherent in the vision of the haunted, which is exacerbated by the visor effect allowing the ghost to look at us without being seen. This cover hides a void, since the spectre is not there in actuality, and, at the same time, provides the only visible indication of its presence. As a consequence, there is no chance for building an intersubjective relation with the virtual thing, since one would not be able to reciprocate its gaze. In his analysis of spectrality, Derrida reverses the Husserlian model of intentionality, where a subject directs her or his mental regard to the intended object. Here, the traditional object (the ghostly Thing) becomes the subject of vision and contemplates my blindness to the virtual, an inversion that represents a re-description of Levinasian ethics from the perspective of the other (Marder, Event 41–2). The I who comes into the other’s field of vision becomes aware of its relative position vis-à-vis the ghost; the subject is, thus, decentered, since it is no longer the origin of perception and of the phenomenological world. Further, the other is now virtual, and I am no longer able to identify it concretely. The implicit overlap between the Derridian ghost and Levinas’s figure of alterity is that I cannot measure my proximity to the other, since I am blind to the contours of the spectre and am therefore condemned to an infinite approach, forever attempting to relate to an entity that escapes my grasp. But this flight of the ghost is not purely negative, in that it leaves in its wake a permanently unsatisfied desire for alterity, which prompts me to do all the more for the other. In keeping with Shakespeare’s play, where the apparition of Hamlet’s father raises the demand for justice, the spectre stands for the subject’s conscience. To respond to the ghostly injunction is to bear the ethical burden of boundless responsibility for the singularity of the other. If the revenant embodies absolute singularity, it is simultaneously

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a site of universality, given that anything or anyone could be dissimulated behind the visor. The ghost is both a unique apparition and a virtual placeholder for one or many entities. The first moment corresponds to the level of the ethical, while the second instance, predicated on multiplicity and universality, opens up the realm of the political. In Derrida’s Specters of Marx, the word ‘phantom’ is used to describe Hamlet’s father, as well as the ideal of communism, following the first lines of Marx’s Manifesto.43 The implicit question that resonates in this conjunction is how to inherit communism’s promise of freedom without reproducing the stricture of monarchical sovereignty. Ultimately, this is a question of social subject-formation taking place under the gaze of the ghostly thing that ‘looks at us’ and invests our subjectivity with its regard. The amorphous mass comes together as the object of this look and becomes a collective ‘we.’ Those who face the spectre are united both by the fact that they cannot see it and by their positionality as objects of the apparition’s sight, which registers their blindness. But this group does not become a stable, ontological unit, since the ghost that convokes them also desynchronizes their coexistence. This collectivity remains indeterminate and its internal unhinging opens the space for Derrida’s notion of democracy to-come that refers to the unconditional welcome extended to all foreignness.44 This futural democracy could never be fully actualized, because its concretion would exclude its ‘other’ and would, therefore, be tantamount to a totalizing politics. Analogous to the other, democracy to-come is not accessible to vision and, as a result, we are unable to gauge our distance or proximity to it. As such, this eschatological arrangement corresponds to an ethical politics, since it accommodates singularity in a sphere that exceeds the face-to-face relationship. Levinasian and Derridean reflections on seeing, ethics, and politics implicitly delineated a link between an instrumentalizing vision and the egotistic and self-absorbed subjectivity that stands at the core of the destructive political developments of the last century. This association between an all-encompassing gaze and totalitarian politics has been explicty formulated by Paul Virilio in his work The Vision Machine: Omnivoyance, Western Europe’s totalitarian ambition, may here appear as the formation of a whole image by repressing the invisible. And since all that appears, appears in light – the visible being merely the realityeffect of the response of a light-emission – we could say that the formation of a total image is the result of illumination. (33)

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Virilio concurs here with the Frankfurt School’s reading of the Enlightenment as a precursor of twentieth-century state violence in that, for him, the desire for total illumination implies a repression of the invisible and leads to what he defines as ‘omnivoyance,’ i.e., a wish for total domination. Such an indictment of a totalizing gaze, associated with a philosophical metaphysics of presence, is also described by David Levin who, in the wake of Levinas, Derrida, and Virilio, blames the Enlightenment’s emphasis on a reifying vision for the excesses of instrumental rationality at work in dictatorial political regimes: Our modernity comes in the wake of the Enlightenment: it is a form of consciousness, a reflexivity, that finds itself awakening […] not in a beautiful utopia, but in the horrors of an instrumental rationality gone mad […] Enlightenment must now be found concealed in the splinters of remaining light, in the ghostly shadows: for the philosopher thinking after metaphysics, there is at least as much to be learned from the presence of shadows as there is from the presence of light. (Philosopher’s Gaze 416)

Levin’s denunciation of a certain hyperrational and visually centred strand of the Enlightenment does not lead him to completely reject sight as a potentially ethical sense. Rather, he puts forth a new understanding of vision that is grounded on the experience of crying, and values not only the light but also darkness and shadows. Following Derrida’s Memoirs of the Blind, Levin suggests that crying lies at the root of a new kind of vision, since it associates sight with suffering and with the human ability to feel compassion (Opening 171 ff). The medium of crying – water – stands for the principle of contiguity and cohesion and opens up vision to a contact with exteriority. This experience entails the acknowledgment that seeing is closely related to touching and being touched: ‘To behold, is to be held by what one sees. To behold is, in this sense, to be also beheld’ (257). The vision propounded by Levin retains the memory of this primordial beholdenness, which contaminates the gaze of the self with the shadow of the other and, in so doing, touches one’s eyes and makes one cry. This vision attuned to darkness rejects the logic of identity and the tyranny of objectivity and welcomes contradictory or ambiguous significations. Levin finds an affinity between this form of seeing and the workings of justice and considers that such an approach to sight would not be seduced by the lure of authoritarianism’s univocality: ‘In a philosophical discourse crisscrossed by shadows, hospitable to multiple shades of meaning […] it would not be

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quite so easy to argue for a totalitarian politics’ (Philosopher’s Gaze 418). Only an eye that registers and values both light and shadows can be attentive to different interpretations and is capable of rejecting the onesided discourse of despotism. From classical Antiquity to contemporaneity, visual metaphors and concrete seeing have been linked not only to epistemology but also to a reflection on ethical relations and political structures. Even though in some historical periods, such as ancient Greece, vision played a central role in the cultural arena, it ineluctably entailed its obverse in the shape of shadows, darkness, and blindness. Late modernity represented a point of reversal of this trend, in that the underside of seeing came to be valorized as a way of resisting a traditionally dominating gaze that appropriated everything in its field. Further, the emphasis on blindness and obscurity signified an acceptance of human finitude and prompted the recoding of these tropes not as mere negativity and absence of light, but as a possibility for a non-intrusive, ethical approach to exteriority and for an inclusive politics. This understanding of vision goes beyond contemporary philosophy and also underlies many literary and artistic creations from the nineteenth century onwards. In the case of literature and art that address the topic of political oppression, darkness and blindness are frequently portrayed as a source of resistance to the overarching gaze of dictatorial political regimes and become enabling conditions of possibility for a rethinking of existing socio-political structures and for imagining new forms of collective life.

2 Darkness and the Animal in Graciliano Ramos’s Memórias do Cárcere (Memoirs of Prison)

In seinem In-sich-gehen ist er in der Nacht seines Selbstbewußtseins versunken, sein verschwundnes Dasein aber ist in ihr aufbewahet, und dies aufgehobne Dasein – das vorige, aber aus dem Wissen neugeborne – ist das neue Dasein, eine neue Welt und Geistesgestalt. Hegel, Phänomenologie des Geistes1

Darkness envelops the direst steps of Graciliano Ramos’s (1892–1953) autobiographical text Memórias do Cárcere (Memoirs of Prison).2 Published posthumously in 1953, the narrative depicts the author’s incarceration between March 1936 and January 1937, during the populist government of Getúlio Vargas in Brazil, under the accusation of supporting a communist rebellion.3 In his text, Graciliano frequently describes the obscurity that characterized his prison environment, an inability to see that was often conjoined with the inmates’ figurative acquisition of animal features that denoted the erasure of their humanity by the authorities. Prisoners were thrust into a dusky limbo, moving on the borderline between the human and its contrary, in a realm of pure negativity. This is the locus of exclusion that Graciliano inhabited, as he contemplated the dismemberment of his subjectivity and became an animal-like shadow, simultaneously super- and subhuman. It was paradoxically in the midst of this dispersion, from the depths of darkness, that the protagonist’s political views began to coalesce and take shape as he started working on his autobiography. 2.1 Darkness in a State of Emergency In the various stages of his emprisonment, the protagonist of Memórias

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do Cárcere is often placed in a foggy or dark environment, where everything around him becomes unfocused.4 This imposed blindness usually goes hand in hand with the degrading circumstances of incarceration. In fact, darkness is the marker of the state of exception, which allowed the Brazilian government to disregard basic human rights when dealing with political prisoners. The centrality of darkness in Memórias comes to the fore early in the narrative. Obscurity is a key element in the description of the trip aboard the Manaus, undertaken shortly after Graciliano’s arrest, and during which he was transported with about 115 other detainees between Recife and Rio de Janeiro. The voyage was accompanied by an alteration in the visual stimuli available to the author. If, in his former prison wards, shadows had contrasted with the brightness of jail illumination, this is the first moment in the narrative when light completely fades and the writer is wholly overwhelmed by darkness.5 In the narration of his stay aboard the Manaus Graciliano conjured up a nightmarish description of life on the ship, with allusions to the Middle Passage – the journey of African slaves transported to the Americas – where inmates, enclosed for days in the very limited space of a single compartment, lost their individual contours in a thick foggy obscurity: Lá fora anoitecera; ali duvidaríamos se era dia ou noite. Havia luzes toldadas por espesso nevoeiro: uma escuridão branca […] Desviando-me deles tentei sondar a bruma cheia de trevas luminosas. Idéia absurda, que ainda hoje persiste e me parece razoável: trevas luminosas. Havia muitas lâmpadas penduradas no teto baixo, ali ao alcance da mão, aparentemente, mas eram como luas de inverno, boiando na grossa neblina. (I, 124) (Outside night had fallen; in there, we did not know if it was day or night. There were lights clouded by a thick fog: a white obscurity […] Moving away from these, I tried to scan the haze, full of luminous darkness. It was an absurd idea that persists to this day and still seems reasonable to me: luminous darkness. There were many lamps hanging from the low ceiling, seemingly at arm’s reach, but they were like winter moons, floating in the heavy fog.)6

Night and day turn into meaningless categories on the ship. The brightness emanating from the light bulbs hanging from the ceiling drowns in the gloom caused by a dense fog. Graciliano’s reduced field of vision is not a result of lack of light but of the haze generated by the breathing of the numerous inmates, kept in the filthy hold of the vessel. Ironically,

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the move to the country’s capital coincides with the complete suppression of any rights the political prisoners might have possessed. The writer’s forced voyage to the south, from Alagoas to Rio, is therefore presented as a regression during which he is transformed from a citizen into little more than his corporeal self (I, 124). The author’s portrayal of lack of light aboard the Manaus echoes Plato’s depiction of the inhabitants of the cave in The Republic. Similar to their Greek counterparts, Brazilian prisoners were enclosed in a dark space below the surface, in the hold of the ship. They could discern only shadows since clarity, located above them, was a privilege of the ones who were free. Obscurity is thus linked in both texts with an infrahuman status, where people subsist in ‘a day that is like night’ (Plato, Republic 521c). However, there is a crucial divergence that severs the two spaces: while, in the Platonic parable, cave-dwellers were able to set themselves free, in Graciliano’s narrative they were purposefully kept in the dark by others. For Plato, who places himself outside the cave, truth resides in light. It is the task of the philosopher, who has acquired knowledge, to descend back into darkness and aid his fellow human beings in leaving shadows behind. In Memórias, on the contrary, the author is himself inside the cave and knowledge does not pertain to the ones who dwell in the light. Brightness illuminates the deck of the ship, where the passengers of the Manaus pitilessly look down at the prisoners and mix with the police officers guarding them. A dim clarity also originates in the light bulbs located in the hold of the vessel, which stand for the inmates’ permanent invigilation. These produce the luminous darkness that made such a strong impression on the writer, as described in the excerpt quoted above. It therefore becomes clear that, unlike in Platonic texts, light does not function here as a marker of truth. Wisdom may not be the apanage of those suffering in the metaphorical cave, but it also does not lie outside it. Graciliano thus spun a reversal of the Platonic myth, muddling the neat distinction between the positive connotations of light and the shadows of nescient darkness. In spite of the obscurity that characterizes prison life, the narrator does not propound light as a panacea for the detainees’ predicament. The writer unmasks the deliverance traditionally connoting brightness and obfuscates clarity’s virtues. Light, invariably associated with the ones in power in Memórias, is rejected as the author adheres to the dark fortunes of his fellow inmates. Graciliano adopts the classical association of darkness with a subhu-

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man condition but he distances himself from a tradition of thought that linked seeing and light with the good, in that he valorizes obscurity as a marker of the distance between the prisoners and the authorities. The narrator sides in this respect with late modern thinkers, who have undertaken a theoretical valorization of obscurity and blindness both in ethical and in aesthetic discourses. In terms of his representation of darkness, Graciliano occupies a threshold between two different conceptions of the visual, a situation that is in tune with the rest of his literary production, where he often moves between different paradigms. For instance, the writer’s narrative style inherits techniques lingering in Brazilian literature from the nineteeth century and combines these with more modern forms of narration. In his groundbreaking essay on the writer, ‘Ficção e Confissão’ (‘Fiction and Confession’), Antônio Candido states that the author’s first novel, Caetés, still shares a numbers of traits with realist and naturalistic aesthetics, while the ulterior texts distance themselves from this heritage and tend to underscore the instability of the first-person narrator (14–23).7 Thus placed on the brink of Brazilian literary modernity, the art of Graciliano permanently stands outside of itself, constantly moving beyond the tenets of previous works. His portrayal of darkness, indebted to both classic and late modern discourses on vision, can therefore be read in the context of his liminal position between tradition and contemporaneity. The Platonic coupling of obscurity and dehumanization in Memórias resurfaces in the depiction of the final stage in the author’s process of degradation. This occurs with his move from the Primary Pavilion, where he was held in Rio, to the Penal Colony, located on the Ilha Grande. Here, darkness underlies both the move to the new place of detention, portending the abominations to come, and the subsequent daily life in the Colony.8 The trip begins at night, before the break of dawn. In the back of a truck, the author discerns the other prisoners only when street lighting penetrates the vehicle through holes in its walls: Mas com semelhante azáfama, afundáramos à toa no buraco sombrio, éramos uma confusão de membros e pacotes […] Cercavam-nos trevas cheias de manchas luminosas. As paredes do carro eram crivadas de furos redondos, as luzes da rua entravam por eles, corriam em dança louca, punham traços vivos e inconstantes nas figuras em redor, e isto me dava a impressão de ver gente incompleta, pedaços humanos, olhos, bocas, orelhas, a aparecer e desaparecer continuadamente. (II, 32)

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Immersed in darkness and illuminated only by fleeting streetlights, the inmates appear to the author as incomplete people, stripped of their subjectivity. They become reduced not even to their body but only to certain elements of it. Graciliano mentions the eyes, mouths and ears – the organs of the senses – as the details he was able to glimpse. This underscores the debasement of the prisoners, who are viewed as sentient part-objects, merely capable of passively experiencing pain. Even though the author observes only disjointed components of his fellow-detainees’ bodies, he does not assume the position of an abstract outside spectator commenting on the dispersion of others. In fact, Graciliano repeatedly states that imprisonment triggered in him a process of fragmentation, both at a physical and at a psychological level. Numerous passages in the text attest to the deterioration of his health: he smokes constantly, often feels nauseated, experiences a chronic lack of appetite, and ends up suffering from a hemorrhage in the intestines. These symptoms are accompanied by the writer’s questioning of his sanity. His reflections on madness are, again, stated in terms of obscurity: ‘convenci-me de que estava doido […] Recusa dos factos evidentes, sombras, lacunas […] a convicção de que nos vamos achegando, passo a passo, da treva completa […] Julgo na verdade que estivesse doido’ (I, 132, emphasis added) (I convinced myself that I was mad […] I refused obvious fact, shadows, lacunae […] the conviction that, step by step, we are getting close to complete darkness. I truly believe that I was mad). Such mental dissolution renders Graciliano unable to perform the most elementary task of self-recognition: ‘Eu mesmo era um desconhecido agora, diluía-me, tentava debalde encontrar-me, perdido entre aquelas sombras’ (II, 44, emphasis added) (I was a foreigner to myself now; I was getting diluted; I tried in vain to find myself, lost among those shadows). He becomes just another shadow in a group of incomplete people. The progressive fragmentation of the author’s self in the darkness of prison life stands in a directly proportional relationship to the increas-

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ing depersonalization brought about by incarceration. Shortly after his arrest, Graciliano realizes that he has ceased to be considered an individual with a certain number of fundamental rights: ‘Essa vaidade tola devia basear-se na suposição de que exergariam em mim um indivíduo, com certo número de direitos. Logo ao chegar, notei que me despersonalizavam’ (I, 52) (That foolish vanity was probably based on the supposition that they would see me as an individual, with a certain number of rights. As soon as I arrived, I noticed that they depersonalized me).9 At this point, the author longs for the trappings of legal bureaucracy, which would lend him at least the illusion of justice: ‘Porque não figuramos em autos, não arranjavam depoimentos, embora falsos, num simulacro de justiça? […] Suprimiam-nos assim todos os direitos, os últimos vestígios deles’ (I, 88) (Why don’t we show in legal reports, why did they not collect statements, however false, in a simulacrum of justice? […] They thus suppressed all our rights, the last remnants of these rights).10 Political prisoners are placed in a limbo outside the rules that apply to other citizens, a necessary condition for their elimination from a society that fears contamination by their leftist creed.11 This erosion of the inmates’ individuality is emphasized in the Penal Colony by the replacement of their name with a number, a system that was to become infamous in connection with Nazi Germany’s concentration camps: ‘O seu número é 35.35, anunciou. Fiquei um momento absorto, pouco a pouco me inteirei da supressão do meu nome, substituído por quatro algarismos’ (II, 75) (Your number is 35.35, he announced. I was confused, for a moment; little by little I became aware of the suppression of my name, which had been replaced by four digits). The authorities’ last semblance of humanity vanishes when detainees are bluntly told that they are incarcerated in order to be annihilated: ‘Aqui não há direito. Escutem. Nenhum direito […] Vocês não vêm corrigir-se, estão ouvindo? Não vêm corrigir-se: vêm morrer’(II, 69) (There are no rights here. Listen. No rights […] You are not here to mend your ways, are you listening? You are not here to mend your ways: you are here to die). Prisoners are systematically reduced to parts of their corporeal being, such as a number on their arm, a process that should culminate in the ultimate loss of identity represented by death, where they would literally become only a body, a corpse. In his dark path through the various Brazilian prisons, ending in the Penal Colony, Graciliano is transfigured into what Giorgio Agamben would describe as ‘homo sacer,’ a term used in Roman law to designate someone who has been stripped of his citizen rights and condemned

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to death (Means 22).12 Agamben argues that this status is attributed to a person who is no longer viewed as a thinking ‘form-of-life’ but only as ‘naked life,’ i.e., as a purely biological entity (3–4).13 In an adaptation of the Heideggerian Dasein, Agamben defines a human being as ‘a life for which what is at stake in its way of living is living itself […] a life – human life – in which the single ways, acts, and processes of living are never simply facts but always and above all possibilities of life, always and above all power’ (4).14 It takes a state of exception to rob humans of their possibilities as ‘forms-of life’ and turn them into ‘naked life,’ defined by necessity. In a state of exception, human beings become pure actuality, always already enacted. Community is foreclosed since the exception, which is a type of exclusion, eliminates individuals, who alone are capable of sociality (Agamben, Homo Sacer 17). Agamben derives the concept of the ‘state of exception’ from the work of political philosopher Carl Schmitt, who defined it as characteristic of a dictatorship, i.e., a political organization that subtracts itself from the previously existing juridical order and constitutes a space exterior to the law (State 32–3).15 Following Schmitt, Agamben argues that the origin of the state of exception is not only dictatorships but also the state of emergency or the state of siege declared by the sovereign when the polity appears to be endangered. It is this departure from the established legality that rendered the existence of concentration camps possible; the juridical foundation of the Nazi camps was, for instance, the Prussian legislation on the state of siege.16 The camp is thus the space of pure actualization of human beings into ‘naked life’: Inasmuch as its inhabitants have been stripped of every political status and reduced completely to naked life, the camp is also the most absolute biopolitical space that has ever been realized – a space in which power confronts nothing other than pure biological life without any mediation. The camp is the paradigm itself of political space at the point in which politics becomes biopolitics and the homo sacer becomes indistinguishable from the citizen. (Means 41)

The cave-like hold of the Manaus, where Graciliano travelled to Rio de Janeiro, can be read as the prototype of a camp, since prisoners were stripped of their prerogatives as citizens with certain rights, and reduced to their biological selves. By the same token, the darkness of the Penal Colony, to which the writer was transferred later, is also the realm of ‘naked life.’ Isolated from the rest of society by its location on a scarcely inhabited island, the Colony was an alluvium where the

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authorities sent society’s waste, political prisoners and common thieves alike. Once in that zone outside legal space, inmates lost their identity and, in the words of their guards, could hope only for death. If obscurity and fragmentation in Memórias accompany the treatment of prisoners as ‘naked life’ in camp-like conditions, then this situation was rendered possible by virtue of an event in Brazilian politics of the time that led to a de facto state of exception. After the uprising of the leftist Aliança Nacional Libertadora (National Alliance for Freedom) in 1935, Brazilian president Getúlio Vargas, who had come to power by staging a military coup, was able to persuade Congress to declare a state of emergency. The revolt was speedily crushed at its three military bases in Natal, Recife, and Rio de Janeiro. More lasting, however, was the suspension of civil rights justified by the president as a means of protection against a presumed Bolshevik threat (see Skidmore, Brazil 112). It was this climate of repression that led to the arrest of Graciliano Ramos and countless other citizens. Vargas was able to continue renewing the 90-day state of emergency for the next two years, a time during which the government enjoyed unlimited policing power.17 The incarceration of political prisoners was therefore the result of a generalized state of exception. The fashion in which detainees were handled both aboard the Manaus and in the Penal Colony was thus an exception within the exception, a case of lawlessness in a broader structural suspension of the law. According to Agamben, one of the attributes of the state of exception is the contiguity arising between the police apparatus and sovereignty, in that the police go beyond their administrative function of law enforcement and take the task of defining what is legal upon themselves (Means 104).18 Memórias documents numerous such situations, in which the police overstepped their boundaries and created their own laws.19 Aggressions perpetrated by the police force were frequent: detainees endured beatings and other abuse in the Penal Colony and torture was a common way to deal with prisoners. But the impunity of any action undertaken by the authorities was experienced by Graciliano at its starkest when a policeman pointed a gun at his back while he was boarding the Manaus: ‘Ao pisar o primeiro degrau senti um objecto roçar-me as costas […] Um instante duvidei dos meus olhos, julgueime vítima de alucinação’ (I, 123) (When I stepped on the first step I felt an object touching my back […] For a moment I doubted my eyes, I thought I had been the victim of a hallucination). This passage might be pinpointed as the moment when the author understood that he was

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entirely at the mercy of his henchmen. Still, as he points out in his text, Graciliano soon realized that, even though the detainees were utterly defenceless, the perpetuation of the Vargas regime obliquely depended upon them. The goal underlying the brutal reppression of dissent during the Vargas government was to instill fear of political upheaval in the Brazilian population … as Graciliano states in numerous passages throughout his narrative. The author considers that he and many of his fellow inmates would have been incapable of participating in a revolution and sees his incarceration as a governmental tactic to curtail social unrest and to justify the existence of a powerful police apparatus: ‘Eu não era capaz de jogar bombas, sublevar quartéis. Estava ali apenas para dar ao burguês a impressão de que havia muitos elementos perniciosos e o capital corria perigo’ (I, 106) (I was not capable of throwing bombs, of leading barracks to sedition. I was there only to give the burgeois the impression that there were many pernicious elements and that capital was in danger). Political detainees were thus vacillating between two seemingly incompatible roles: that of pernicious and dangerous social elements, in the government’s view and in the parlance of the press it controlled; and that of puppets constituting a pretext for an increased concentration of unchecked power in the hands of the authorities.20 The incarceration of numerous citizens appears, then, to have been a necessary instrument for the government to rein in the entire country. Graciliano’s reflections on the role of prisoners during the Vargas regime echo Agamben’s claim that ‘naked life,’ here represented by the inmates, forms the core of sovereignty. As Agamben puts it: ‘The puissance absolue et perpétuelle, which defines state power, is not founded – in the last instance – on a political will but rather on naked life ’ (Means 5). It is the fact that the sovereign is entitled to decide upon the life and death of those who are reduced to ‘naked life’ that lends him his power. Consequently, sovereignty depends on the state of emergency in that it occupies, like the exception, a place outside the law. It is from this position that it both institutes the law and derives the power to enforce it. The state of exception is the hidden core of power and it constitutes the fundamental structure of the legal system. According to Agamben, the task is not to reaffirm the primacy of the norms that are grounded in the sovereignty derived from the state of exception but to problematize legality altogether: ‘To show law in its nonrelation to life and life in its nonrelation to law means to open a space between them for human action, which once claimed for itself the name of “politics”’ (State 88).

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Agamben wishes to detach legality from its dependence on ‘naked life’ and seems to be making a gesture toward a post-juridical world, to a law beyond the law, which would be closer to justice.21 Graciliano’s account of his imprisonment appears to validate many tenets of Agamben’s theorization of the concept of ‘naked life’ as it bears upon sovereignty. Yet, one would need to add a few caveats. First, Agamben believes that the camp-like circumstances prevalent in the state of exception have become the norm in our world, while Memórias exemplifies the untenablility of such a position (Means 6). Even though sovereignty might share a certain emphasis on lawlessness with the state of emergency, asserting that ‘naked-life’ has become the rule would banalize an ordeal such as the one Graciliano went through. The author’s imprisonment cannot be compared to the fate of those Brazilians who remained free under Vargas or to present-day conditions in democratic societies, and the protagonist’s narrative testimony bespeaks the uniqueness of his experience. Another point of divergence has to do with the definition of sovereign power. Agamben presupposes the existence of a clearly defined sovereign authority, as well as a direct causal relation between this authority and its effects. However, Memórias demonstrates that one cannot identify sovereignty with any structured entity. On countless occasions in the narrative the writer or other prisoners ask themselves about the rationale behind the actions of the authorities: ‘Essas trapalhadas [the ordeals the author went through] obedeciam certamente a um plano; em vão me esforçava por entendê-las e propendia a julgá-las estúpidas’ (I, 343) (These mix-ups [the ordeals the author went through] certainly followed a plan; I tried in vain to understand them and I tended to find them stupid). The guards either help or abuse prisoners without any apparent reason to act that way, while some inmates, like the sailor Tiago, have been arrested by mistake.22 Sovereignty is presented as unstructured and seems to be as fragmented as the detainees themselves. At points, the authorities seem almost clownish, and there appears to be no clear connection between the goals of the government and its concrete actions. In Graciliano’s account, the Vargas regime thus incarnates the quintessential modern condition of being incapable of tracing disparate effects back to an originary and cogent root. A third consequence issuing from the juxtaposition of Memórias and Agamben’s notion of sovereignty would be a reevaluation of the meaning attributed to the state of exception. The condition of ‘naked life’ in the state of emergency is associated for Graciliano with darkness, while

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sovereignty is linked to light, both in the author’s narrative and in traditional political discourse dating back, at least, to the image of Louis XIV, the French Sun King. Both Agamben and Graciliano criticize the overarching domination of sovereign power and, in the case of the Brazilian writer, of the authorities whose task it is to enforce it. Yet, while Agamben devalues the state of exception as a sphere of pure negativity, Graciliano’s stance is more nuanced. The author describes himself and his fellow inmates as occupying a position of utter defencelessness or, if we want, of complete receptivity. If sovereign power stands for the abolition of possibility, the darkness of ‘naked life’ represents for the protagonist of Memórias an alternative to totalizing light. Even in the darkness of the state of exception, in a condition of absolute animality, there remains a possibility for thought, which is, for Graciliano, the very meaning of resistance. 2.2 The Ghost of the Animal Darkness and the blindness ensuing from it in Memórias do Cárcere accompany the prisoners’ withdrawal from society into a realm where the everyday parameters of communal living no longer apply. If, following Aristotle, human beings are to be defined as political animals (Aristotle, Politics 1253a, 3), obscurity signals the loss of the inmates’ political and societal veneer and their return to pure animality. Similar to animals, detainees see nothing but their most pressing physical needs and their immediate environment. However, Graciliano does not fully subscribe to the Ancient Greek compartmentalization of humans into a natural and a social self, the former serving as a basis for the latter. On the contrary, it is in the depth of blind animality that the protagonist regains a political voice by means of an urge to put his experiences into writing. Throughout the narration of his time in prison, the author falls back, time and again, into figurative descriptions involving animals. He portrays himself and his fellow-prisoners, at different points, as mice (I, 192), as birds or chickens (I, 253), as insects such as flies (I, 333), bees (II, 62) or cockroaches (II, 78), as mad dogs (II, 90), and so on.23 This preponderance of animal imagery cannot be regarded as a coincidental usage of a rhetorical device. Rather, it emphasizes Graciliano’s conviction that, while in prison, inmates dropped social conventions and regressed to a semi-natural condition. A change in the outer appearance is the first sign of this transformation. Aboard the Manaus, sev-

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eral detainees removed their clothes due to the heat. Likewise, in the Primary Pavilion, prisoners reduced their attire to a bare minimum, wearing mostly their pajamas or underwear, and often even forgot to put something on (I, 234–5). The author considers that these customs abolish the distinction between the public and the private: ‘Embora usando pijamas e cuecas, vivíamos em público, éramos obrigados a familiarizar-nos com indivíduos muito diferentes de nós’ (I, 256) (Even though we wore pajamas and underwear, we lived in public, and we were forced to familiarize ourselves with individuals who were very different from us).24 Although Graciliano is forced to take up some of these habits out of necessity, he does not condone them, since he views the conflation of the public and private spheres as a giving in to the animal-like conditions imposed upon him by the authorities. The animal, like some of the prisoners, is not conscious of rules and thus displays complete indifference vis-à-vis these codes of conduct: ‘Não se notava ali desprezo à opinião pública: notava-se indiferença perfeita. O animal [a naked man aboard the Manaus] nem tinha consciência de que nos ofendia’ (I, 30, emphasis added) (One could not detect there a disdain for public opinion: there was perfect indifference. The animal [a naked man aboard the Manaus] was not even conscious of the fact that he was offending us). The author’s attachment to societal precepts and his desire to shore up the edifice of his public persona are a reaction against the demeaning situation resulting from incarceration. The most prevalent image of the political prisoners’ transmutation into animals in Memórias is their metaphorical rendering as cattle. This allegorical depiction includes the author, who frequently portrays himself as part of a herd: Era como se fôssemos gado e nos empurrassem para dentro de um banheiro carrapaticida. Resvaláramos até ali, não podíamos recuar, obrigavamnos ao mergulho. Simples rebanho, apenas, rebanho gafento, na opinião de nossos proprietários, necessitando creolina. Os vaqueiros, armados e fardados, se impacientavam […] Agora já não éramos pequeno rebanho a escorregar num declive: constituíamos boiada numerosa; à idéia do banheiro carrapaticida sucedeu a de um vasto curral. (I, 124) (It was as if we were cattle and were being pushed into a bath to get rid of parasites. We had slid to that point and were unable to go back; we were forced to plunge. We were only a simple herd, a parasite-ridden herd, in the opinion of our owners; we needed cleansing. The herdsmen, armed

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Seeing Politics Otherwise and in uniforms, grew impatient […] Now, we were no longer a small herd going down a slope: our numbers grew into a large herd; the image of a bath to get rid of parasites was replaced by that of a vast pen.)

Here, the distinctive features of the writer and of the various detainees are no longer described in terms of specific animals but all inmates are amalgamated in an undifferentiated whole. Devoid of individuality, prisoners resemble cattle enclosed in a pen. This is a recurrent image in the text and it resurfaces in the representation of the Penal Colony, which is commonly portrayed as a ‘cattle pen made of barbed wire’, so as to emphasize the reduction of detainees to an animal-like state (II, 17). In this passage, it is noteworthy that the herd is being led by cowmen, who push the cattle into a purifying bath that would wash away noxious parasites. This symbolic washing corresponds to the authorities’ desire to cleanse the prisoners of their dangerous political ideas. The behaviour of the ‘cowmen,’ armed and impatient, seems to lead inmates not so much into a bath but into animality itself. Their immersion in water evokes an image of complete oblivion, in that all remnants of personhood will be erased. Prisoners were enjoined to forget their past political allegiances and to adhere unquestioningly to Vargas’s populist government. The total forgetfulness of their past prescribed for political prisoners is, according to Friedrich Nietzsche, the defining characteristic of the animal. For the philosopher, the lives of animals are fully contained in a present devoid of memory and are, therefore, completely unhistorical (‘On the Uses’ 61). The animal can be characterized as pure immanence, which is often defined in terms of immersion both in water and in darkness. Georges Bataille, following Nietzsche, sees animality as immediacy without time, in that ‘nothing is posited beyond the present’ (Theory 18). The animal knows no power and no subordination, since its mode of existence precedes the emergence of these categories. It does not relate to or act upon its surroundings and is thus incapable of transcendence, a perquisite of humanity. Bataille understands this condition in terms of the merging of the animal with its milieu: ‘every animal is in the world like water in water’ (19). Such absence of distance between the animal and its world is often defined in terms of lack of vision: In picturing the universe without man, a universe in which only the animal’s gaze would be opened to things, the animal being neither a thing

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nor a man, we can only call up a vision in which we see nothing […] There was no landscape in a world where the eyes that opened did not apprehend what they looked at, where, indeed, in our terms, the eyes did not see […] in my mind’s confusion, stupidly contemplating that absence of vision, I begin to say: ‘There was no vision, there was nothing.’ (Theory 21, bold added)

The animal gaze is blind in its complete openness to things. Paradoxically, the animal sees without seeing, since it does not undergo the split between subject and object traditionally posited as a precondition for vision. In this context, sight metonymically stands for the ability to relate to and apprehend the world. Since animals adhere completely to their environment, they do not perceive it as something external, which makes them incapable of differentiating between themselves and others and, therefore, unable to experience individuality. For Bataille, man represents a fall from animality, since human beings have lost their intimate connection with the world. The history of humanity is a progressive move from immanent animality into the realm of transcendence, a transformation that brought about the emergence of a conscious I. The challenge for men is to mediate between the two extremes of immanence and transcendence: ‘But if man surrendered unreservedly to immanence, he would fall short of humanity […] The constant problem [is] posed by the impossibility of being human without being a thing and of escaping the limits of things without returning to animal slumber’ (Theory 53). In Memórias do Cárcere, Graciliano describes a dilemma similar to the one delineated by Bataille in that he focuses on the shifting borders separating animality and humanity. Yet, while Bataille wishes that humanity would be more integrated with its surroundings, following the model of animal life, Graciliano’s narrative portrays the political prisoners’ forced retreat into the night of animality, where they are reduced to the contingencies of the environment and lose their individual traits, becoming like cattle in a herd. The challenge faced by inmates such as Graciliano is to recover their humanity without simply falling back into the situation of their henchman, who contemplate them from a position of absolute transcendence. The figure of the animal, arrested in an immanent communion with the world, does not emerge in Graciliano’s text as an undifferentiated entity but, rather, appears in various contexts and materializes with multiple gradations. The most frequent distinction established in the narrative is that between the Portuguese words ‘bicho’ and ‘animal,’

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both translating as ‘animal’ in English.25 The expression ‘bicho’ tends to express a sense of powerlessness already conveyed in Luís de Camões’s celebrated characterization of man as ‘um bicho da terra tão pequeno’ (an animal [bicho] from the earth so small) (Lusíadas I, 106, my translation). Graciliano utilizes the word to impart the impotence and helplessness of the detainees: ‘na verdade, éramos bichos bem mesquinhos. Todos bichos’ (II, 35) (in truth, we were very insignificant animals [bichos]. All of us animals [bichos]). ‘Animal,’ on the other hand, often approximates the English word ‘beast’ and usually connotes an unstable, sometimes aggressive, behaviour.26 In some passages, it is used in relation to the hostility of the military or the policemen responsible for guarding the prisoners.27 In other moments, it refers to the detainees, particularly at times when they act in a violent manner or otherwise move away from what would be socially acceptable: ‘Às vezes não queremos saber se nos comportamos bem ou mal; […] a violência animal nos impele e domina’ (I, 294, emphasis added) (Sometimes we don’t care whether we behave in a good or in a bad way; […] animal [animal] violence incites us and dominates us).28 For the author, the ‘animal’ seems to represent the inmates’ departure from the human, a condition that corresponds to Bataille’s immanent being ‘like water in water.’ Here, the separation between man and beast, good and evil, public and private ceases to exist. In the case of the ‘bicho,’ these distinctions do not appear to be forgotten but the circumstances render the detainees incapable of fully upholding such categories. The prisoner as ‘bicho’ is the passive animal, always on the verge of suffering another blow, and thus unable to reach transcendence, which exists for him only as an impossible longing. Imprisonment undoes Bataille’s clear-cut categories of the human and the animal and creates the human-bicho, where immanence and transcendence intersect.29 In his Theory of Religion, Bataille suggests that writing could provide a provisional solution for the divide between obscure animal intimacy with the world and human transcendence, in that poetry is the only manner of accessing the state of immanence that characterizes the animal (21). Similarly, Graciliano’s human-‘bicho’ resorts to writing as an expression of the mediation between humanity and animality. But while Bataille finds in writing the potential for liberating humans from the bonds of transcendence, Graciliano’s approach is more nuanced. Contrary to Bataille, he portrays writing as a gesture that emancipates him from the sleep of animality, affording him an ephemeral moment of individuation in the midst of the constraints of incarceration, but he

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also considers it to be a way to relate to his surroundings and to establish a bond with his fellow-prisoners. From the moment when he learns about his impending arrest, Graciliano starts fantasizing about his stay in prison as a period during which he could continue to dedicate himself to literature. Free from social constraints, he would possess the liberty to work on his writing projects full time (I, 45–6). When he comes into contact with the harsh reality of jail, however, the author realizes the naivety of his former intent. Nevertheless, he perseveres in his resolve to write. He alters his subject matter, abandoning the idea of revising the novel he had been working on, and embarks on the composition of scattered notes about the events he goes through and the people he meets, in the hope of later turning them into a cohesive narrative: ‘De qualquer jeito, me apresentariam [in prison] sociedade nova, me proporcionariam elementos para redigir qualquer coisa menos inútil que os dois volumes chochos encalhados nas prateleiras dos editores’ (I, 97) (In any case, I would be introduced [in prison] to a new society, which would give me material to write something less useless than my two dull volumes stuck in the shelves of the publishers). For Graciliano, the writing process always takes place in isolation and, even aboard the Manaus or in the Penal Colony, the author manages to find a location away from the ‘herd’ of the other inmates in order to put down his thoughts on paper.30 This physical distancing is a concrete expression of the minimal detachment of the writer from his subject-matter that creation necessarily entails. In addition, the notes become a prosthetic memory of the ordeals he goes through and, therefore, a form of reaction against the forgetfulness characteristic of the animal. Memórias is rich in references to the novels Graciliano Ramos had written before his imprisonment. As Hermenegildo Bastos points out, the writer’s previous works can be read through the lenses of the remarks amassed in his autobiography (16). These comments are consistently demeaning: ‘dois livros de fôlego curto haviam despertado fraco interesse e alguma condescendência desdenhosa. Era um rabiscador provinciano, detestado na província, ignorado na metrópole’ (I, 97) (two short books had given rise to feeble interest and some disdainful condescendence. I was a provincial scribbler, hated in the countryside and ignored in the metropolis). If the writer criticizes his previously published work, he feels even more strongly about Angústia (Anguish), the novel he had been working on at the time of his incarceration. The need to rewrite this text, which comes out without his final revisions

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while he is in jail, persists in the author’s mind throughout his periplus. This uneasy relationship to his writings comes through in Graciliano’s reflections about his prison notes. In fact, the allusions to the records he composes are invariably charged with frustration: A minha decisão de traçar um diário encolhia-se, bambeava, sem nenhum estímulo fora ou dentro. Os fatos, repisados, banalizavam-se. Apenas quatro ou cinco sobressaíam, mas, ao dar-lhes forma, vi-os reduzidos, insignificantes. Difícil enxertar neles alguma circunstância que lhes desse relevo e brilho: saíam naturalmente apagados, chatos – e irremediáveis. Prosa de noticiarista vagabundo. Tropeços horríveis para alinhavar um simples comentário. Ora comentário! Se até a narração e o diálogo emperravam, certo não me iria meter em funduras. Havia chumbo na minha cabeça. (I, 98–9) (My decision to sketch a diary shrank, it wiggled, without stimulation from the outside or the inside. The facts I went through over and over again became banal. Only four or five of them stood out but when I shaped them I saw that they grew smaller, insignificant. It was difficult to graft something onto them that would make them relevant and shiny: they turned out naturally lackluster and boring – irreparable. It was the prose of a cheap journalist. Horrible stumbles in order to put together a simple comment. A comment! If even the narration and the dialogue were rusty, I was certainly not going to go into something deep. There was lead in my head.)

The author persistently mentions his notes in the negative, not so much to emphasize their production but the difficulties inherent in writing. He is unable to concentrate on their composition (I, 164) and finds fault in his own prose, which is dull, confusing, and poorly written (I, 151, 275; II, 109). He ends up confessing that, more than by all other privations, he is tormented by the inability to write: ‘Não me afligia achar-me fisicamente arruinado; desgraça era a certeza de nada significar a prosa lenta, composta com enorme preguiça. Escasseava a matéria, fugia a expressão’ (I, 188) (I was not concerned about the fact that I was physically ruined; what I experienced as a disgrace was the certainty that my slow prose, written with enormous idleness, did not mean anything. The subject matter was scarce and expressivity fled from me). The motif of writing thus appears in the text under the guise of impossibility, as the author’s jail tribulations converge in his struggle to compose his notes.

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According to Hermenegildo Bastos, writing diary notes is a vital activity for Graciliano: ‘In Mc [Memórias do Cárcere], the characterauthor experiences writing, the composition of his so longed-for diary, as the only way to stay alive. But this idea is only there as something in the horizon of the possible, never as something already achieved’ (48, my translation). Bastos nevertheless recognizes that this process of creation is never fully actualized. Writing his notes could help the author escape animality and recover the traits of humanity lost in prison; yet, Graciliano wants to avoid a complete retreat into a transcendent position, which might afford him space for creation but which would also mean the contemplation of the other detainees with an objectifying gaze similar to the overarching and totalizing vision of those responsible for their arrest. The author struggles with the writing of his notes, since he ascribes to these the arduous task of expressing the simultaneous immanence and transcendence of his position as a human-‘bicho’ and considers them to be the most appropriate medium for criticizing the transcendent, all-powerful position of the prison authorities. Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari describe writing as a process of ‘becoming,’ beyond serial or structural organization (237). Using a language that approximates Bataille’s terminology, they postulate the existence of two levels of existence, namely the plane of transcendence and the plane of immanence or consistency. The latter is the domain of the multiplicities, traversed by constant transformations and marked by permanent tension (254–5). It is also the field inhabited by the animal, which here stands for plurality. The becoming-animal is a way for human beings to reach the plane of immanence, and the authors, similar to Bataille, view writing as one of the modes of this becoming:31 ‘If the writer is a sorcerer, it is because writing is a becoming, writing is traversed by strange becomings that are not becomingswriter, but becomings-rat, becomings-insect, becomings-wolf, etc.’ (240). Artistic creation and, more specifically, writing, take place in the plane of immanence,32 and the fascination with animality identified by the philosophers in many authors results from the fact that the animal represents the decentralized intimacy of immanence characteristic of writing.33 In Memórias do Cárcere writing is also a process of becoming, tightly intertwined with animality. Yet, while both Deleuze and Guattari, as well as Bataille, believe that artistic creation facilitates a return to the animal, Graciliano employs writing as a way to dwell in the continuum that extends between immanence and transcendence. The

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challenges involved in this process testify to the difficulties in reaching this goal. If one is never fully free from the shadow of the animal, which perpetually haunts the prisoners, one is also always at the risk of flipping into its opposite, namely the complete transcendence of their incarcerators. According to Maurice Blanchot, a diary is a way to redeem one’s life through literature: ‘uniting the insignificance of life with the nonexistence of the work, to raise null life up to the beautiful surprise of art […] makes the diary an undertaking of redemption’ (Book 186). Diary notes are perceived, simultaneously, as a compensation for the meaninglessness of being and as a replacement for a more significant body of work. What Blanchot does not consider is the possibility of a breakdown in existence, when diary writing becomes almost impossible. For Graciliano Ramos, imprisonment signified this deadlock. Arrested in a pendular movement between the night of blind animality and the seductions of transcendence, the writer is a ‘bicho,’ lurking in the shadows that extend between these opposites. He dwells in writing, incapable and unwilling to occupy a transcendent position where, apart from his fellow prisoners, he would place himself at a level parallel to that of their henchmen. The proximity to the event needs to fade, in order for the author to release himself from this broken dialectics and allow his experiences and his notes to coalesce in an autobiography. 2.3 Autobiographical Twilight Graciliano Ramos’s autobiography emerges in the space opened up by the notes he took while he was in prison. As Hermenegildo Bastos points out, the narrative aims at occupying the place left vacant by this first diary: ‘The text of Memórias presents itself as a replacement for another text – the notes written in jail, the original narrative. This replacement is imperfect and the text of the notes, even though it does not really exist, erupts into the present text like a ghost’ (28, my translation). The author mentions already in the introductory chapter of Memórias that he lost all the remarks he had jotted down during his incarceration. His lost annotations, then, function as a spectre perpetually towering over the autobiographical text he wrote later in life. Yet, Graciliano feels that, even though some details were irretrievably gone, the loss of his prison notes conferred upon him more freedom to write:34 Não resguardei os apontamentos obtidos em largos dias e meses de observação: num momento de aperto fui obrigado a atirá-los na água […] Quase

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me inclino a supor que foi bom privar-me desse material. Se ele existisse, ver-me-ia propenso a consultá-lo a cada instante […] Mas que significa isso? Essas coisas verdadeiras podem não ser verosímeis. E se esmoreceram, deixá-las no esquecimento […] Outras, porém, conservaram-se, cresceram, associaram-se, e é inevitável mencioná-las. Afirmarei que sejam absolutamente exatas? Leviandade. (I, 36) (I did not keep the notes I wrote during long days and months of observation: in a difficult moment, I had to throw them into the water […] I am inclined to believe that it was good to deprive myself of that material. If it existed, I would be tempted to go back to it all the time […] But what would that mean? Those truthful things may not be verisimilar. And if they have faded, let them remain in oblivion […] Other events were nevertheless kept in my memory, they grew, forged connections, and it is inevitable to mention them. Can I say that they are absolutely exact? That would not be serious.)

The comments that the author put down on paper during his incarceration were too faithful to the events he went through. Had he kept them, they would have enslaved his memorialist account to factuality and would have prevented his autobiography from cohering into a verisimilar narration.35 In this passage, the writer relativizes the value of reality and subordinates past occurrences to the consistency of the story. He seems to imply that, higher than the actuality of real incidents is the veracity of memory. The disappearance of Graciliano’s diaristic comments is posited as a condition of possibility for the creation of Memórias. The scattered notes, adhering too closely to the dispersion of life in jail, give way to the concatenation of episodes woven together in autobiography. This autobiographical account, which forms an image of the self, consists of a moment of convergence that is, according to Jean-Luc Nancy, always tinged by violence. The philosopher considers that the existence of images involves the tearing apart of a closed intimacy.36 The image irrupts into the real and assembles it into a self-contained unity; it is the violent creation of presence, identity and self-identity in the realm of chaos (‘Ground’ 24).37 Even though Nancy refers mainly to images in the artistic sphere, his considerations can be extended to writing. Graciliano’s autobiography, an image of the I, presupposes a tearing to pieces of the self and a disappearance of his scattered notes, in order for a transformed and coherent picture of the self to arise. For Nancy, there are two kinds of violence associated with images, as

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it may arise either from violence itself or from truth. Violence always makes an image of itself and, in this process, it produces its own truth. But truth is violent in its own way, in that its appearance – its image – disrupts the established order. Nancy juxtaposes the stupidity of the truth of violence, governed by violation, to the thoughtful violence of truth, determined by desire (‘Ground’ 19). In Memórias do Cárcere, the brutality of the authorities responsible for the imprisonment of political dissidents is an image of self-serving violence that seeks to establish its own mendacious truth. The writer’s autobiography could be read as the counterpoint to this aggression: it is a true but violent image of the events, not real but verisimilar, faithful both to remembrance and to aesthetics.38 The violent truth gathered in Gracilano Ramos’s autobiography consistently undermines itself. Throughout his narration, the writer questions his opinions and prejudices on various topics, ranging from the position of criminals in Brazilian society to his views on sexuality. The narrative reproduces several preconceived ideas about the people the author encounters in prison, as he describes his proximity to common thieves to be a demeaning situation and fiercely criticizes homosexuality.39 This led an unsympathetic critic like Roberto Reis to state that Graciliano’s dogmatic and binary like the world does not allow him to comprehend fully the experience of jail and approximates the authoritarianism of fascism (52). However, as John Gledson points out, Graciliano’s position is transformed throughout the text. Gledson argues that the writer’s views on homosexuality, which shifted from condemnation to understanding, served as a catalyst for a larger process of change, where physical and hereditary imperatives lost ground to a perception of human beings as determined by cultural forces (25– 7).40 The author relativizes his positions in that he realizes that they depend upon socially determined concepts and norms. According to Gledson, this more benevolent outlook on humanity would persist in Graciliano’s texts written after his incarceration (27). In fact, the writer himself is conscious of this conversion: ‘Realmente a desgraça nos ensina muito: sem ela, eu continuaria a julgar a humanidade incapaz de verdadeira nobreza’ (I, 113) (Truly, misfortune teaches us a lot: without it, I would still think that humanity is incapable of true nobleness). Memórias can thus be read as a belated Bildungsroman, where the protagonist treads the tortuous path of acknowledging the futility of universal dogmas. In his autobiography, Graciliano rejects both the ideal of factual truth-

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fulness that is forever lost and cannot lend itself to artistic representation, and a veracity based upon general agreement on a set of axioms. Instead, he espouses a concept of truth that reverberates with Martin Heidegger’s meditations on the subject. According to Heidegger, ‘being true’ cannot be understood as the result of a judgment that determines the conformity of a statement to an event. Rather, truthfulness corresponds to the ancient Greek notion of aletheia, which is a discovering or unveiling of something that had been hitherto hidden (Heidegger, Being 56–7). This conception emphasizes the fact that truth cannot solely depend upon subjective views on what should be true and false but requires things and events to show themselves. It is noteworthy that the ancient Greek term alethes is a negation of ‘lethe,’ the word for ‘oblivion’ or ‘forgetfulness’ from which the designation of the river that traverses the Underworld is derived. Truth is, therefore, the opposite of oblivion, while unconcealment coincides with the work of memory advocated by Graciliano as the source of his autobiography. The imbrication of autobiography, uncovering, and truth that we find in Memórias do Cárcere is described by Paul de Man in the essay ‘Autobiography as De-Facement.’ For de Man, autobiography is not so much a genre as a figure of reading that is present, to some extent, in all claims of authorship and, more broadly, in any piece of writing (70). The autobiographical moment illustrates the fact that the structure of language is one of substitution, where the referent is replaced by the text and the saying never fully coincides with the said. Autobiography thus enacts a defacement, since it transforms and disfigures the one who narrates her or his life, in that this person’s account does not necessarily correspond to her or his experiences.41 De Man identifies prosopopeia, a rhetorical figure by which an absent or dead person is presented in the role of a speaker, as the most apt image of autobiography (75–6). In prosopopeic discourse, it becomes clear that the thing itself is no longer and we can only refer to it through its mask. Figurative death is therefore, according to de Man, a precondition for all speech, and defacement becomes the unavoidable brunt born by any subject who wishes to be heard. Significantly, Graciliano’s autobiographical text often accentuates the fact that there is but a thin line separating life and death. The writer learns about or directly witnesses the passing of numerous prisoners and, while in the Penal Colony, realizes that no value was placed on his own life. In fact, on various occasions Graciliano envisions himself as little more than a ghost, already carrying the burden of his demise: ‘Havia em mim pedaços mortos, ia-me, aos poucos, habituando à sepultura;

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difícil ressurgir, vagar na multidão, à toa, como alma penada’ (I, 378) (There were dead pieces inside me; slowly, I was getting used to the grave; it was difficult to resurface, to wander in the crowd, like a lost soul). The protagonist progressively slips into the darkness of the grave and feels that he wanders in obscurity, like a lost soul. This process is not solely equated with the experience of imprisonment but also with its remembrance. The author, who waited until the end of his life to start working on the narration of his time in jail, associates the writing of his autobiography with the fast approaching moment of his passing: ‘Estou a descer para a cova […] e provavelmente isto será publicação póstuma, como convém a um livro de memórias’ (I, 35) (I am descending to the grave […] and probably this will be a posthumous publication, which befits a book of memoirs). The writer serenely muses over the possibility of his death and deems it to be fitting for a memoir to be published as a posthumous book that would stand for and replace its author. In the wake of de Man, and echoing Ramos’s text, Jacques Derrida has defined autobiography as a thanatography (Ear 19). The philosopher contends that the relation between fiction and autobiographical truth corresponds to the link between literature and death (Instant 15). Autobiography takes place in the gap separating imagination and veracity, in the space between life and death, in that it is essentially a testimony.42 According to Derrida, testimony opens up the possibility of perjury and fiction since, if this eventuality were eliminated, there would be no need to testify. Moreover, one testifies to something experienced in a past instant, but the person who witnessed that moment is no longer the same at the time when testimony is given. The testimonial condition thus consists of an utterance by someone who is, like Graciliano, a ghost. The one who went through the events exists no more, but someone – her or his remainder – having survived imprisonment, still has a voice to narrate what had been experienced.43 This disappearance of the subject necessary for the creation of an autobiographical representation of the past could also be rendered as a fall into obscurity. In Memoirs of the Blind, Derrida argues that the moment of representation is always blind. Even in the case of painting, the instant when the draftsman sketches a drawing implies a retreat into the self and an erasure of whatever lies outside it, including the model (2–3). Insofar as drawing or writing are mediated by memory, they happen in darkness, since remembering entails a blindness to everything but the image a certain event has imprinted on the self.

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The peculiarity of autobiography as a genre resides in the fact that the authorial subject is, simultaneously, the object of the narration. The coincidence of these entities underlies what Philippe Lejeune defined as the ‘autobiographical pact,’ established between a writer and its audience.44 Graciliano’s text questions this identification of subject and object, as the author distances himself from the protagonist and points out that the recollections he compiled may not be entirely faithful to the events that took place in the past.45 He adds that his text will most likely become a posthumous book and considers this to be the adequate condition of an autobiography, where the biographical self is effaced by a mélange of fact and fiction.46 Furthermore, the author presents his autobiography not only as a defacement but also as an acknowledgment that there is no unity behind the face. The uncovering of his experiences shows the protagonist as fragmented: incarceration turned him into ‘naked life,’ an animal-like shadow, immersed in doubt, in contradictions, and in darkness. To the authorial voice of a non-subject, writing under the looming threat of death, thus corresponds the depersonalized and dismembered non-object of Memórias. For the protagonist of the narrative, de-facement is identified with disfigurement, blindness, and the death of the referent. If it was arduous for Graciliano to write his scattered notes in prison, his autobiographical attempt also remains unfinished.47 The writer’s daughter Clara Ramos states in her biography of her father that he purposely left his prison memoirs open-ended (251).48 Hermenegildo Bastos goes even further and identifies the incapability to reach completion as a central category in the author’s oeuvre, in that several characters in his novels engage in invariably frustrated attempts to write autobiographical texts (48).49 In Memórias, the fragmented subject and object are therefore accompanied by the incompleteness of the narrative itself. Any autobiographical account is always fed by a desire for completion and constitutes an attempt to shed the light of truth on disordered events. Yet, Graciliano’s text only uncovers the inhuman, the blind, and the obscure that progressively submerge the writer as he is replaced by his unfinished text. His autobiography is an attempt to balance these centripetal and centrifugal tendencies, embracing neither total brightness nor the complete fall into darkness. It takes place in a moment of twilight, between gathering and dispersion, transcendence and immanence, where the retreat of the subject and the blindness of the object give rise to a non-totalizing writing that remains the only possibility of agency in the face of oppression.

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Michel Foucault states that autobiographical texts often establish a link between veracity and action: ‘writing has […] an ethopoetic function: it is an operator of the transformation of truth into ethos’ (‘L’Écriture’ 1237, my translation). In the case of Memórias do Cárcere, this connection is formed under erasure, since the author questions both the existence of a univocal, clear truth about a given object and the stability of the acting subject. Autobiographical writing is the space where these tensions are played out, in a game of light and darkness. Antônio Candido has argued that Graciliano’s literature progressively transitions from fiction to autobiography, an assertion that has been taken up by numerous works of criticism analysing the author’s writings.50 If Candido is right, one might read this autobiographical twilight as the matrix of the author’s work. In fact, many of his texts allude to the permanent struggle between the light of a totalizing truth and an unviable desire to act, and writing is frequently offered as an uncomfortable temporary respite from this double bind. In his autobiography, Graciliano, a modern Orpheus, descends once again into the obscurity of the Hades he knew during his incarceration, hoping to bring deliverance with his song. But Euridice will be lost nonetheless: the writer is unable to uncover a unified truth behind his experience but still feels the irrevocable need to glance back and revisit the darkness of prison life.

3 Twists of the Blindfold in Art, Fiction, and Film

Es überkam mich unter ihnen das Gefühl furchtbarer Einsamkeit; mir war zumuth wie einem, der in einem Garten mit lauter augenlosen Statuen eingesperrt wäre. Hugo von Hofmannsthal, ‘Brief des Lord Chandos an Francis Bacon’1

The defining trait of the blindfold resides in its power to generate individualized darkness. It is an artefact that isolates the ones using it from the light that surrounds them, thus creating an artificial and temporary blindness. The main consequence of this feature is the emergence of an asymmetry between those who are and those who are not blindfolded while sharing the same space, since the blindfolded individual is seen but cannot see. Further, he or she is looked at in the act of not seeing, arrested in unsuccessful attempts to replace the now useless eyes with the ears or with touch. It suffices to conjure up the image of a group playing blind man’s bluff, a scene frequently depicted in art by painters as disparate as Dirk van der Lisse, Francisco de Goya, and Jean-Honoré Fragonard, to illustrate the predicament of someone with covered eyes. The person advances slowly, with outstretched arms and with ears attuned to every sound, while the others laugh, tease, and mimic her or him, until their own turn to be blindfolded arrives.2 The inequality engendered by the use of the blindfold on some of the various people inhabiting the same space often demeans those who cannot see, since the latter are regarded as objects, devoid of the possibility of asserting their subjectivity by reciprocating the gaze. This uneven power relation put in place by the covering of the eyes turns the blindfold into a tool that has been widely used by dictatorial political

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systems, where torture is frequently practised as a means of repression. The blindfold or its extension, namely the hood, is often employed as a palpable sign of the debasement of prisoners, who are thereby prevented from looking at and identifying the ones causing them pain. In this chapter, I discuss the multifaceted, symbolic weight of the eye cover in situations of physical violence and torture through the analyses of its representation in three different art forms, namely the figurative arts, literature, and film. I concentrate on works that emerged in the context of the wave of right-wing military rule in Latin America’s Southern Cone and in Brazil in the second half of the twentieth century and analyse the ways in which artists, writers, and filmmakers responded to these developments, in an effort to resist political violence and to keep the memory of victims alive.3 Brazilian artist Ana Maria Pacheco (1943–) captures the imbrication of oppressive power, torture, and the blindfold in many of her works.4 In prints such as those from the series And They Inherited the Earth, and in several paintings and sculptures, particularly in The Dark Night of the Soul, there is a widespread representation of figures blinded by blindfolds and hoods. These usually cover the eyes and faces of victims of torture or mutilation, whose limbs, bound by ropes, are portrayed as contorted into unnatural positions. Yet, absence of vision is not linearly used to represent the dehumanization of these figures, whose human bodies are starkly prominent. On the contrary, it is the agents or the spectators of the process that appear to be deprived of human traits, since they are frequently presented with animal-like features or covered by a black cloak. The artist seems to suggest that, even though victims are blindfolded, those surrounding them are the ones who are degraded. The link developed in Pacheco’s art between torture, blindfolds, and the victims’ resistance to the violence of their oppressors also lies at the core of Chilean writer Ariel Dorfman’s (1942–) play Death and the Maiden (1990). Even though the covering of the eyes is not staged at any time during the performance, it becomes, to borrow from Derridean terminology, the supplement to the rest of the plot. The main character, Paulina, encounters a man whose voice is that of one of the people who tortured her during a dictatorial political regime, presumably in Chile. However, she is unable to identify him unequivocally because she was always blindfolded while she was in jail and, therefore, has never seen his face. The fact that she did not see the perpetrators of the atrocities she endured renders Paulina unable to testify as a witness

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against them, which contributes to her inability to come to terms with the traumatic events she went through. The play focuses on her rejection of the impunity created by the blindness imposed upon her during the torture sessions, as she imprisons her former oppressor and reproduces the one-to-one torture situation she has previously experienced. Her husband, a lawyer, is left with the task of attempting an impossible mediation between torturer and tortured, by inserting the procedures of justice into a relationship that precludes all sociality. Finally, the blindfold is also a prevalent image in films such as Garaje Olimpo (Garage Olimpo, 1999) and O que é isso Companheiro? (Four Days in September, 1997) that focus on the period of military dictatorship in Argentina and Brazil, respectively. Garaje Olimpo, directed by Marco Bechis, portrays the usage of the eye cover on prisoners tortured by the Argentinian political police, while in Bruno Barreto’s O que é isso Companheiro? (1997) a cover for the eyes or for the face is used both on the American ambassador, kidnapped by a radical left-wing group during the Brazilian military regime, and by those who hold him prisoner. The movie explores the insidiousness of repression techniques, the employment of which risks blurring the distinction between those who are fighting oppression and the totalitarianism they oppose. 3.1 Blindfolds, Hoods, and the Exercise of Power in the Art of Ana Maria Pacheco The blindfold and the hood frequently adorn the figures represented in the art of Ana Maria Pacheco. In her works, individuals portrayed with their eyes or faces covered are never alone and their situation usually contrasts with that of one or several other characters, who direct their gaze at them, often in sternness, rage, or mocking self-contentment, portending impending sufferings. Sometimes, as in the two prints based on woodcuts from the series And They Inherited the Earth (1994),5 the onlookers are wearing animal masks that emphasize their own dehumanization. They assume the position of torturers who seem to either wonder at or rejoice in the pain of their victims. Further, the ones who cannot see are almost always sparsely dressed or even naked, which contrasts with the covered bodies of those surrounding them. This is the case in the large multi-figure sculpture in polychrome wood titled Dark Night of the Soul (1999) that revolves around a naked hooded man whose brightly illuminated body is pierced with arrows.6 The piece highlights the irreducibility of pain, in that the suffering flesh becomes the centre of the

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sculpture. When comtemplating artworks such as these, the viewer is compelled to abandon her or his voyeuristic position and to side with the figures with covered eyes and faces, a process of identification that triggers an ethical response to the scenes being depicted. And They Inherited the Earth I (fig. 1) is structured around a series of dichotomies, the first of which is the opposition between the blindfold that covers the face of the female figure and the animal mask that places an emphasis on the eyes of the male one. While the victim’s face is pointing in the direction of the apparatus of wires, ropes, and hooks generating her pain, her torturer is beholding her intently. The image is ambiguous concerning the nature of the oppressor’s eyes, in that they can be regarded either as human eyes appearing through a slit in his animal mask, as seems to be the case in most of the masked figures in And They Inherited the Earth II, or as non-human eyes forming part of the mask, which is suggested by their shape and ferociousness. The latter interpretation would imply that the male figure has no human face behind its disguise or that it simply takes up the form of whatever cover it is wearing. The artwork thus reverses the traditional connotation of the eyes, commonly portrayed as the mirror of the soul, with humanity, and associates them instead with the beastly characteristics of the torturer, who appears to be devoid of human features. Many of the individuals depicted in Pacheco’s paintings, drawings, and prints are wearing similar masks with animal traits that cover either the upper part or the whole of their faces. Their eyes remain open but their distorted heads evoke the conflation of the human and the beast portrayed centuries earlier in some of the works by the Dutch painter Hieronymus Bosch.7 Yet, these animal masks are not always ferocious but often express dejection or helplessness. They to not appear to symbolize the complete beastialization of humans but rather to signal that these take on different roles in various circumstances and that their essence lies precisely in their fluid, ever-changing appearance. Therefore, in And They Inherited the Earth I, the torturer is not necessarily an incarnation of evil but can be interpreted as a transient bearer of its brutal mask. This banality of brutality and evil and its lack of ontological grounding have been the subject of Hannah Arendt’s reflections on the Israeli trial of Otto Eichmann, a high-ranking Nazi official who was instrumental in the planning of the Holocaust. In her observations, Arendt concluded that atrocities are not perpetrated by psychopaths marked by abnormality but by ordinary people who are placed in a particular position. Jean Améry, a former member of the resistance to the Nazi

Twists of the Blindfold in Art, Fiction, and Film

Figure 1 Ana Maria Pacheco, And They Inherited the Earth I (1994), © Ana Maria Pacheco, used with permission.

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regime who was tortured after being arrested by the Gestapo in 1943, also comments on the motivations of torturers. Améry agrees with Arendt that his henchmen were not intrinsically sadistic, in the sexualpathological sense. However, he believes that they were sadists in the philosophical sense, since their goal was ‘the radical negation of the other’ (Mind’s Limits 35). The philosophical sadist wants to nullify her or his fellow human being in order to achieve complete sovereignty over her or him, and therefore resorts to torture, where there is a ‘total inversion of the social world,’ predicated on coexistence and mutually imposed limitations (35). The male figure in And They Inherited the Earth I can be regarded as an instantiation of such banal evil. He seems to derive his cruelty from the mask he is wearing, which suggests that underneath that cover might hide a common individual. Yet, once the mask of violence is put on, the character is transformed into a sadist, whose satisfaction feeds on the suffering and annihilation of the other. The print suggests that the task generates the one who performs it and that the ontology of the torturer is both relational and situational. The contrast between the blindfold worn by the victim and the open eyes of the oppressor in Pacheco’s piece is emphasized by the fact that the male figure is also the bearer of light, in that he is holding a large lit candle. Luminosity is here associated both with the physical violence inflicted on the suffering woman and with the violence of the gaze of the henchman that she cannot reciprocate. Further, light is linked with the hands used by the torturer to cause pain, which are, ironically, his only visible human feature, apart from the general shape of his body; they constitute the antithesis of the female figure’s hands, tied behind her back. The male character’s hands are the means he employs to manipulate the ropes, wires, and hooks depicted in the image as the instruments of suffering. The display of this apparatus underlies the fact that torture is a technique, which, in this case, breaks down the dualism of the image, in that technology is represented as a mediator between the two figures. If, as Jean Améry points out in the passage quoted above, torture is the inversion of the social world, the social realm is here distorted but survives in the technicality that unites the oppressor and the oppressed. Technology is, thus, the amoral means that serves the unethical end of torture. Given that torture hinges upon technef, a characteristic it shares with art, the body of the tortured is a material in the hands of the oppressor, similar to the matter moulded by the artist. As Jean Améry and later Page DuBois, among others, have pointed out, the reason for the

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divergence between the two activities is that the purpose behind the infliction of pain is primarily to eradicate the difference represented by the other (DuBois 147). DuBois delineates a correlation between torture and sexual abuse, since the body of women has traditional been regarded by a phallocentric society as the locus of absolute otherness. This connection is present in And They Inherited the Earth, as well as in Death and the Maiden and in the film Garaje Olimpo that will be discussed later. Torture is a technique that ultimately strives for the extinction of multiplicity, as its goal is to transmute any victim into an empty replica of the oppressor. This implies that a torturer would consider the practice redundant only with the extinction of society as such. Unlike torture, art is a technef that engenders difference. Artistic creations generate a variety of perspectives and depend upon a plurality of interpretations. Thus, in And They Inherited the Earth I, the one-sidedness of the practice of torture depicted in the image is juxtaposed with the diversity of readings suggested by the artwork. Another dichotomous element in the print lies in the representation of the mouths of the two figures. The mouth of the victim appears to replace the eyes in expressing her suffering and the fact that it is gaping hints at the possibility that she might be screaming. The torturer’s mouth, on the other hand, has inhuman contours and its protruding fangs suggest that he is about to roar at or bite the woman. Pacheco has devoted particular care in her artwork to the crafting of mouths, which, according to Vivian Schelling, are furnished with real teeth in sculptures, a technical device that contributes to a blurring of the distinction between representation and reality (7). In the multi-figure wooden sculptures Some Exercise of Power (1980) (fig. 2) and The Banquet (1985) (fig. 3), where the artist has also represented scenes of torture, the sharp teeth of one of the henchmen insinuate that human relationships are cannibalistic, with the oppressors devouring the oppressed, a notion corroborated by the fact that, in both sculptures, the victims are naked. The Banquet goes even further in this analogy, since the tortured lies on a table and, as intimated in the title, is about to be eaten alive by his torturers. The artist portrays the abolition of otherness intended by torture as a cannibal act, where the other’s difference is assimilated and victims are forced into conformity through digestion. And They Inherited the Earth I further contrasts the torturer’s covered body and the scarcity of garments worn by the victim. The man is fully dressed and enveloped in a cloak that leaves only his hands and face uncovered. Conversely, the woman has a tight piece of clothing on that

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Figure 2 Ana Maria Pacheco, Some Exercise of Power (1980), © Ana Maria Pacheco, used with permission.

Figure 3 Ana Maria Pacheco, The Banquet (1985), © Ana Maria Pacheco, used with permission.

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barely covers her torso. Her only other piece of attire is a pair of fashionable boots that represent the last trace of her public persona on an otherwise completely exposed body. In Some Exercise of Power and in The Banquet, the torturers are also fully dressed, this time in suits, and at least one of them in a shirt and tie. The animal masks worn by some of the perpetrators are incongruous with their clothes and the atrocities they commit seem to be incompatible with the fact that they are the ones bearing the marks of the social sphere in their outfit. The artist appears to utilize this device in order to hint at society’s responsibility in torture and at its tacit condoning of the practice. A final dichotomy found in the print is the distinction between the stability of the male figure, who is firmly planted on the ground next to a table, and the instability of the victim, suspended by ropes in mid-air. This opposition can be interpreted in conjunction with the title of the artwork, as one is led to believe that the torturer, who is standing on the floor, is the inheritor of the earth. Still, the title’s religious connotations, which can be traced back to the apocryphal Book of Enoch, suggest an alternative reading: ‘And for all of you sinners there shall be no salvation, / But on you all shall abide a curse. / But for the elect there shall be light and joy and peace, / And they shall inherit the earth’ (Enoch 5: 6i–7b). The Gospel according to Matthew reiterates the notion that the earth will be the legacy of the elect, who are here identified with the oppressed: ‘Blessed are the meek, / for they will inherit the earth […] / Blessed are those who are persecuted because of righteousness, / for theirs is the kingdom of heaven. / Blessed are you when people insult you, persecute you ’ (Matt. 5: 5–11). According to Judaeo-Christian values, those who suffer and are persecuted will be the inheritors of the world. The title of Pacheco’s print points to a scenario where the prophecy from the Book of Enoch and from the Gospel has supposedly been fulfilled. If the suffering and persecuted woman represents all those who inherited the world, this would mean that this legacy is not equivalent to light and joy but to pain and mortality. The image would therefore reverse the revelatory prediction, since the elect inheritors dwell not in luminosity but in darkness. The artist might also be cynically implying that the prophecy failed, since the earth was inherited by the torturers and not by the sufferers. Or, rather, that the prophecy came true but that whoever inherits the earth – whoever is placed in a position of power – is necessarily transformed from persecuted victim into oppressor. Similar to And They Inherited the Earth I, Pacheco’s sculpture Dark

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Figure 4 Ana Maria Pacheco, Dark Night of the Soul (19XX), © Ana Maria Pacheco, used with permission.

Night of the Soul displays a sharp contrast between the naked man kneeling in the middle and the covered bodies of those around him. The only other naked body featured in the sculpture is that of a child, powerless as the naked man in the centre of the piece, who looks on at the scene in amazement.8 The martyr, with his hands tied behind his back and his body pierced with arrows, is wearing only a black hood that appears to be made of a material similar to that employed in the cloaks enveloping the surrounding figures, as if to insinuate the complicity of the onlookers with his suffering. Pacheco has stated that she used a press photograph of a victim of the Brazilian death squads as an inspiration for the artwork.9 The artist therefore established a correlation between physical suffering imposed on others and acts of sociopolitical violence perpetrated in her country (Silva 61). Dark Night of the Soul emphasizes the contours of the naked figure, whose white body reflects the light illuminating the sculpture and cre-

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ates the illusion that the brightness is originating from within. The soul of the martyr, presumably lodged in the hooded head, is immersed in darkness, as the title suggests, in opposition to the heads of the ones surrounding him, which are white and exposed to the light, as if to emphasize their intellectualized gaze. The image thus contradicts the iconographic legacy of associating spirit and luminosity by representing the head and soul of the one in pain in obscurity, while those of the perpetrators dwell in light. The artist makes, here, a double gesture that leads both to a re-evaluation of the body as a site of spiritual growth and to a denaturalization of the link between the purity of the soul and brightness. Pacheco’s rendering of the soul enters into a dialogue with the title of the piece, which is a quote from the writings of San Juan de la Cruz (1542–91). For the Spanish mystic, the ‘dark night’ does not coincide with a complete absence of light but rather with the arduous moments of one’s spiritual path and with the overstimulation of the human senses by the intensity of divine light (Willmoth 13; Silva 61). The darkness of the soul, therefore, appears to be part and parcel of a spiritual journey. However, in Pacheco’s piece, the ‘dark night’ created by the hood is imposed upon the male figure by those around him, who assume a god-like role. Thus, in the sculpture, the obscurity of spirit does not translate into the union with the divine but appears to signal the distance between the victim and the ones in power. The play of light and darkness portrayed in the sculpture already constituted the core of a homonymous print by Pacheco from 1994 (see image in the cover). In this image, a man is attached to the mast of a boat by ropes that bind his arms and feet. Facing the hooded man is an angel and we notice here, once again, a contrast between the starkly prominent body of the former and the figure of the latter, whose body is covered by long wings. The angel’s breath spreads light around the man but this luminosity seems to ricochet off the male body and cannot be perceived by the figure, who is wearing a black hood. The angel stands here in the same position as the torturer in other art works by Pacheco, which suggests an association between religion and power. As Paul Hills points out, Pacheco often employs archetypical imagery in the creation of her works (9). Archetypes such as the tortured and the torturer, the suffering one and the onlooker, are placeholders that can be occupied by anyone, hence the use of masks that signal this anonymity. The status of oppressor or victim, the innocent or the guilty, depend

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upon each figure’s current positionality in a given social tableau. The emphasis on the corporeality of the oppressed in the art of Pacheco and the artist’s highlighting of the details of the body binds the sufferer’s physical pain to naked reality. As Jean Améry points out, everyday life is unmasked as a codified abstraction in extreme situations such as torture, when one experiences reality without intermediaries: ‘Only in rare moments of life do we truly stand face to face with the event and, with it, reality’ (26). Améry postulates the existence of a path leading from the pain of the victim to death: ‘torture, through which we are turned into body by the other, blots out the contradiction of death and allows us to experience it personally’ (34). In torture, the person’s transformation into flesh becomes complete and it is in this moment, when the tortured confronts death at the limits of physical pain, that she or he encounters reality. Pacheco’s artworks emphasize that this face-to-face encounter with the real is not facilitated by the intellect or by the soul but happens in and through the body.10 The viewer of Pacheco’s images and sculptures depicting suffering bodies finds her- or himself in an uncomfortable position. The beholder of these works contemplates the blindfolded and hooded victims, as well as their henchmen: placed outside of the scene, she or he watches others watching those in pain and is, therefore, twice removed from the events that, in turn, have already been mediated by art. What are the consequences of this voyeuristic stance? The dichotomous nature of many of Pacheco’s pieces prompts one to declare one’s allegiances and to side with either of the represented factions. In the process of viewing, one is enjoined to abandon one’s position as a spectator by donning a figurative blindfold or hood, which will shatter the distance established by the aesthetic contemplation of the artwork and compel one to partake in the experience being depicted. The viewer identifies with the powerless, helpless victims whose blinfolded eyes, hooded faces, and exposed, fragile corporeality indict the violent gaze of the figures watching them. Pacheco’s paintings, prints, and sculptures thus become a site of passage, a threshold prompting the viewer to move through art beyond art in an impossible attempt to penetrate and understand the core of torture and oppression. In the series And They Inherited the Earth, in Dark Night of the Soul, as well as in Some Exercise of Power and The Banquet, Pacheco represents torture and suffering in the process of their unfolding. Ariel Dorfman’s text Death and the Maiden, on the other hand, focuses on the aftermath

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of such events and explores the individual and social consequences of torture, the possibility of justice, and the politics of memory. I argue below that in the play, as in Pacheco’s artworks, the blindfold denotes the indelible marks that oppression leaves on its victims. 3.2 Torture and Sociality in Ariel Dorfman’s Death and the Maiden11 In the play Death and the Maiden the blindfold is inextricably linked with the practice of torture perpetrated against political detainees.12 The protagonist, Paulina Salas, is unable to free herself from the suffering she endured when she was jailed as a political prisoner, supposedly during the Chilean military dictatorship, under the rule of General Augusto Pinochet.13 Pinochet, who overthrew the democratically elected socialist president Salvador Allende in a coup on 11 September 1973, remained in power until 1990, a period during which countless left-wing political activists, writers, and artists were incarcerated and tortured in the country. The main character in Ariel Dorfman’s text is a fictional representation of all of those tortured subjects, who remained traumatized by the bonds of domination, both physical and psychic, woven during their incarceration.14 In the case of Paulina, these ostensibly insubstantial ties are all the stronger in that, because she was blindfolded, she could not identify the ones who tortured her. She knows that she will never be able to legally indict her persecutors, since her circumstantial evidence would not be accepted in a court of law. Therefore, Paulina will have to decide between falling into the oblivion precipitated by madness and confronting her past by staging a vigilante trial. The main character of Death and the Maiden is presented as someone who lives in anxiety.15 The first moments of the performance dramatize her fear, as she takes out a gun and hides behind the curtains in her house because she sees an unknown car approaching. The audience later learns that her constant uneasiness is one of the scars left by torture. She had been repeatedly beaten and raped years ago by the military police after she was arrested for working in an underground resistance movement. The perpetual apprehension displayed by the protagonist of the play is a common trait in those who underwent torture. Jean Améry addresses this issue in his reflections on the torture sessions he endured at the hands of the Gestapo during the Second World War. He states that one of most insidious results of the practice resides in the victim’s loss of trust in the world, which consists of the conviction that one will be spared by others: ‘An element of trust in the world

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[…] is the certainty that […] the other person will spare me […] that he will respect my physical, and with it also my metaphysical, being […] If I am to have trust, I must feel on it [on my body] only what I want to feel’ (28). For Améry, the destruction of the tortured’s faith in the world begins with the first blow, since it brings home the realization that help cannot be expected. The physical pain that follows is felt as a violation: ‘The other person […] forces his own corporeality on me with the first blow. He is on me and thereby destroys me. It is like a rape, a sexual act without the consent of one of the two partners’ (28). The torturer exists by ruining the other, over whom she or he can exert absolute sovereignty. This overwhelming physical force which, as in the case of Paulina, often involves actual sexual abuse, shatters the detainees’ integrity, whose pieces can never be fully reassembled: Whoever has succumbed to torture can no longer feel at home in the world. The shame of destruction cannot be erased. Trust in the world, which already collapsed in part at the first blow, but in the end, under torture, fully, will not be regained. That one’s fellow man was experienced as the antiman remains in the tortured person as accumulated horror. It blocks the view into a world in which the principle of hope rules. One who was martyred is a defenseless prisoner of fear. It is fear that henceforth reigns over him. (Mind’s Limits 40)

After experiencing the other as a merciless henchman, the tortured cannot unproblematically regain her or his former place in the world. Victims inhabit the world as foreign and are never able to completely bridge the cleft opened up by the collapse of their trust in others. Paulina’s fear in Death and the Maiden derives from this loss of faith. She cannot have confidence in strangers and seems to be even incapable of fully trusting her husband.16 The protagonist’s anxiety in Dorfman’s play is tied to the fact that she has been unable to overcome the past, as she remains tethered to the events she went through during the years of the dictatorship. In the words of her husband Gerardo, Paulina should strive to emancipate herself from her recollections: gerardo: […] Let him go, Paulina. For the good of the country, for our own good. paulina: And me? What I need? Look at me, look at me! gerardo: Yes, look at you, love. You’re still a prisoner, you stayed there

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Seeing Politics Otherwise behind with them, locked in that basement. For fifteen years you’ve done nothing with your life. […] Isn’t it time we –? paulina: Forgot? You’re asking me to forget. gerardo: Free yourself from them, Paulina, that’s what I’m asking. paulina: And let him loose so he can come back in a few years’ time? gerardo: Let him loose, so he won’t come back ever again. paulina: And we see him at Tavelli and we smile at him […]. gerardo: No need to smile at him but basically yes, that is what we have to do. And to start to live, yes. (39)17

In this dialogue, Gerardo points out that his wife’s situation coincides with that of her country. In fact, it becomes clear throughout the play that Paulina’s predicament stands for the plight of a society that has just emerged from a totalitarian government.18 In an interview with Vivian Martínez Tabares, Dorfman comments on the Chilean transition to democracy in the following way: ‘We are facing a fractured country […] that wishes to build itself upon the disappearance of the person who has endured most pain, a fatherland that demands the silence of a woman (of many women and many men) to achieve a fake reconciliation’ (84, my translation).19 The country will need to impose silence upon some of its citizens in order to reunite the different factions of its society under the same political system. Similarly to the protagonist, Dorfman’s Chile will have to walk a thin line between the erasure of a repressed memory that will perpetually struggle to resurface, and the drowning of the present in the shadows of a troubled history. The open ending of the text suggests that neither its main character nor Chilean society as a whole will be able to find a fully satisfactory solution to their dilemma.20 The giant mirror that descends in front of the stage at the moment when Paulina is about to decide whether to kill or spare the person she believes to be her former torturer, appears to pass the choice on to the spectators, who are forced to look at their own reflection. The public is summoned to participate in the trial of Doctor Miranda and to reach its own verdict about the best outcome for the performance. The audience metonymically stands for the citizens of Chile, who will need to decide how to deal with their past. The end of the performance does not coincide with the reaching of an agreement and the flickering lights that illuminate a few spectators at a time from among the audience suggest that each person will have a different opinion about the correct path to be taken.21 However, the presence of

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Gerardo and Paulina in a concert hall signals that, despite political differences, they will have no alternative but to share a common public space with their former adversaries. In the dialogue reproduced above, Gerardo favours a certain degree of forgetting that he deems necessary in order for life to continue. Conversely, Paulina rejects the possibility of such oblivion and loathes the idea of having to pretend that she has put the experience of torture behind her.22 Jean Améry also condemns the injunction to forget often imposed upon victims and states that torture has an ineffaceable character: ‘Whoever was tortured, stays tortured. Torture is ineradicably burned into him’ (34).23 In addition, he criticizes the fact that events such as torture are often overcome by their insertion into a normalized version of the past and labels this development as immoral. Améry detaches himself from the consensual social body through his resentment that he presents as his personal protest against forgetting (77). The author’s resentment demands both a regression into the past and its nullification, and has its roots in his desire to be released from loneliness and abandonment, a liberation to be accomplished through the true repentance of the criminals. Améry inverts the Nietzschean critique of slave morality elaborated in On the Genealogy of Morality by proclaiming that true morals derive from the victims’ resentment, which should be allowed to remain alive, allied with constant self-mistrust on the side of the perpetrators:24 ‘Two groups of people, the overpowered and those who overpowered them, would be joined in the desire that time be turned back and, with it, that history become moral’ (Améry 78). The ignominy of forgetting will only be eradicated when both oppressors and oppressed truly wish that the past had been different (78). Similar to Améry, the main character in Death and the Maiden realizes that the redemption of her past depends on Doctor Miranda’s confession to the crimes she believes he committed and on his repentance for his deeds: ‘I can only forgive someone who really repents, who stands up amongst those he has wronged and says, I did this, I did it, and I’ll never do it again’ (65). The doctor’s refusal to comply suggests that, if he is guilty, the morality advocated by Améry has not prevailed and victims such as Paulina have not been able to come to terms with the traumatic events they experienced during the dictatorship. In the passage cited above Paulina ties her refusal to forget the past with the fear that, if she lets Doctor Miranda leave, he is bound to return to her later. What the protagonist describes in the quote is the structure

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of trauma: lodged in the timeless expanse of the unconscious, traumatic experience tends to repeatedly reemerge against the victim’s conscious will.25 As Cathy Caruth points out, the essence of trauma lies in its unassimilated nature that haunts the individual beyond the original event that gave rise to it in the past (Unclaimed 4).26 Caruth states that trauma is a symptom of a violent history: ‘The traumatized person, we might say, carries an impossible history within them, or they become themselves the symptom of a history that they cannot entirely possess’ (Introduction 4). The scene of trauma cannot be appropriated by the victim as yet another instance of experiential knowledge; rather it possesses the person who went through it. The overwhelming immediacy of trauma prevents it from being processed as information and therefore creates uncertainty about its truth. Trauma’s truth is bound with a crisis of truth, in that the victim is too close to the event to perceive it as real: trauma, an absolute confrontation with reality, thus precludes reality (Introduction 6–8). For Caruth, a history of trauma that begins to work through violent events would require listening to traumatic experiences and paying attention to the impossibility of knowing that they create: ‘the history of trauma, in its inherent belatedness, can only take place through the listening of another’ (Introduction 10). Trauma demands attention and traumatized subjects can only find redemption when others listen to their voices. In Dorfman’s play, Paulina dwells in the impossibility of knowing described by Caruth. In order to overcome trauma, she has to translate her suffering into words and reinsert it into a cohesive narrative. The text seems to indicate that, after years of silence, the protagonist would be ready to perform this translation of her pain into chains of signification, which is why she agrees to describe her torture sessions to her husband. However, she realizes, in this process, that she will never be able to understand fully what she experienced and to construe those events as banal occurrences. Her desire to replicate her imprisonment by holding the doctor in her house, her wish that he confess to his crimes, and her insistence on the intransitivity of her suffering suggest that she is unable to produce a standardized version of her past. Paulina represents the challenge of dealing with traumatic events and it is up to her husband, in the play, and, more broadly, up to Chilean society in general, to listen to her story and to piece together the impossible history of trauma. In Death and the Maiden, the protagonist implies that breaking the ties connecting her to her memories is not only impossible but would also

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amount to a loss of identity. In his reflections on torture in Latin America, Idelber Avelar also discusses this impasse: The traumatized subject finds itself, then, trapped at a crossroads: there is no elaboration and overcoming of trauma without the articulation of a narrative in which the traumatic experience can be meaningfully embedded, can be embedded as meaning. Yet this very embedding cannot but be experienced by the subject as a veritable betrayal of the singularity and intractability of his experience. (‘La Prática’ 184, my translation)

Those who have undergone a traumatic experience hesitate between a cure that implies the dilution of that occurrence in the succession of episodes that constitute their lives, and the faithfulness to the singularity of the events they went through. Dorfman’s text suggests that victims do not necessarily have a choice, in that Paulina is both unwilling and unable to leave the ghosts of torture behind and is therefore condemned to live with trauma. Gerardo mentions, in the quote reproduced above, that Paulina continues to be arrested inside the space where she was tortured years before, implying that she has also remained locked within the confines of the torturer/tortured relationship. In the play, she simply exchanges positions with Doctor Miranda, by now taking on the role of the oppressor, a reversal symbolized by the fact that she utilizes the language employed by her torturer when she was in jail, including some of the mannerisms of his speech, and acquires some masculine gestures and attitudes. The absorption of the victim into the world of her torturer is a corollary to the fact that torture excludes any form of mediation and leaves no room for sociality. Torture’s exclusion of social space is discussed in Elaine Scarry’s book The Body in Pain, which highlights the unsharability of bodily suffering and identifies resistance to language as one of its essential attributes. Similarly, Jean Améry has emphasized the inability to verbalize the experience of torture: ‘The pain was what it was. Beyond that there is nothing to say. Qualities of feeling […] mark the limit of the capacity of language to communicate. If someone wanted to impart his physical pain, he would be forced to inflict it and thereby become a torturer himself’ (33). Physical pain is an experience that eludes representation and the main consequence of the difficulty to express it is that it remains unacknowledged by all except the victim (Scarry, Body in Pain 46). This characteristic becomes particularly unsettling in a situation of pain purposefully inflicted on others, since

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its insubstantiality, from the objective point of view, allows for its dismissal as a side effect of a particular policy or government. Avelar complements Améry’s and Scarry’s reflections about the incompatibility of physical pain and language when he identifies the appropriation of the victim’s voice as one of the main goals of the torturer: ‘A fundamental component of torture is the production of a statement in the tortured subject, its transformation into a spokesperson for the statements of the torturer’ (‘La Prática’ 183, my translation). Through torture, prisoners are forced to reproduce the discourse of their persecutors. This experience of having lost their voice will lead victims such as Paulina to be silent once they have been released, since they are beset by the shame of having succumbed to the pressure of the oppressor. If language stands for the opening up of social space, torture’s undoing of the victim’s speech, together with the impossibility of sharing the suffering it engenders, curtails its inclusion in the social domain. Torture’s space of exclusion partly coincides with the realm occupied by the Levinasian ethical relationship since, according to Levinas, ethics entails a situation where the subject finds her- or himself in a one-on-one, face-to-face encounter with the Other, which is removed from the social and political stage. Such a subject is at the mercy of the Other, from whom it derives its very definition and whose overwhelming presence holds it hostage (Otherwise 124). Levinas further conceives of this contact between the I and the Other as a persecution that both predicates and targets the subjectivity of the former. Analogous to torture, Levinasian ethics takes place prior to and below discourse, in that the call of the Other does not articulate itself in empirical language. However, while torture stamps out the possibility of all discursive interaction between the persecutor and the persecuted, the face to face encounter forms the basis for and contains a promise of speech. For Levinas, the positions of the I and the Other may potentially be reversed, provided that one moves from the level of ethical exclusivity to that of social multiplicity. Torture bars this inversion and therefore locks the victim in the dynamics of unspeakable oppression. In Death and the Maiden, the male characters fail to acknowledge Paulina’s trauma and often portray the psychological scars left by the events she went through as hysteria or madness. Doctor Miranda is understandably anxious to characterize the protagonist as mentally unbalanced, since this would discredit the accusations she levelled against him: ‘I do not know you, madam. I have never seen you before in my life. But I can tell you this: you are extremely ill, almost proto-

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typically schizoid’ (32).27 However, Paulina’s husband also accuses her of insanity: paulina: It’s him gerardo: Who? paulina: It’s the doctor […] gerardo: But weren’t you – you told me – what you told me was all through those weeks … paulina: Blindfolded, yes. But I could still hear. gerardo: You’re sick. paulina: I’m not sick. gerardo: You’re sick. paulina: All right then, I’m sick. But I can be sick and recognize a voice. (23)

Gerardo does not accept Paulina’s arguments against Doctor Miranda and concludes that she must be insane when she identifies her former torturer by recognizing his voice and the touch and smell of his skin. During the Middle Ages, madmen were often regarded as the guardians of truth, as Michel Foucault shows in Madness and Civilization (13– 14). This view of insanity, which survived in literature unscathed by the medicalization of madness from the eighteenth century onwards, can be brought into the reading of Death and the Maiden. Instead of silencing the mad by imprisoning them, a historical event that, according to Foucault, took place at the dawn of the classical age, in the play there is an attempt to silence Paulina with madness. In the text, the link between insanity and prison is the obverse of the one described by Foucault, since it is not the mad who were imprisoned, but rather the prisoners that purportedly went mad as a result of their confinement. By having the two male characters describe Paulina as insane, Dorfman might be implying that she takes on the role of the clairvoyant madwoman, or even of the literary figure of the Fool, whose unreason was often a device to bring veracity home to those in power. In addition, the performance underscores the fact that rationality, represented by Doctor Miranda, is at the service of oppression. If one assumes that Paulina was right about the identity of her former torturer, the categories of reason and madness are rendered meaningless, in that the image of sanity associated with the doctor is shattered by the knowledge of the actions he performed. In the play, the characters fall into the conventional pattern of asso-

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ciating men with reason, vision, and abstraction, while women are placed on the side of darkness, hysteria, and the body, a connection we already encountered in some of the artworks by Pacheco. Paulina is persistently infantilized and only manages to assert her will when she holds a gun.28 Sabine Schlickers suggests that the drama thematizes a fight for power between two men and a woman, who is characterized as neurotic because she breaks with patriarchal tenets (60). The male characters’ depiction of Paulina as mad would therefore be a way for them to assert their authority, an interpretation substantiated by Dorfman’s own remarks in his afterword to the text, where he states that one of the guiding threads of the performance is a speculation about what happens when women take power (75). The dramaturge plays with gender categories and draws a parallel between the public and the private spheres, between sexual and political oppression.29 The madness attributed to Paulina in Death and the Maiden is the underside of her desire for social recognition. Given that both men consider justice either undesirable or impossible in the current political circumstances, they wish to define the protagonist as insane, and thus neutralize her. If madness is characterized by a split within the self, which is no longer able to recognize itself, insanity would be the easiest way to inscribe a third party within the torture relationship. It represents a perversion of sociality in that the social is reduced to the alienated self. In the passage quoted above, Geraldo correlates his wife’s madness with the fact that she was blindfolded. This articulation of blindness and insanity has been traced back by Foucault at least to the classical age, when unreason was often metaphorically referred to as an inability to see.30 In Dorfman’s text, Paulina turns into a figure of blindness not only through the blindfold but also through shadows and darkness. As stated in the play’s stage directions, the protagonist makes her first appearance in semi-obscurity, illuminated only by the moonlight (3). When her husband enters their house, she is hiding in darkness until he turns on the light (3–4) and the stage directions emphasize that she ties and gags Doctor Miranda by a dimmed moonlight, as ‘a cloud passes over the moon’ (18).31 One of the reasons why Paulina remembers her former torturer is because the darkness of the night reproduces the blindness she experienced when she was blindfolded in prison (Reynolds 34). The obscurity surrounding the protagonist suggests that the torturer did not really manage to penetrate her psychic interiority. She never revealed information about her political activities while she was in prison, nor did she, at the time, give away the name of her partner,

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who later became her husband (30). In addition, even though she was blindfolded, she is the one who recognizes her former torturer, which suggests that she got to know him better than he knew her.32 The blindfold, often used as a means to degrade prisoners, can simultaneously stand for their resistance to the unflinching eye of the oppressor, an opacity that prevented Paulina’s complete annihilation in the torture chamber. The two male characters describe Paulina as insane in that she holds on to an experience she went through years ago. Her supposed madness hinges on her difference, namely, on the fact that she endured physical abuse as a political prisoner. The blindfold she wore during the torture sessions was a tangible symbol of the mark branded upon her and, in the play, the darkness into which that eye cover plunged her continues to envelop the protagonist, both concretely and metaphorically. Paulina struggles to hold on to her identity, shaped by her experience of physical pain, and, simultaneously, to participate in a society from which she is excluded by that very experience of suffering. If, in Death and the Maiden, the protagonist is arrested in the stifling world of her torturer, her trial of the doctor concomitantly represents the main character’s attempt to break out of a relationship of subordination in order to assert her sanity and to regain a public voice: paulina: But the members of the Commission only deal with the dead, with those who can’t speak. And I can speak – it’s been years since I murmured even a word, I haven’t opened my mouth to even whisper a breath of what I’m thinking, years living in terror of my own … but I’m not dead, I thought I was but I’m not and I can speak, damn it – so for God’s sake let me have my say and you go ahead with your Commission and believe me when I tell you that none of this is going to be made public. (37)

The protagonist longs to escape the torture scene in which she remains imprisoned and wants her situation as a victim to be recognized. Yet, she knows that the recently created Commission appointed to investigate the political crimes perpetrated during the time of the dictatorship only deals with cases where the former detainees have either died or disappeared.33 She considers the Commission to be a betrayal of those who, like her, were forced to live in terror during totalitarianism and are still unable to speak about their experiences after the fall of the regime. Knowing that she is being denied a voice under the newly rein-

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stated democracy, Paulina is determined to create her own space for the enactment of justice inside her home: ‘We’re going to put him on trial, Gerardo, this doctor. Right here. Today. You and me. Or is your famous Investigating Commission going to do it?’ (26).34 Not only are cases such as Paulina’s not considered by the Commission investigating political crimes, but her proofs against the doctor would also be deemed circumstantial. Witnessing is equated with seeing and the fact that the protagonist was blindfolded when she was abused renders her testimony inconclusive in a court of law. When blindfolded, Paulina was turned into an object that was merely looked at and did not have the ability to reciprocate the gaze. This circumstance is inscribed in the choice of her former torturer’s name: ‘Miranda,’ the name of the doctor accused of torturing Paulina, is related to the verb ‘mirar,’ the Spanish equivalent of ‘to look.’35 The objectification of the protagonist is replicated after the fall of the dictatorship by the fact that she is denied the chance to indict her oppressor. The blindfold thus erases torture at the exact moment when it is being practised since the victim is not able to prove the culpability of her persecutor, who remains unidentifiable. In the play, Paulina questions the juridical structure of testimony and its dependence on seeing. She challenges the tethering of vision to identity and reclaims the validity of the experience of the body. In performing this gesture of emancipation from sight, the protagonist rejects the objectification imposed upon her by her inability to look back at her henchmen during the torture sessions and suggests that subjectivity is independent from the domination afforded by the gaze, thus connecting it with its root in ‘subjection.’ The protagonist proclaims herself as a subject who is dependent on the voice, rather than on vision, and thereby asserts the legitimacy of the accusation she levels against her former torturer. The performance problematizes the reversibility of the positions of the seer and the seen, as well as the purported balance thereby established, and suggests that all relationships are founded upon multiple asymmetries, torture being an exacerbation of this fundamental unevenness. The traumatic nature of the extreme inequality underpinning torture relationships incapacitates individuals, preventing them from testifying to events. As Dori Laub points out, traumatic occurrences often produce no witnesses since, given their enormity, no one can extricate her- or himself from their contaminating power and give an objective description of what happened. Traumatic experience thus implies the collapse of witnessing, i.e., the impossibility of

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detachedly observing and reporting about what took place (66). Paulina was not able to testify to what she went through, yet the reason for this was not her blindfold but the fact that torture precludes witnessing as such. Nevertheless, this incapability of witnessing does not necessarily lead to a tacit acceptance of forgetting; rather, it renders the social task of listening to the unnarratable stories of the victims all the more pressing. In Death and the Maiden, the protagonist’s decision to try Doctor Miranda is coupled with her appointment of her husband Gerardo, who has been selected as one of the members of the commission created to investigate political crimes committed during the dictatorship, as a mediator in the procedure. Throughout the play, Gerardo is presented as a voice of compromise and several critics have argued that he stands for the middle way in Chilean politics. Sophia McClennen states the following: ‘Paulina and Doctor Miranda represent the poles of the left and the right with Geraldo standing in for the moderate center’ (99).36 Gerardo represents the part of society that wants to move on and, as a politician, he believes in the possibility of creating a common space where different social factions can coexist (Alcides Jofre 94, and Castro Jr 65). Further, Gerardo not only stands for moderation but he is also equated with justice. He works as a lawyer and tells his wife that he is committed to upholding juridical procedures: ‘You know that I have spent a good part of my life defending the law’ (30). When Paulina requests Gerardo’s aid in Doctor Miranda’s trial, she wants him to adjudicate between her and the man she believes was her torturer. He serves at times as Doctor Miranda’s defence lawyer and at times as his or even his wife’s prosecutor.37 He is thus constituted as a third party that will triangulate the closed one-to-one relationship between the torturer and the tortured in an attempt to release Paulina from the hold of her traumatic past.38 In Dorfman’s text, the blindfold that prevented the protagonist from clearly identifying her oppressor metamorphoses into the veil covering the eyes of Justitia, which is here allegorically donned by Gerardo.39 Justice strives to uphold Kantian universality, where each individual will be treated objectively and according to the same guiding principles. Its blindness points to its impartiality that arises out of the necessity to arbitrate without taking social or other differences into consideration. Yet, the iconic representation of Justice also carries scales in one hand, signalling its responsibility to take particulars into consideration, since these constitute the elements of the cases presented before it. Justice

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thus navigates between two sets of differences: superficial distinctions, to which it should be blind, and relevant traits that differentiate the various parties involved in a dispute, which are to be weighed on the scales. The double-edged sword held by the figure in the other hand stands for the normativity of justice and for its readiness to implement its decisions. Gerardo’s attempt to embody justice and to be an objective mediator in the situation presented before him flounders as his personal allegiances come into play. On the one hand, a male bond unites him with Doctor Miranda, with whom he discusses politics and shares sexist jokes. On the other hand, his affection for his wife interferes with the way he treats the doctor. Paulina’s husband recognizes that he has been put in an untenable position: ‘I’m tired of being in the middle, in between the two of you [between Doctor Miranda and his wife]’ (48). Finding himself torn between justice’s claim to universality and the particular demands of Paulina and the doctor, he realizes the impossibility of coming to a conciliatory solution that would appease both contenders. If we agree with Jacques Derrida, who, in Specters of Marx, defines justice as dis-adjustment and disarticulation, then Gerardo’s situation in the play seems to represent the aporias of Justicia itself. According to Derrida, justice does not involve compromise solutions that would reconcile the different participants or harmonize the general social arrangement, since, in order to remain fair, it cannot negate the uniqueness of each case and of each party involved (22–3). This uncompromising stance of justice creates a conflict between the universal and the particular, between a general norm and its application in individual circumstances: How to reconcile the act of justice that must always concern singularity, individuals, groups, irreplaceable existences, the other or myself as other, in a unique situation, with rule, norm, value, or the imperative of justice that necessarily have a general form, even if this generality prescribes a singular application in each case? (Derrida, ‘Force’ 245)

The impossibility of reconciling these disparate elements is what defines justice, since general norms are bound to fail when we try to take into account all the exigencies of each case to which they are applied. Consequently, as Derrida points out, every ruling on a given legal situation generates a new rule and calls for a reinvention of the law: ‘Each case

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is other, each decision is different and requires an absolutely unique interpretation, which no existing, coded rule can or ought to guarantee absolutely’ (‘Force’ 251). In other words, the very existence of the already constituted legal system stands in the way of the aspiration to reconstitute a law that is tailored to the unrepeatable character of a singular case. Justice dwells in this tension between its form and particular contents and, therefore, can never be completely just. In Dorfman’s play, Gerardo hesitates between his belief in the universality of the law and the specificity of the events that his wife went through and finally realizes that no legal procedure will ever do justice to Paulina’s difference and to the pain inflicted on her through torture. In Death and the Maiden, torture is presented as a relationship that undermines the social arena. For victims such as Paulina Salas, the only possibility of entering the realm of sociality is to open up a space of mediation between oppressor and oppressed, either by retreating into madness or by subjecting the torturer to a justice that demands an impossible objectivity and universality. However, one should not assume that torture and the social are two self-contained and separated domains. In The Letter of Violence, Avelar goes back to the Benjaminian association of culture and barbarity and argues that torture is intrinsically related to the formation of Western society. Avelar’s conclusions draw on Page DuBois’s work Torture and Truth that analyses the use of torture in Antiquity. In ancient Greek society, torture was instrumental in establishing the distinction between citizens and non-citizens, since only the latter could be subjected to the practice. It was considered that truth had to be dragged out of the slave’s body and brought into the open through the infliction of pain. DuBois thus links the Greek notion of truth as a bringing to light or unveiling of something that had hitherto been hidden with purposefully imposed suffering. Avelar goes a step further by suggesting that the Western philosophical and juridical concept of truth is rooted in torture: ‘The following question, then, imposes itself: to what extent does the very conception of truth installed in Western philosophy take us back to this procedure carried out on the bastard body?’ (Letter 37). According to Avelar, there is an inextricable correlation between the socially constructed notion of veracity and the mutilated body of the oppressed, a relation that plays itself out in Dorfman’s text. In Death and the Maiden, the idea of truth is not univocal. The different characters espouse diverging versions of the same events and it remains unclear whether Paulina’s account of the past is more accurate

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than Doctor Miranda’s.40 The performance therefore rejects a totalizing conception of an uncontestable truth that would arise out of the sacrifice of the voices of many. However, even though the play disavows a truth built upon a forced consensus and guaranteed through the infliction of corporeal pain, it does not fall into complete relativism;41 instead, it asserts the right of every person and, more specifically, the victims’ right, to participate in the social and political space. This social representation of the persecuted does not correspond to a complete removal of their figurative blindfold in order to shed light on the phenomenon of totalitarian politics. On the contrary, sociality is concentrated in the blindfold, the only remnant of a third party separating the torturer from the body of the victims during torture sessions. In Dorfman’s text, society should not be grounded on the premises of a universal justice that irons out all particularities. Rather, the play propounds a social realm that accommodates darkness, one that has a space for Paulina, with her trauma and with her particular form of madness. The most profound difference separating Dorfman’s text and its adaptation to the silver screen by Roman Polanski, which premiered in 1994 with the same title as the play, is the unambiguous character of the film.42 The movie ends with Doctor Miranda’s true confession of his past as a torturer, which takes place after a first staged confession that is also part of the play.43 Even though the film explores some of the issues pertaining to legality and justice already at stake in the theatre version,44 most critics agree that it depoliticizes the plot of the drama. Both Bernard Schulz (132) and Sabine Schlickers (65) fault the film for presenting Paulina’s torture and rape mainly as individual acts of perversion, while the political context of these actions recedes into the background.45 Avelar is equally critical of the movie, particularly due its conflation of the doctor’s second confession with the truth. The experiences of Paulina are only confirmed by Doctor Miranda’s admission of guilt, which reinstates the dependence of the tortured woman upon her male torturer (‘La Muerte’). In spite of the film’s careful recreation of a closed environment, that grows increasingly claustrophobic until its denouement in an open-air scene near a cliff, and in spite of its compelling portrayal of the obsessive relationship that holds the three characters together, the cinematic adaptation of the play fails to depict the predicament represented in the drama in all its socio-political nuances. Conversely, the movies Garaje Olimpo and O que é isso Companheiro? which also focus on periods of dictatorship in Latin American countries – Argentina and Brazil, respectively – express the imbrication

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of the private and the public spheres in situations of political violence. In both films, the blindfold and the hood contrast with the translucence of state authority and are presented as a site of equivocality, marking both the limitless power of the oppressors and the prisoners’ wish to shield themselves from their gaze. 3.3 Filming the Blindfold: Garaje Olimpo (Garage Olimpo) and O que é isso Companheiro? (Four Days in September) The blindfold is frequently featured in films portraying abuses of power, where it betokens the demeaning handling of political prisoners. The inability to see is an inscription of the detainees’ vulnerability onto their body, signalling their complete dependence upon their oppressors. The covering of the eyes in the films Garaje Olimpo (Garage Olimpo) and O que é isso Companheiro? (Four Days in September) is in line with this representation of the blindfold or the hood as marks of abjection. Yet, both productions add a layer of complexity to the usage of the eye cover, since this implement does not simply figure as a veil imposed by totalitarianism on its victims but often seems to be elected by prisoners and even by guards as a mask that distances them from their surroundings. The blindfold and the hood thus become loci of ambiguity, in that they fit both the disempowered and their aggressors. Garaje Olimpo focuses on the abduction, incarceration and torture of members of the left-leaning resistance to the dictatorship in Argentina (1976–83), a period during which the country was governed by a series of right-wing military juntas. The protagonist, Maria (Antonella Costa), is taken from her home by the military police and put in a jail disguised as a garage. Once she enters the sombre environment of the prison, she is blindfolded and warned by one of the guards that she is never to behold what takes place around her: ‘Este es el mundo del sonido para vos. A partir de ahora, no vas a ver más, nunca más. Y si ves algo te voy a sacar los ojos con una cuchara’ (This is the world of sound for you. From now on, you will no longer see, never again. And if you see something I will take your eyes out with a spoon). At various moments in the film, prisoners are ordered to put on a blindfold and torturers hint at the fact that the eye cover is used to protect their identity. However, the henchmen systematically tear the blindfold off the detainees’ faces: whenever victims are being tortured, when someone talks to them, or when they are about to leave the facility their eye cover is taken off. In fact, the device seems to be used only when

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prisoners are alone or when they are being moved between the various locations inside the jail. The discrepancy between the overt function of the blindfold and its concrete usage in the film leads the viewer to conclude that its sole purpose consisted in depriving detainees of their spatial coordinates in order to accentuate their powerlessness. Guards were aware of the fact that all victims were going to be assassinated and would therefore not be able to give away the identity of their torturers. The imposition of the eye cover and the order not to take it off was thus a ruse designed to accentuate the boundless authority of the henchmen, who were the only ones in a position to disobey the order commanding prisoners not to look, which they had issued themselves. The dictate to wear a blindfold can be ascribed to the arbitrary nature of totalitarian regimes, where the authorities have the power both to define norms and to circumvent or annul them. In Marco Bechis’s film, the gesture of tearing off the blindfold from the prisoners’ eyes is presented as a moment of violence. Torturers aggressively wrench the eye cover from the detainees’ faces, who are suddenly dazzled by the intensity of the light around them. Through this act, the oppressors convey that they are the ones who decide when and what the inmates should behold. This unveiling of the eyes is almost equated to an undressing, whereby the victims become fully exposed to their henchmen, as one of her fellow prisoners tells Maria: ‘El problema son los ojos. No se puede fingir con los ojos, ellos lo saben. Por eso, todo el tiempo te están buscando la mirada, para saber si mentis’ (The problem is the eyes. One cannot pretend with the eyes and they know it. For this reason, they are constantly searching for your gaze, to know if you are lying). By tearing off their blindfold, the guards want to signal to the tortured that they cannot hide behind their eye cover, which will not shelter them from the torturers’ unblinking gaze. Despite the blindfold’s negative connotations, the film highlights the fact that inmates often wear it when they do not have to. The movie comprises numerous shots of Maria sitting alone and motionless in her dingy cell with her eyes covered. She is often filmed from a high angle, as if the viewers were being invited to observe her from a privileged position and, through this denaturalized stance, to become conscious of their role as outside spectators, watching someone with covered eyes. It appears that, by dint of a process of habituation, Maria has internalized the rule commanding her to wear the blindfold. However, the protagonist’s choice to cover her eyes when she is alone might indicate that she derives some comfort from blindness, which prevents her from seeing

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the squalidness around her, and that she feels some transient sense of protection thanks to the blindfold. One of the most striking scenes of the film occurs when Maria is in her cell, while a man is being tortured in an adjacent room to the sound of loud pop music playing on the radio to mask his cries. Maria is alone, wearing a blindfold, and she starts writing on the prison wall with her bare fingers. The sequence begins with the camera filming her directly from the back, which is followed by a cut to a wide and slightly high angle that encompasses her whole body, focused on the activity of scribbling. The protagonist cannot see what she is writing and the signs she is forming with her fingers are not going to remain for others to read. The incongruity of Maria’s action, which seems to reproduce blindness on various levels, is the protagonist’s way of expressing the absurdity of torture. Locked in her cell, prevented from defending herself or from helping her fellow prisoners, Maria finds that words have lost their meaning and she is only able to respond to the situation with blind, invisible letters, a testimony that can be neither written nor read. In Garaje Olimpo the blindfold is imposed by the torturers upon detainees and simultaneously embraced by the latter as a veil that separates them from the horrors of life in prison. In Bruno Barreto’s production O que é isso Companheiro? the ambivalence of the eye or face cover is even more blatant, in that it is worn both by the guards and by their prisoner. The movie, based on a homonymous autobiographical book by Fernando Gabeira, revolves around the kidnapping of the American ambassador to Brazil by a group composed of members of two left-wing resistance movements fighting the military dictatorship in the country (1964–85): the Ação Libertadora Nacional and the Movimento Revolucionário 8 de Outubro (MR8).46 The film reflects upon the legitimacy of resorting to violence to fight totalitarianism and the use of different veils for the eyes and face, both by the kidnappers and by the kidnapped, signals the subtle portrayal of authority in the movie. After being abducted, the American ambassador is held in one of the rooms of an old rented house and is kept under permanent surveillance by the members of the group that sequestered him. In order not to be identified, each of these wears a hood with holes at the level of the eyes when together with the kidnapped. By wearing a hood, the revolutionaries seem to identify themselves with the illegal position ascribed to them by the authorities and their covering of the head shows them as disempowered, even though they are the ones in control of the ambassador. In contrast with the torturers in Garaje Olimpo, who acted with

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impunity because they were backed by the power of the state, the members of the resistance movement are labelled as criminals and, therefore, cannot show their faces. State authority in both Argentina and Brazil presents itself as though it had nothing to hide and imposes covers upon those who defy it, be they prisoners or guards. The only member of the group of abductors who does not wear a hood is Fernando (Pedro Cardoso), a former university student whose political positions have been radicalized by the brutality of the dictatorship. Fernando refuses to assume the identity of a criminal by veiling his face and asks the ambassador to cover his eyes instead. He rejects the power of the regime, according to which he is a terrorist, and considers that the act of resistance perpetrated by the group founds a new authority, beyond the sovereignty of the totalitarian state. Yet, when he must kill the ambassador, given that the conditions set by the group for his release were not met, he puts on a hood. Forced to use violence indiscriminately, Fernando realizes that the means employed by the revolutionaries in response to the dictatorship are similar to the ones used by the regime. The wearing of the hood accompanies his acknowledgment that he has become as much of an offender as the military government. O que é isso Companheiro? questions the efficacy of employing violence as a means to fight aggression. The film shows that the line separating oppressors and oppressed can be easily crossed and portrays this traversal through the different usages of the hood. Furthermore, the portrayal of the blindfold and the hood in both Bruno Barreto’s and Marco Bechis’s films exposes the groundlessness of authority by showing that totalitarian states always present themselves as legitimate, transparent governments, while striving to impose veils on all those who defy their dictates. Finally, in Garaje Olimpo, the prisoners use the blindfold, which is traditionally a sign of debasement, as a curtain separating them from the oppressors. Detainees choose to put on the eye cover in order to escape the grim environment where they find themselves and the penetrating gaze of the torturers. In the works analysed in this chapter, the blindfold, like torture, is presented as an end in itself. The practice of torture is generally considered not to be a reliable source of information, since suffering is most often inflicted on prisoners as a punishment for their actions. To abuse the body thus becomes a goal in and of itself and not simply a means to gather data.47 Likewise, the blindfolding of victims is not primarily practised in order to protect the identity of the henchmen. As shown

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in Garaje Olimpo, many guards knew that the tortured were going to be executed and, in case they survived, the generalized impunity for crimes committed against prisoners during dictatorships foreclosed the possibility of any legal or other kind of action against the perpetrators. Even after the demise of totalitarianism, the political climate in countries such as Chile prevented the public denunciation of former torturers, a predicament that is played out in Death and the Maiden. The blindfold is thus just another form of chastising detainees by rendering them completely powerless to protect themselves against the blows of the authorities. It underlines the luminous character of state power, which contrasts with the darkness imposed upon those who contest it, as demonstrated in O que é isso Companheiro? A consequence of the covering of the eyes is that it sharpens the other senses. The blindfold exposes the body, increasing its receptiveness to outside stimuli, which is why it is often employed as a prop in erotic games. In situations of oppression there is a reversal of this potentially pleasurable effect of blindfolding. In the artworks, texts, and films discussed in this chapter, the prisoners’ blindness heightens their sensitivity to pain, while the perpetrators acquire a god-like allure, since the detainees are unable to identify the source of the blows. The utmost perversion of erotic blindfolding is represented by the main character in Death and the Maiden, who was repeatedly raped without ever seeing her torturer. In many of these works, the blindfold and the hood are characterized by ambiguity, in that the blindness they generate is often embraced by the detainees. Furthermore, in Death and the Maiden, in Garaje Olimpo, and in some pieces by Pacheco, the covering of the eyes represents the only remnant of sociality in a situation of torture, and appears to preserve the interiority of the victims from the scrutiny of their henchmen. It, therefore, offers prisoners some transitory respite from the utter defencelessness that characterizes their position. Lending itself to pleasure and play, as well as to torture and debasement, the blindfold is a form without content, a piece of cloth turned into a hollow sign, whose symbolism is generated through practice. In exploring the (mis)uses of the eye cover, this chapter concomitantly undertook a dissection of totalitarianism, which so often resorts to blindfolds and hoods in its violent exercise of power.

4 The Reason of Vision: Variations on Subjectivity in José Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Blindness)

Resistamos à ilusão de supor que tudo pode ser inundado de luz. Deixaríamos de ver. Eduardo Lourenço, Heterodoxia I1

José Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira (Blindness),2 published in 1995, invites a meditation upon the limits of rationality in contemporary societies.3 Even though the novel seems to propound a return to reason, this facile interpretation is thwarted by the narrative’s questioning of the very meaning of thought. The luminous blindness portrayed in the text is presented as the point where reason and unreason intersect and the corporeal dimension of the plague of blindness that triggers the events in the novel further indicates a rejection of an abstract universal rationality and the recovery of the material individual who is exposed to the workings of ideology and of power. In Ensaio, blindness is tied to the transformation of this individual into a subject, dependent upon social constraints and upon the state. Yet, it also opens the path for a reflection on power relations and on the possibility of agency predicated on collective subjectivity. 4.1 The Reason of Blindness The polyphony generated by the numerous commentaries on Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira seems to cohere with surprising harmony in the interpretation of the inability to see as an emblem for unreason.4 The catastrophic plague of white blindness that befalls an unidentified

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region is frequently explicated as a figuration for the irrational organization of contemporary societies, where inequality prevails.5 Ensaio contains various pieces of textual evidence supporting an allegorical reading of the illness as an exacerbation of the irrational condition in which the world already finds itself, and, at key moments in the novel, the main characters themselves seem to become aware of the symbolic nature of their affliction:6 Não somos imortais, não podemos escapar à morte, mas ao menos não devíamos ser cegos, disse a mulher do médico, Como, se esta cegueira é concreta e real, disse o médico, Não tenho a certeza, disse a mulher, Nem eu, disse a rapariga dos óculos escuros. (282) (We are not immortal, we cannot escape death, but at least we should not be blind, said the doctor’s wife, How, if this blindness is concrete and real, said the doctor, I am not sure, said the wife, Nor I, said the girl with the dark glasses.)7 (296)

In this passage, the doctor’s wife implicitly compares blindness with death, which would be equivalent to the annihilation of reason itself. Both she and the girl with the shades realize that the condition of being blind is not so much a physical as a moral one, and it could potentially be reversed. Similar insights surface at key points throughout the narrative and are summarized, once again, by the doctor’s wife: ‘Abramos os olhos, Não podemos, estamos cegos, disse o médico, É uma grande verdade a que diz que o pior cego foi aquele que não quis ver’ (283) (Let’s open our eyes, We can’t, we are blind, said the doctor, It is a great truth that says that the worst blind person was the one who did not want to see, [298]). Here the woman exhorts her companions to open their eyes and see, since she knows that their affliction is not a concrete blindness.8 The situation described in the text is thus reduced to the corporeal correlate to an unethical inability to see social ills. In moments of metatextual commentary such as the ones described above, the characters distance themselves from the action and become conscious of their position as pawns in an essayistic experiment.9 They eschew their plot-embedded selves to adopt the perspective of the author/narrator and to replicate the latter’s views.10 These decisive instances when the protagonists transcend their roles seem to be the corollary of a novelistic process that affords both anagnorisis and

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catharsis: physical blindness is the exteriorization of a latent malady ensconced in the depths of the social fabric, and being able to identify it as such would be the first step in finding a cure for the disease. Saramago’s short comments on Ensaio appear to corroborate a reading of the novel as a condemnation of unreason in social relations. In an interview with Carlos Reis, the author states: And it is that indifference in relation to the other, that kind of disdain for the other that I ask myself if it has any meaning in a situation or in the context of the existence of a species, which considers itself to be rational. This, in truth, I cannot understand, and it is one of my great torments. Blindness plays a role in the expression of this torment. (150, my translation)

According to the writer, disrespect for the other is incompatible with the definition of humans as rational beings. In other words, Saramago considers that reason stands for an acknowledgment of the other’s rights, including the right to be different.11 If one does not make good use of reason, if one mistreats others, one must be blind. Ensaio is simply a literalization of this idea, as the novelist states in another interview: ‘And when one loses vision in that metaphorical sense, what one is losing is the ability to understand. One is losing the ability to relate to the other, to respect the other in its difference, no matter what this difference is’ (Halperín 52, my translation). The loss of vision allegorized in the text is thus equated with the inability to relate to other individuals, which, in turn, represents a failure in human understanding. Saramago describes Ensaio as a literary reflection on circumstances prevalent in present-day society: ‘This was written because this is happening in the world’ (Halperín 15, my translation). The irrational sightlessness portrayed in the narrative stands for what occurs in the world and the author finds it contradictory that readers who pronounce themselves shocked by the violence depicted in the novel remain apparently undisturbed by current events.12 If the conjunction of reason and human emancipation is presented in Ensaio as the exact opposite of irrational blindness, it follows that the novel should be ranked among the apologies of enlightened rationality. In fact, in his interviews, Saramago often harks back to the values of the Enlightenment and bemoans the ongoing demise of the mindset inaugurated by eighteenth-century thinkers with proleptic nostalgia.13 The solution to the concrete and metaphorical blindness depicted in the narrative would appear to be the bright light of rea-

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son.14 This is what the characters in the text and the readers of the story should realize. To consider Ensaio as an allegory that calls for rationality in a society increasingly dominated by unreason is certainly one of the possible paths for interpreting the novel. However, this reading encounters a number of difficulties. First, the positing of a universal reason that presupposes the infinite replication of the same structure of interiority in multiple instantiations contradicts the author’s imperative of respect for individual differences. Furthermore, this approach to reason would imply the existence of a totalizing truth shared by all. Finally, this disembodied notion of rationality contrasts with the omnipresent physicality portrayed in the novel. The avowal of these interpretative paradoxes will be the starting point for a rethinking of the correlation between blindness and unreason in Saramago’s novel. This link will not be wholly repudiated. Rather, it will be the basis of a more nuanced reading of lack of vision in the text that will take into consideration the multiple layers of meaning embedded in the narrative. One of the peculiarities of the plague of blindness described in Ensaio sobre a Cegueira is that its cause is a luminous whiteness: Chegara mesmo ao ponto de pensar que a escuridão em que os cegos viviam não era, afinal, senão a simples ausência da luz, que o que chamamos cegueira era algo que se limitava a cobrir a aparência dos seres e das coisas, deixando-os intactos por trás do seu véu negro. Agora, pelo contrário, eilo que se encontrava mergulhado numa brancura tão luminosa, tão total, que devorava, mais do que absorvia, não só as cores, mas as próprias coisas e seres, tornando-os, por essa maneira, duplamente invisíveis. (15–16) (He had even reached the point of thinking that the darkness in which the blind live was nothing other than the simple absence of light, that what we call blindness was something that simply covered the appearance of beings and things, leaving them intact behind their black veil. Now, on the contrary, here he was, plunged into a whiteness so luminous, so total, that it swallowed up rather than absorbed, not just the colors, but the very things and beings, thus making them twice as invisible.) (6)

Blindness is usually associated with darkness, i.e., with the complete absence of colour. This obscurity is limited to erasing the appearance of beings and things but leaves their essence unchanged. In contrast, the affliction portrayed in the novel results from a very bright white light.

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The passage above depicts this second mode of blindness as a vortex that draws and absorbs beings and things into nothingness, in that they are rendered doubly invisible, neither beheld nor experienced. In the end, the blind themselves run the risk of dispersion into the vacuum of light: ‘Eles diluem-se na luz que os rodeia, é a luz que não os deixa ver’ (260) (They fade into the surrounding light, and it is the light which does not allow them to see [274]). Their determining trait is the light that prevents them from seeing. By defining blindness as an excess of brightness, the novel precludes a straightforward articulation between the plague and unreason. The coupling of the inability to see with light, traditionally linked to rationality and the Enlightenment, unhinges the reading of vision in Ensaio as a synonym of emancipation. The novel postulates the existence of two kinds of light, or two modalities of the rational, namely, the rationality of the blind and that of those who see, as the white luminosity seen by those afflicted by the plague of blindness contrasts with the light of reason. A second divide arises between those who were already metaphorically blind when they still possessed the physical ability to see, and an equally metaphorical enlightened vision. The latter is only hinted at in the novel and coincides with moments of lucidity, when the characters realize that their condition is an allegory for a problem that pre-existed it. This proliferation of concrete and figurative light seems to indicate not so much a mitosis originating divergent illuminations and rationalities but a split within reason itself, which is one of the features of modernity inaugurated by the Enlightenment.15 Theodor Adorno and Marx Horkheimer have identified a contradiction inherent in the unfolding of the Enlightenment since, according to the thinkers, this movement that aimed at freeing human beings from their bonds has led to calamity.16 Departing from this aporia, they conclude that ‘the not merely theoretical but practical tendency toward self-destruction has been inherent in rationality from the first, not only in the present phase when it is emerging nakedly’ (xix). They trace the beginning of the Enlightenment to mythology, which inaugurated the creation of concepts as abstract units and thus marked the separation between subject and object (11). This development ultimately led to an objectification of the relationship of human beings both to other individuals and to themselves (21). Significantly, the authors link the mass culture brought about by enlightened reason to a certain blindness (28). Yet, in spite of their critique of a totalizing and reifying streak of the Enlightenment, Adorno and Horkheimer believe that society can-

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not dispense with it: ‘We have no doubt […] that freedom in society is inseparable from enlightenment thinking […] If enlightenment does not assimilate reflection on this regressive moment, it seals its own fate’ (xvi). It is up to enlightened reason to reflect upon itself and its multiple manifestations, since only through thinking can totalitarian rationality be defeated. The understanding of reason advanced by Adorno and Horkheimer coincides with the notion of rationality underlying Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira. In tune with the ideas expressed by the German thinkers, the novel implies that there are multiple modes of rationality, which can either lead to a totalizing universality predicated on sameness or open the path to more ethical social relations. In the narrative, the moment of blindness encompasses both alternatives.17 On the one hand, the brutality marking the authorities’ attempts to isolate the ones contaminated by the plague, as well as the egotistic behaviour of some of the blind, is an example of the worst excesses of rationality. Both cases denote a desire for a uniform, submissive, and hierarchical society. On the other hand, the incapacity to see triggers a process of reflection in some of the main characters, which leads them to reevaluate the tenets that have guided their former lives and to understand the relevance of sharing and the rewards of communal living. Consequently, in the text, the situation of blindness does not stand for irrationality but rather represents the paradoxes of reason itself, as the whiteness of the blinding light encompasses all colours and, metonymically, all possibilities. The brightness experienced by the blind makes things doubly invisible, in that, as the narrator of the novel puts it, it absorbs their essence, but it is this non-essentiality that will permit a reformulation of the ways in which individuals relate to other beings and to things. Adorno and Horkheimer emphasize the fact that reason has no specific content, since it can be used both to defend and to condemn violence. In the Western tradition, the writings of the Marquis de Sade represent a paradigm for this lack of ethical content at the core of rationality (Horkheimer and Adorno 92–3). In Ensaio, there is also a sense that human thought can lead to divergent results, a notion exemplified in the passage describing the main characters’ wanderings through the streets of a city populated solely by the blind, where they encounter public speakers, who defend different approaches to the salvation of mankind. In one of the squares they pass, preachers expound their religious and apocalyptic views: ‘Proclamava-se ali o fim do mundo, a salvação penitencial, a visão do sétimo dia, o advento do anjo, a

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colisão cósmica, a extinção do sol, o espírito da tribo, a seiva da mandrágora’ (284) (They were proclaiming the end of the world, redemption through penitence, the visions of the seventh day, the advent of the angel, cosmic collisions, the death of the sun, the tribal spirit, the sap of the mandrake [298]). In another square, the emphasis is on law and the economy: ‘Proclamavam-se ali os princípios fundamentais dos grandes sistemas organizados, a propriedade privada, o livre câmbio, o mercado, a bolsa […] o código penal, o código civil, o código das estradas, o dicionário, a lista de telefones, as redes de prostituição’ (295) (They were extolling the virtues of the fundamental principles of the great organized systems, private property, a free currency market, the market economy, the stock exchange […] the penal code, the civil code, the highway code, dictionaries, the telephone directory, networks of prostitution [310–11]). There is a clear ironical intent in the juxtaposition of the topics addressed in the two locations, in that Christianity and magic, the stock exchange and prostitution, are here lumped together. However, even though the narrative suggests a repudiation of both religion and liberal economy, which is not surprising given its author’s atheistic and communist convictions, it refrains from prescribing specific solutions to social problems.18 Maria Alzira Seixo remarks that Ensaio does not exactly pinpoint social wrongs nor does it state how these should be corrected.19 Rather, it highlights a certain danger inherent in contemporary societies that becomes all the more clear when exacerbated by the freedom of fictional discourse, and that some commentators have identified with totalitarianism (‘Os Espelhos’ 108).20 As the doctor’s wife emphasizes in the novel, right and wrong are fluid concepts: ‘O certo e o errado são apenas modos diferentes de entender a nossa relação com os outros […]’ (262) (What is right and what is wrong are simply different ways of understanding our relationships with the others [276]). Values are not eternal and immutable but can only be defined in the context of a relationship with others, and by imagining these interpersonal exchanges in a limit situation, the text sparks a rethinking of currently held beliefs. The narrative takes the reader by the hand and guides her or him to an intersection, metaphorically represented by blindness, showing her or him the different directions that human reason can take. It will be up to each reader to determine what concrete path is to be taken.21 In Ensaio, the body becomes the site where moral dilemmas are played out, since blindness is a physical condition that affects the characters’ everyday, material lives. Furthermore, as the organization of

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the imaginary community collapses, hunger, cold and sexual desire become the driving forces behind the action. The abstract reason of the Enlightenment appears in Saramago’s novel to have gained a corporeal dimension. In fact, the narrative is characterized by a morbid insistence on the scatological and there are detailed and synaesthetic descriptions of filth, putrefaction, and death.22 The idea of a plague descending upon a region also points toward the centrality of the body and it evokes both historical occurrences, like the medieval Black Death, and some of its literary reworkings, such as Albert Camus’s novel The Plague.23 The omnipresent corporeality depicted in the text emphasizes the vulnerability of the human body and its dependence on social structures for survival. The fictionalized inscription of the quandaries of contemporary reason on the body of an entire population through a plague extends the implications of Ensaio beyond subjective concerns and into the level of the state. As Sandra Stanley suggests, the personal and the social bodies appear intertwined (294) and absence of vision can be read as the passageway through which the undifferentiated members of a society are turned into political subjects. In the novel, blindness becomes the site where the individual and the communal converge. 4.2 Becoming Blind, Becoming a Subject Ensaio sobre a Cegueira does not offer an explanation as to the cause of the sudden epidemic of blindness that rapidly spread to an entire population. Even though Luciana Stegagno Picchio likens the plague portrayed in the novel to the white blindness that scourged the sinners of Sodom in Genesis (74), there are no indications in the book that the affliction is a result of punishment.24 On the contrary, with the exception of the doctor’s wife, the illness affects everyone indiscriminately and, like death, is transformed into a great equalizer, as the characters themselves realize.25 This apparent absence of causality is also an effect of the plague of blindness, as the blind are often unaware of the motivations underlying the events that befall them. The most tragic example of this condition is the death of a group of people who were waiting for food outside of the building of the mental asylum. Without vision, they do not realize that they have placed themselves in a position where they might frighten the soldiers who are bringing them provisions and when the guards see them, they become scared and the blind are shot without understanding why (88).

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The disconnect between cause and effect is frequently identified as one of the hallmarks of contemporary society. Friedrich Nietzsche has pointedly diagnosed it in his dictum: ‘“the doer” is simply fabricated into the doing – the doing is everything’ (Genealogy 25). According to Nietzsche, only effects are real and causes are constructed retrospectively. The process of creating a cause, i.e., the production of a doer or of a subject of an action, results from social conventions. In Ensaio, this formation of subjecthood coincides with the moment when characters go blind. The first part of the novel is dedicated to a description of how various characters lost their sight and, as Maria Alzira Seixo emphasizes, the incipit coincides with the first case of the illness (‘Espelhos Virados’ 109). In Ensaio, there is no information about the life of the community where the action takes place before it was overcome by the plague, which implies that the situation from which it departs is uninteresting, since it coincides with a social environment that most readers would be familiar with, namely, that of a post-industrial society. Further, the main characters are only individuated at the moment when they are touched by blindness; their fictional lives begin when they are about to stop seeing. The community and its members need to be transformed into an object of blindness in order to become subjects in the text. The depiction of the first cases of blindness in the opening chapters of the book recurs in a condensed form when the blind have been confined to the mental asylum. Shortly after his arrival in the dormitory, the old man suggests that each person describe the moment when they lost their sight: Ceguei quando estava a ver o meu olho cego […] Parece uma parábola, disse uma voz desconhecida, o olho que se recusa a reconhecer a sua própria ausência […] Quanto a mim, disse a mulher do primeiro cego, a última coisa que me lembro de ter visto foi o meu lenço, estava em casa a chorar, levei o lenço aos olhos e, nesse instante, ceguei […] O meu caso, disse o ajudante de farmácia, foi mais simples, ouvi dizer que havia pessoas a cegarem, então pensei como seria se eu cegasse também, fechei os olhos a experimentar e quando os abri estava cego, Parece outra parábola, falou a voz desconhecida, se queres ser cego, sê-lo-ás. Ficaram calados. (129) (I went blind when I was looking at my blind eye […] It sounds like an allegory, said an unknown voice, the eye that refuses to acknowledge its

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own absence […] As for me, said the wife of the first blind man, the last thing I can remember seeing was my handkerchief, I was sitting at home and crying my heart out, I raised the handkerchief to my eyes and went blind that very moment […] My situation, said the pharmancist’s assistant, was simpler, I heard that people were going blind, then I began to wonder what it would be like if I too were to go blind, I closed my eyes to try it and when I opened them I was blind, Sounds like another allegory, interrupted the unknown voice, if you want to be blind, then blind you will be. They remained silent.) (127–8)

The revisiting of the abrupt transition from seeing to the white light of blindness, accompanied by comments imitating those of a Greek chorus represented by the voice of an unknown person, highlights the fact that the loss of vision happened at a time when individuals were reflecting about sight. This is particularly obvious in the case of the man working at a drug store and in the situation of the old man, in that they attempt to contemplate lack of vision itself.26 The two characters’ efforts to turn blindness into an object for consideration backfires, as they, themselves, became the targets of the affliction. The old man wants to look at the blindness already affecting one of his eyes, while the drug store employee tries to recreate lack of vision within himself and becomes blind in this process of internalization. As the unidentified individual states in the end of this passage: ‘Já éramos cegos no momento em que cegámos’ (131) (We were already blind the moment we turned blind [129]). This disembodied unknown voice that appears to convey the words of God suggests that a different kind of blindness preexisted the physical one. Both the old man and the drug store employee lose sight at the moment when they become conscious of this blindness within themselves or, in other words, when this consciousness turns into self-consciousness. It is precisely through this process of re-flection, where the characters’ blindness returns to them after being exteriorized, that they are created as subjects. It is telling that the sequence of brief narratives portraying each character’s passage into blindness culminates in an ekphrastic moment. The unidentified person in the group declares that she/he had been in a museum when she/he went blind.27 This individual embarks on a long description of the picture she/he had been contemplating at the time, a composite image of a number of famous works in the tradition of Western painting, from Van Gogh’s Wheat Fields under Threatening Skies to Leonardo da Vinci’s The Last Supper or Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus

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(130–1). The last image to be beheld in this random collage is that of a battle and, more specifically, of a frightened horse in combat, a reference to Pablo Picasso’s Guernica that foreshadows the violence to come in the text. Art itself seems to be the topic of this montage of images. Artistic representation can be read here as a catalyst that renders people aware of a blindness that preexisted the time when they physically lost their sight, the moment of going blind being the instant when characters become cognizant of their condition.28 It takes blindness to end blindness or, to put it differently, the end of physical vision marks the beginning of the end of sightlessness, a development mediated through art. The novel bears an implicit desire that its readers will, too, identify their own blindness while reading the text. In Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, becoming blind translates into becoming a subject, in that it is a process that both subjugates and emancipates. The characters are simultaneously subjected to the disease and lent agency by their newly acquired self-consciousness. This mechanism mirrors the structure of the hailing of ideology delineated by Louis Althusser in his renowned essay ‘Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.’ For Althusser, it is necessary to distinguish between ideologies, which depend upon the history of social formations and of class struggle, and Ideology that is essentially ahistorical and represents the imaginary relationship of human beings to their real conditions of existence (‘Ideology’ 107). Interpellation is the process through which Ideology hails concrete individuals and, by that call, turns them into subjects (118). As the author points out, even though one can adopt different ideologies, one is always within Ideology, i.e., one has always already been summoned to subjecthood: Thus ideology hails or interpellates individuals as subjects. As ideology is eternal, I must now suppress the temporal form in which I have presented the functioning of ideology, and say: ideology has always-already interpellated individuals as subjects, which amounts to making it clear that individuals are always-already interpellated by ideology as subjects, which necessarily leads us to one last proposition: individuals are alwaysalready subjects. (‘Ideology’ 119)

In Althusser’s words, man is an ideological animal, who at all times recognizes himself as a subject, and hailing is an image that substantiates the abstract and atemporal individual subjection to Ideology, turning it into a concrete subjugation to a specific power (the police, the

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law, etc.) (116). Ideology is, thus, the mechanism by which causes are construed, weaving a coherent narration around the subject. In Ensaio, the hailing of ideology comes as a plague of blindness. The absence of proper names in the narrative marks the fact that each character should be defined, first and foremost, as a blind person.29 As Eduardo Calbucci points out, even the expressions used to identify the main characters – ‘the girl with the shades,’ ‘the eye doctor,’ ‘the first blind,’ etc. – are related to the eyes and to blindness (87). Subjects become conscious of themselves and of the materiality of their subjection at the moment when they stop seeing. From then on, they identify with their sightlessness, accepting it as their own, as a voice in the text declares: ‘Quem está a falar, perguntou o médico, Um cego, respondeu a voz, só um cego, é o que temos aqui’ (131) (Who is speaking, asked the doctor, A blind man, replied a voice, just a blind man, for that is all we have here [129]). The interpellation by ideology signifies a move toward self-consciousness, as the blind become aware of an impossibility to see that already dwelled within them before its physical manifestation. Althusser emphasizes the similarities between Ideology and the unconscious, in that the two are irreducible conditions of possibility for subject-formation. According to the author, the only way to go beyond Ideology is to perform an epistemological break, through which one would be able to situate oneself in a non-ideological terrain, such as the subjectless discourse of science (‘Ideology’ 117). For Saramago, however, such a position would be untenable. The author believes that all thoughts and actions are ineluctably determined by ideological precepts, as he states in his interview with Carlos Reis: Ideology as a general system of ideas […] touches us all, because everybody, writer or non-writer, lives immersed in that kind of soup. This means that it is not even legitimate to think that we could live outside that kind of sea, since that is where we breathe, that is where we are, it is where we feed, intellectually.30 (73, my translation)

As Onésimo Almeida reminds us, for the author of Ensaio the term ‘Ideology’ does not necessarily carry negative connotations. Rejecting the strictly Marxist understanding of the concept, where it was associated with false consciousness, Saramago defines ideology in the sense of a ‘system of ideas’ (25–6).31 For the novelist, everyone is inextricably immersed in an ideological ‘soup’ and he considers the notion of the

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‘death of ideology’ to be the most totalitarian of ideologies (Reis, Diálogos 76). Saramago denies the possibility that there is something outside of ideology, where the bonds of subjecthood do not apply. Neither science nor even literature, where the author moves beyond her- or himself to produce a work, are non-ideological: ‘Where would literature exist, if it could exist outside of ideology or at its margins? Literature can even exist in conflict with ideology. But it cannot exist outside of ideology’ (Reis, Diálogos 74, my translation). Literature may rebel against the shackles imposed by ideology but even this resistance will only make sense within determinate ideological constraints. Ensaio is in tune with this belief that ideology is inescapable: everyone in the text becomes blind, with the exception of the doctor’s wife. Yet, not even the latter can be said to occupy an ideologically free position, since she is immersed in the world of those who do not see: ‘De uma certa maneira, é verdade, estou cega da vossa cegueira, talvez pudesse começar a ver melhor se fôssemos mais os que vêem’ (283) (In a way I am, I am blind with your blindness, perhaps I might be able to see better if there were more of us who could see [297]). To see largely depends on the possibility of being seen, as sight is not only a material reality but also a social construction that loses its meaning in the society of the blind, when no one can reciprocate the gaze.32 Blindness stands at the junction between the bodily and the social. Abstract, metaphorical blindness dwells in the eyes of the characters in the novel, transmuting them from possible into concrete subjects. Potentiality, represented by the imminence of falling into the whiteness of the blinding light, and the actuality of physical sightlessness coincide as everyone goes blind. Blindness functions as a synthesis, a concrete abstraction that renders visible and palpable the conditions of possibility for becoming a subject as such: anyone who can see can (and will) become blind. Turning blind is, then, a process of individuation through which characters move from universality to subjectivity, as blindness is substantiated in a slightly different way in their bodies. This is translated in Ensaio by the fact that there are few indications about the past lives of the protagonists, whose specific traits are only developed as the narrative progresses after the breakout of the plague. In the beginning of the novel, individuals are presented as devoid of qualities and are simply defined by the specific social groups they belong to: doctor, hotel maid, drug store employee, etc. A static description of personality features pertaining to the main characters, conveyed by an omniscient

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narrator in the tradition of the nineteeth-century realist novel, would not be consistent with a text that deals with the creation of psychic space as such. Blindness opens up the possibility of interiority, which is portrayed as dependent upon a corporeal phenomenon and thus better represented by actions that give a sense of development. Internal focalization is, therefore, almost completely absent from the text and interiority is expressed mostly in actions and in intersubjective relations. The narrator and the doctor’s wife, together with the reader, are the only ones left to behold this exteriorized interiority.33 Ensaio distances itself from Althusser’s theory of subjecthood both by renouncing the possibility of a discourse extraneous to ideology and by its emphasis on the corporeal. In the novel, the subject is no longer formed by state apparatuses but emerges as a result of a more dispersed physical phenomenon, namely the plague of blindness, a development that approximates Michel Foucault’s understanding of the workings of power. Moving away from Althusser’s notion of Ideology, which still retains some elements of transcendence, Foucault declares that there is nothing outside the immanence of power. While, for Althusser, the formation of subjecthood by ideology is mostly an intellectual process, Foucault postulates, in Discipline and Punish, that individuals are turned into subjects when the presence of power is actualized and impressed on their bodies.34 Judith Butler comments on this operation in the following way: For Foucault, this process of subjectivation takes place centrally through the body. In Discipline and Punish the prisoner’s body not only appears as a sign of guilt and transgression, as the embodiment of prohibition and the sanction for rituals of normalization, but is framed and formed through the discursive matrix of a juridical subject. (Psychic Life 83–4)

As Butler points out, Foucault propounds a radical inversion of Althusser’s theory. On the one hand, there is a dissemination of power that manifests itself through an imprint on the body. On the other hand, the body, which mediates the process of subjectivation, is itself constructed by the intricate web of discourses of power. An individual’s corporeal self is thus the fulcrum where power and discourse intersect. This Foucaultian take on subjectivity can inform the reading of blindness in Saramago’s novel.35 The physical affliction plaguing the characters in the text is supplemented by the social and discursive construction of the illness, a process that begins when the doctor warns

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the authorities about the outbreak of the plague, and continues with the political and media discussions on the topic. There is thus a split within blindness that divides it between the corporeal fact and its discursive representation. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault traces the origin of disciplinary mechanisms to the measures of invigilation put in place in urban areas so as to respond to upsurges of the plague. In order to prevent the spread of the disease, authorities tried to confine individuals to their homes and established a complex system of control, the goal of which was to circumscribe and isolate the body. According to Foucault, Jeremy Bentham’s panopticon is the culmination of the disciplinary norms used to stave off epidemics. An architectural construction designed to enhance supervision, the panopticon was based on the notion that those who were confined should be seen at all times, and inmates never knew whether or not they were being watched. This resulted in an automatization of the workings of power, since rules and regulations were internalized by prisoners, who began to function according to the principles of self-control. In Ensaio, those afflicted by blindness are rounded up and incarcerated in a former mental asylum, where they are left to their own devices. Even though this institution is not designed as a panopticon, it functions as a prison and its entrance is permanently lit and guarded by soldiers. This form of surveillance is further enhanced by the effects of blindness itself, as the blind do not know when or whether they are being watched. Retaining her sight in the midst of the blind, the doctor’s wife questions the ethicality of her position: Pela primeira vez, desde que aqui entrara, a mulher do médico sentiu-se como se estivesse por trás de um microscópio a observar o comportamento de uns seres que não podiam sequer suspeitar da sua presença, e isto pareceu-lhe subitamente indigno, obsceno. Não tenho o direito de olhar se os outros não me podem olhar a mim, pensou. (71) (For the first time since she had arrived there, the doctor’s wife felt as if she were behind a microscope and observing the behaviour of a number of human beings who did not even suspect her presence, and this suddenly struck her as being contemptible and obscene. I have no right to look if the others cannot see me, she thought to herself.) (65)

The doctor’s wife realizes that watching without being watched is essentially unethical. She ends up rejecting this position of power and

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embodies a vision opposed to that of the panopticon, in that she chooses to use her eyes not as an instrument of control but as a means to help the blind, becoming the guide and provider of the small group that left the asylum together with her. The disciplinary measures employed by the authorities to contain the plague are accompanied by a discourse of exclusion that complements the incarceration of the blind. In the novel, this is conveyed through the opinions of some of the members of the military, who believe that killing all the contaminated would be the best solution to the problem: ‘O sargento ainda disse, Isto o melhor era deixá-los morrer à fome, morrendo o bicho acabava-se a peçonha’ (89) (The sergeant’s only comment was, It would have been better to let them die of hunger, when the beast dies, the poison dies with it [84]). The stigmatization of the blind, who are de facto condemned to death by their confinement in the mental asylum, replicates the marks of exclusion that used to be branded upon the mad, criminals, or any other bearers of a behaviour considered deviant. Foucault, who unearthened the practices of ostracism targeted against the members of these groups since the Middle Ages, argued that these methods were at the origin of the disciplinary mechanisms used in contemporary societies, which were later depicted by Saramago in Ensaio. In his later writings, Foucault posits the existence of a non-disciplinary technology of power. This mechanism, which does not completely exclude disciplining, is defined by the author as biopower. While discipline acts upon the body, biopower, in its multiple shapes, relates to man as a living being, in that it deals with issues such as birth rates, illness, or old age, and attempts to regulate these developments (Society 242–3). Foucault coins the term ‘biopolitics’ to designate this new way to exert power that views the whole population as a political problem. The author links disciplinary methods to the classical theory of sovereignty, according to which the sovereign had the right of life and death over his subjects. In contemporary democratic societies, the traditional sovereign right over life and death is permeated by its opposite, namely, by the right to give life and to let die, which forms the basis of biopolitics (241). The fashion in which blindness is dealt with in Ensaio evinces a combination of disciplinary measures, associated with an exclusionary discourse, and efforts at biopolitical manipulation. The latter comes to the fore with particular conspicuousness in the authorities’ failed attempts to avoid contagion. The fact that the methods employed by the government to prevent the spread of the plague in Ensaio sobre a Cegueira mirror the mecha-

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nisms of biopolitical control that Foucault pinpoints as instantiations of power is most evident in the message issued by the authorities and played every evening through loudspeakers in the asylum: O Governo lamenta ter sido forçado a exercer energicamente o que considera ser seu direito e seu dever, proteger por todos os meios as populações na crise que estamos a atravessar […] abandonar o edifício sem autorização significará morte imediata […] em caso de incêndio, seja ele fortuito ou intencional, os bombeiros não intervirão […] em caso de morte, seja qual for a sua causa, os internados enterrarão sem formalidades o cadáver na cerca […] O Governo e a Nação esperam que cada um cumpra o seu dever. (49–51) (The Government regrets having been forced to exercise with all urgency what it considers to be its rightful duty, to protect the population by all possible means in this present crisis […] leaving the building without authorization will mean instant death […] in the event of a fire getting out of control, whether accidentally or on purpose, the firemen will not intervene […] in the case of death, whatever the cause, the internees will bury the corpse in the yard without any formalities […] The Government and Nation expect every man and woman to do their duty.) (42–4)

Power is here exerted not merely over single individuals but aims at reaching an entire population. Rather than invoking its domination over the life and death of subjects, the government refers to its duty to shield the public from a nefarious plague. The authorities thus camouflage their despotic stance under the guise of protection and appeal to the sense of duty of the blind as citizens of the state. This message becomes a symbol for the ineptitude of the response to the calamity. It is repeated a number of times throughout the novel and, as it accompanies the degradation of the living conditions inside the asylum, it acquires an eerie quality, given that many of its warnings about attempts to escape being punished by death or the need for the detainees to bury the deceased come true. The interruption of the playing of the message coincides with the collapse of all organized forms of government, as the entire society becomes blind. Foucault argues that the chances to undo oppression such as the one exerted by the authorities in Ensaio are enhanced by creating discourses that subvert the existing ones. This process of re-signification would give rise to subjects and objects of knowledge that would forge new

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paths for the contestation of power. In her comments on both Althusser and Foucault in The Psychic Life of Power, Judith Butler inquires into the plausibility of this resistance for a subject completely immersed in power. Accepting the premise that individuals acquire subjectivity by becoming subjected to power, Butler concludes that the rejection of domination would amount to a denial of individuality and self-identity. Any struggle against control would thus have to come to terms with the fact that power is a condition of possibility for subjecthood and, therefore, for agency as such. Butler seems to find an alternative to this double bind in psychoanalysis. The unconscious confounds the normalization imposed by disciplinary techniques and discourses in that it is hospitable to contradiction, and by exceeding the conscious subject it can potentially become a site of nonconformity. If resistance can be traced partly to the unconscious, it follows that alterity is indispensable in the questioning of power. For Butler, subversion is necessarily self-subversion, in that the subject attempts to overthrow the discourses and practices that allowed her or him to attain subjecthood in the first place. Becoming other is thus a first step in the challenging of power, a battle from which no individual subject will ever emerge fully victorious. According to Butler, the hold of power over a subject functions as a visual construct: ‘Regulatory power maintains subjects in subordination by producing and exploiting the demand for continuity, visibility, and place’ (Psychic Life 29, emphasis added). Yet, this visible subject who wants to persevere in its own being is haunted by alterity dwelling in its self, an otherness that is materialized in blindness in Ensaio sobre a Cegueira. When they lose sight, individuals become other to themselves, in that many of the coordinates that governed their previous lives no longer apply. The blind react to this discontinuity in their selves in different ways. Some, like the members of the gang that is formed inside the mental asylum, cling to old habits. They appropriate the other detainees’ jewellery, even though precious metals and stones have completely lost their value in the society of the blind. Others, such as those who follow the doctor’s wife, retain traits of their former selves while remaining open to change and seem to actualize the possibilities inherent in sightlessless. Blindness stands for the impossibility of ontologizing, in that it represents a moment of alterity in the identity of a subject. The inability to see is the dark spot at the core of subjecthood, where the first step in a collective resistance to power originates.

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Despite the similaties between the situation portrayed in Ensaio and Foucault’s elaborations on techniques of domination, Saramago’s allegory moves beyond the scenario of an Orwellian realm of total social subordination to power. The second part of the novel marks the end of a panoptical society of control, as the entire population becomes blind. This absence of a figure of authority is best represented in the text by the statues in the church, whose eyes are covered by a blindfold, as if to signify the incapability of religion to explain the events related to the plague of blindness (301–2). However, the lack of a centralized authority does not lead to a complete release from the mechanisms of power, as a large part of the blind remain shackled to disciplinary means of control. The novel suggests that the subject’s subversion of domination cannot be fully achieved by an isolated individual but needs to be actualized at the level of the collective. 4.3 Collective Vision The crisis of vision portrayed in Ensaio sobre a Cegueira may be understood at the same time as an outcome of and as a key to grappling with the impossibility of reconstituting a subject capable of agency based on the ideal of reason or the all-pervasiveness of power. Incapable of tackling the problem of political praxis, oppositional, and subversive, individual subjects are arrested within the folds of the power relations that constitute them. Whereas Butler searches for a solution to this impasse in the unconscious, Saramago’s narrative looks for an alternative in a collective subject. If the moment of becoming blind coincides with one’s entry into subjecthood, some of the characters in the narrative craft a common sense of subjectivity based on their social interactions. These individuals, who meet in the mental asylum, share only the condition of not being able to see, its consequences, and the suffering caused by this predicament. The founding moment of the group coincides with the deterioration of the circumstances inside the asylum. When a gang takes possession of the food and demands payments for the continuation of its supply, this community, led by the doctor’s wife, invokes the ‘sacred principle of collective property’ and falls back on the Marxian notion of justice: Daremos todos e daremos tudo, disse o médico, E quem não tiver nada para dar, perguntou o ajudante de farmácia, Esse, sim, comerá do que os

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outros derem, é justo o que alguém disse, de cada um segundo as suas possibilidades, a cada um segundo as suas necessidades. (141–2) (We shall all give up what we’ve got and hand over everything, said the doctor, And what about those who have nothing to give, asked the pharmacist’s assistant, They will eat from what the others give, as the saying rightly goes, from each according to his abilities, to each according to his needs.) (my translation)

In the transition from possessive individualism to the respect for collective property, blindness is a factor of expropriation, marking both the limits of the old and the horizons of the emergent systems of value. In the newly created collectivity, it would be possible to make a contribution, in the doctor’s words, to ‘give everything,’ only after the initial dispossession, that is, from the depths of despair and abjection that unite the victimized blind. Here, one can witness a transformation of the mass of people assembled together by chance into a joint subject with its own judgments and principles for action. A poignant illustration of this newly created communality rooted in shared suffering is the group formed by the women who offered their bodies to the bandits in exchange for food. After being raped and tortured during the night, they are returning to their room when one of them dies of a heart attack. The doctor’s wife describes the corpse in the following way: Levantou em braços o corpo subitamente desconjuntado, as pernas ensanguentadas, o ventre espancado, os pobres seios descobertos, marcados com fúria, uma mordedura num ombro, Este é o retrato do meu corpo, pensou, o retrato do corpo de quantas aqui vamos, entre estes insultos e as nossas dores não há mais do que uma diferença, nós, por enquanto, ainda estamos vivas. (178–9) (She raised the suddenly dislocated body, the legs covered in blood, her abdomen bruised, her poor breasts uncovered, brutally scarred, teeth marks on her shoulder where she had been bitten. This is the image of my body, she thought, the image of the body of all the women here, between these outrages and our sorrows there is only one difference, we, for the present, are still alive.) (182)

The marks of pain inscribed on the dead woman’s body correspond to

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the lacerations imprinted on the skin and on the psyche of each victim. As the doctor’s wife realizes, the deceased and the living constitute a whole brought together by suffering, in that the condition of being alive is reduced to an agony that will necessarily end in death. Thus, the battered women converge around the beaten corpse and treat it as if it were their own. They walk to their room together, holding hands and carrying the dead body, while comforting each other with small gestures of support, in which they find a temporary respite from the ordeal they went through. Their mutual aid, represented by their collective washing of one another and of the dead woman, is a mute communal response to the violence to which they were subjected.36 The collective subject that emerges from the group formed by the protagonists of Ensaio develops in the second part of the novel, after the main characters have left the mental asylum and wander through the streets of the city in search of food and shelter. When they reach the doctor’s house, they partake of a meal defined, once again, by the principle of sharing: ‘Não dispunham os companheiros de mais do que este pouco, e contudo veio a ser uma festa de família, daquelas, raras, onde o que é de cada um, é de todos’ (240) (Though meagre rations were all this little group had, yet it ended up as a family feast, one of those rare feasts where what belongs to one, belongs to everybody [250]).37 This communal approach to existence is not perceived as an option among others; rather, the events triggered by the plague of blindness lead the group to realize that this is the only way for them to survive: ‘Voltemos à questão, disse a mulher do médico, se continuarmos juntos talvez consigamos sobreviver, se nos separarmos seremos engolidos pela massa e destroçados’ (245) (Let’s go back to the matter we were discussing, said the doctor’s wife, if we stay together we might manage to survive, if we separate we shall be swallowed up by the masses and destroyed [256]). Blindness makes the characters understand that the concept of an autonomous individual is a fiction. The extreme situation fictionalized in Saramago’s text only accentuates a fact that should be self-evident even under normal circumstances, namely, that collectivity is the guiding principle in the organization of a just society.38 Alfonso Lingis has described the birth of collective subjectivity in terms of ‘a community of those who have nothing in common.’ For Lingis, to have nothing in common is to be absolutely different from the other person, but also, in the spirit of Heideggerian philosophy, to have the same fate as the other, namely, to be a mortal, finite being. Such a community has been named the ‘New International’ by Jacques Der-

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rida who defines it as ‘a link of affinity, suffering, and hope […] without common belonging to a class […] a kind of counter-conjuration, in the (theoretical and practical) critique of the state of international law, the concepts of State and nation’ (Specters 85–6). Derrida’s New International is based upon the negation of identity claims, and yet it is this lack of co-belonging that enables the forging of ties among the oppressed. In parallel to the communities delineated by Lingis and Derrida, the members of the group that comes together in Saramago’s text form a subjective alliance, based upon absence, i.e., lack of vision, while retaining their differences. This kind of collective avoids the pitfalls of individual agency in that it is not constrained by a transcendent rationality or by power relations. As a subjectivity, it harbours multiplicity and operates through a permanent displacement of power, whose erratic trajectories traverse the different bodies of the blind without encountering a unified core. Yet, this lack of structure does not deteriorate into the complete anarchy of the unconscious. Through dialogic interactions, the group formulates its idiosyncratic reason while respecting singularity and remaining receptive to open-ended solutions. In Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, the character of the doctor’s wife introduces an asymmetry into this community of the blind, as the old man notes when he describes her: ‘Uma espécie de chefe natural, um rei com olhos numa terra de cegos’ (245) (A kind of natural leader, a king with eyes in the land of the blind [256]).39 The doctor’s wife recognizes that the exceptionality of her vision puts her in a position of authority. However, she does not exploit this circumstance to her own advantage. Similar to Blimunda in Memorial do Convento (Baltasar and Blimunda), an earlier novel by Saramago, she considers her ability to see what others cannot behold as a curse, rather than a blessing, and in several passages throughout the text she expresses her desire to become blind like the rest of the population: ‘Serenamente desejou estar cega também, atravessar a pele visível das coisas e passar para o lado de dentro delas, para a sua fulgurante e irremediável cegueira’ (65) (She serenely wished that she, too, could turn blind, penetrate the visible skin of things and pass to their inner side, to their dazzling and irremediable blindness [58]).40 Becoming blind is here described as a trajectory that moves from the dimension of appearances into the heart of things. It can be read as a more intimate relation to the world, since the division between subject and object, upheld primarily as a visual construct, collapses, as the blind penetrate the shifting core of thinghood. If many of those who lose sight are unable to realize the liberating possibilities inherent in

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blindness, the doctor’s wife becomes a ‘natural chief’ in that she perceives this potential.41 She circulates between the visible and the invisible realms, which allows her to touch the interiority of things without being completely lost in their undifferentiated mass. Even though the doctor’s wife never went blind, she does not feel superior to those who cannot see. Rather, she embraces the group of blind: ‘Penso que não cegámos, penso que estamos cegos […] Cegos que, vendo, não vêm’ (310, emphasis added) (I don’t think we did go blind, I think we are blind […] Blind people who can see, but do not see [326, emphasis added]). In this statement, she inscribes herself in a collective to which she does not really belong. Further, by realizing that people, including herself, did not go blind but are blind, she arrests the dialectical movement from seeing, through blindness, to an enlightened seeing, and focuses on the present situation of the characters, emphasizing a deeper awareness of a condition that has always already existed. She understands that the blindness of her companions, which becomes, to a certain extent, her own, was a necessary moment in a rejection of individualism and in a forging of communitarian ties. The doctor’s wife often feels the impulse to renounce the role of a witness, and the burden of involuntarily testifying to the events that the community undergoes: ‘Vocês não sabem, não o podem saber, o que é ter olhos num mundo de cegos, não sou rainha, não, sou simplesmente a que nasceu para ver o horror, vocês sentem-no, eu sinto-o e vejo-o’ (262) (You do not know, you cannot know, what it means to have eyes in a world in which everyone is blind, I am not a queen, no, I am simply the one who was born to see this horror, you can feel it, I both feel it and see it [276]). She wishes not to see the horror from which others are shielded by their inability to see. Throughout the novel, tears are portrayed as an ephemeral solace and afford her a momentary blindness in the midst of chaos.42 This function of tears in the economy of sight was discussed by Jacques Derrida in his work Memoirs of the Blind. For Derrida, tears are the essence of the human eye since, at the moment when they veil sight, they reveal that what is proper to the eye is not the gaze and the superficial knowledge it might afford, but the expression of emotion: The revelatory or apocalyptic blindness, the blindness that reveals the very truth of the eyes, would be the gaze veiled by tears. It neither sees nor does not see: it is indifferent to its blurred vision. It implores: first of

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all in order to know from where these tears stream down and from whose eyes they come to well up. From where and from whom this mourning or these tears of joy? This essence of the eye, this eye water? (127)

The tearful eye is indifferent to seeing since crying brings home that, beyond the permanent vacillation between seeing and blindness, the truth of the organ of vision is to weep in joy or sorrow. In Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, the doctor’s wife becomes the inheritor of what Derrida describes as the truth of the eye. Contrary to the other characters, she often cries in the narrative, her tears temporarily blinding her to her surroundings.43 This sightlessness is different from that of the other blind, since it results from her position as a witness who has to come to terms both with her own predicament and with the suffering of others. She cries not merely for herself but for the whole society of the blind. Her tears are, therefore, truer to the way blindness itself is portrayed in the novel, since they open the eye to the community that exists beyond self-individuation.44 Her tears are shed at moments when she considers that she might not succeed in providing for those around her. After a number of days without eating, she manages to find food and is carrying the provisions back to the group’s shelter to share them with the blind when she gets lost in the streets of the city. She collapses on the ground, crying for fear of not being able to rejoin those who depend on her for subsistence. She finds consolation in a dog that, from that moment on, accompanies the main characters under the name of ‘the dog of tears,’ and who becomes an emblem of the sorrows of the group.45 This association of the doctor’s wife’s tears with her mission to provide for the blind becomes even clearer when she gains awareness of their frailty: ‘Olhou-os [the blind] com os olhos rasos de lágrimas, ali estavam, dependiam dela como as crianças pequenas dependem da mãe, Se eu lhes falto, pensou’ (218) (She looked at them [the blind], her eyes filled with tears, there they were, as dependent on her as little children on their mother. If I should let them down – she thought [225]). Her tears are an exteriorized sign of her sense of responsibility for the group that has formed around her. Concurrently, they also mark her frustration at not being able to help everyone who cannot see: Hoje é hoje, amanhã será amanhã, é hoje que tenho a responsabilidade, não amanhã, se estiver cega, Responsabilidade de quê, A responsabilidade

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de ter olhos quando os outros os perderam, Não podes guiar nem dar de comer a todos os cegos do mundo, Deveria, Mas não podes, Ajudarei no que estiver ao meu alcance. (241) (Today is today, tomorrow will bring what tomorrow brings, today is my responsibility, not tomorrow if I should turn blind, What do you mean by responsibility, The responsibility of having my eyesight when others have lost theirs, You cannot hope to guide or provide food for all the blind people in this world, I ought to, But you cannot, I shall do whatever I can to help.) (252)

She realizes that responsibility is not an abstract notion. It begins, as Emmanuel Levinas would put it, as a concrete ethics of absolute responsibility for the other, whose uniqueness one can never grasp. To be responsible is, therefore, to give oneself fully to each singular person. The collective subjectivity that arises in the commonality formed by the protagonists is the conjunction of each of its members’ singularity in an organic whole, bound together by the sense of responsibility infused into the group by the doctor’s wife. The precarious situation of the doctor’s wife, placed on the threshold between seeing and blindness, between her position as a provider for a small group and her tears for all the blind that she helplessly beholds, determines her reflections at the end of the novel: A mulher do médico levantou-se e foi à janela. Olhou para baixo, para a rua coberta de lixo, para as pessoas que gritavam e cantavam. Depois levantou a cabeça para o céu e viu-o todo branco, Chegou a minha vez, pensou. O medo súbito fê-la baixar os olhos. A cidade ainda ali estava. (310) (The doctor’s wife got up and went to the window. She looked down at the street full of refuse, at the shouting, singing people. Then she lifted her head up to the sky and she saw everything white, It is my turn, she thought. Fear made her quickly lower her eyes. The city was still there.) (326)

Her gaze travels from the street to the sky and back in a vertical trajectory that betrays her potential position of hierarchical authority. However, in the end, only that which is down-below remains. The doctor’s wife rejects the transcendent dimension represented by the sky and opts to embrace the life-world of the street. The plague of blindness,

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which she experienced as a horrified observer, has taught her and the group that clustered around her the relevance of an immanent communal subject predicated on alterity. In Ensaio sobre a Lucidez (Seeing),46 Saramago’s follow-up to Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, the notion of collective subjectivity is further developed. A large majority of the population of an unknown city, which later in the novel proves to be the same community that had been afflicted by a plague of blindness some years before, expresses its discontent with the current political situation by casting blank votes in an election.47 The events surrounding the epidemic depicted in Ensaio sobre a Cegueira seem to have given rise to a process of learning for this group of people that resulted in a change of behaviour in the second novel.48 This time, the community sticks together and calmly manifests its opposition to the authorities with the lucidity mentioned in the title of the narrative. Even though there are no leaders, the population acts as one, in a concerted effort, and peacefully resists the restrictions imposed upon them by the government.49 The lucidity shared by the inhabitants of the city portrayed in Ensaio sobre a Lucidez does not extend to those in power, who seem not to have learned from the experience of dealing with the plague of blindness. In order to prevent the spread of the tendency to cast blank ballots, which is treated as a disease , the authorities resort to the mechanisms of control enumerated by Foucault. The government isolates the city and declares a state of siege, which allows it to censor the press and to imprison and torture countless citizens.50 The final part of the narrative coincides with the incrimination of some of the protagonists of Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, who are used as scapegoats for the situation. Since she did not go blind, the doctor’s wife is identified as the head of the supposed conspiracy behind the wave of blank votes and the novel ends with her assassination, together with that of the dog of tears. If critics had already identified pessimism as a distinctive trait of Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, its follow-up presents an even gloomier outlook on contemporary society.51 In the first Ensaio, the end of blindness might be read as a redemptive moment that is absent from the second instalment. However, the collective subjectivity born in the group formed by the protagonists of the first narrative lives on in the inhabitants of the city depicted in Ensaio sobre a Lucidez. The hope remains that, in spite of the death of the doctor’s wife, the population will be able to continue its communal struggle against the arbitrary decisions of those who hold power.

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José Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira is a parable, where there is always something invisible beneath the surface of things. In this narrative, blindness marks the crossroads between reason and unreason, and constitutes the concrete and metaphorical event through which subjectivity emerges. Yet, the possibility of non-totalizing agency, bound up with the subversion of power, only comes to fruition in a collective subject, a topic developed further in Ensaio sobre a Lucidez. Communality is shaped in the first Ensaio within a group without a core, constituted by the dispossessed and characterized solely by the absence of light – in other words, in the displaced community of those who have only blindness in common.

Conclusion Readings in the Dark: Shades of Criticism

De tudo fica um pouco. Carlos Drummond de Andrade, ‘Resíduo’1

This book set out to explore the correlation between blindness, ethics, and politics delineated in many literary and artistic productions that allude to abuses of political power. While vision has been associated with a reflection on ethical relations and socio-political organizations from Greco-Roman Antiquity to contemporaneity, late modernity has questioned the traditional foregrounding of sight as the fundamental means to relate to reality and has denounced this tendency to resort to vision for contributing to the formation of an oppressive subject that strives to dominate and possess its object. Twentieth-century philosophy often identifies blindness as a way to denounce this totalizing gaze and as a point of departure for forging a subjectivity grounded on ethics that would form the basis for a more just polity. The literary and artistic works analysed in this book imbibed late modern philosophical discourses on sightlessness in that they embraced the trope of the blind in their call for the emergence of a new political subject. In Memórias do Cárcere, Graciliano Ramos perceives himself as a blind and powerless animal; this non-subject becomes the subjectmatter of his autobiography, in which he tries to regain a political voice by resorting to a kind of writing that remains forever incomplete. The political subject enunciated in Death and the Maiden and in Ana Maria Pacheco’s artworks is the blindfolded, mad, split-subject that has been torn apart by torture and, consequently, is never fully at home with herself. Finally, in Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira, the subject of non-

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totalizing political action is a collective, dispossessed subject, a community whose members have nothing in common and whose togetherness was effectuated by blindness. These texts and artworks call for an interpreter that would be prepared to recognize the new subjectivity they propound. What will be the traits of this critic? To what voices and signals will she or he be attuned? With the aid of Carl Schmitt, Louis Althusser, and Paul de Man, three thinkers who advocate for the centrality of the invisible in writing and in interpretation, this conclusion will offer a provisional sketch of such an interpreter, open to the lessons of the unseen. Carl Schmitt situates representation, the model of which is political, on the threshold between the visible and the invisible. For Schmitt, politics happens between the two extremes of complete visibility in the economic arena and the thorough invisibility of conceptual abstractions. On the one hand, the economy is governed by impersonal rationality and is rooted in a materialist approach, where the life of the community is reduced to an ‘administration of things’ carried out by technological means: ‘Economic thinking has its reason and veracity in that it is absolutely material, concerned only with things’ (Roman 16). On the other hand, abstract concepts such as ‘humanity,’ upon which various ideological currents draw, lack any concrete referents and, therefore, lend themselves to opportunistic usage.2 Both structures preclude the idea of representation either because they posit the existence of nothing but pure presence (economism), or because they are mere signifiers without a signified (conceptual abstraction). Only in the political can representation exist in the precarious balance between the seen and the unseen. The political involves both a staging of embodied collective identities and the secrecy associated with arcana, such as secret diplomacy and other non-public instances of decision-making: ‘To every great politics belongs the “Arcanum”’ (Roman 34). In the twentieth century, guerilla fighters and partisans are the concrete political actors who instantiate the invisible facet of the political, in that their exercise of power hinges upon the fact that they are not seen by a larger visible army.3 Conversely, Schmitt conceives of liberal democracy as a spectacularization of authority that disingenuously presents itself as open to public view, while concealing its alliance with non-democratic tendencies (Concept 69–70). The key question that arises out of this schematization of the political is how to mediate between visibility and invisibility, materialism and spiritualism, presence and absence without becoming trapped

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in these extremes. Interpretation carries the potential to perform this bridging, insofar as it moves from what lends itself to sight toward a realm that lies beyond it. For Schmitt, Roman Catholicism provides a model for the mediation between the seen and the unseen, in that the church is a visible instantiation of the invisible presence of God. Divinity is the only true reality, but it requires a concrete embodiment in order not to dissolve into a powerless abstract concept. The regulating principle for this process is the infinite flow of the transcendent into immanence, where the tension between the opposite poles of visibility and invisibility is preserved: ‘The Church can be in but not of this world’ (Roman 52). The status of the church is contradictory, since it oscillates between its material form and its spiritual content. The institution of Roman Catholicism is thus predicated on a larger chain of mediations that includes the pope, Christ, and, in the last instance, the Word of God (56). The latter already possesses a kernel of materiality that, on a different level, is actualized in the figure of Christ: ‘The idea obtains its visibility in the Word […] Only the Word could become flesh, because the embodiment of the Word is already visualization and the incarnation of man a further step in this substantiation’ (57). The church engages in an interpretation of the Word of God that is simultaneously hermeneutical and ontological. Roman Catholicism presupposes an exegesis of the scripture and its explanation, retracing the manifestation of divinity in the world back to its invisible source. At the same time, the worldly institution of the Church is the ontological embodiment of the interpretation of the Word, which is further actualized without dissolving into pure immanence. For Schmitt, the need to interpret arises from a rejection of complete literalness that he equates with the shallowness of full visibility. However, he also eschews an understanding of interpretation as a proliferation of concurrent and equally valid views in that the truth of the hermeneutical and the ontological unfolding of the Word, starting from the visible and moving to the unseen, is always guaranteed by the presence of God at the top of the chain of signification. For Schmitt, in the realm of politics, the mediation between the visibility of material interests and the invisibility of abstract notions is performed by the sovereign. Theology provides the key to political concepts that are nothing but its secularized corollaries, and the sovereign takes on a role similar to that of the church, in that he interprets and embodies intangible principles.4 The sovereign interpretation of the

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law and the situation at hand can potentially result in the declaration of the state of exception, a possibility that defines sovereignty as such. Schmitt criticizes parliamentary debates that thrive on divergent points of view as meaningless. He posits the sovereign as the one whose interpretation puts an end to all clashing interpretations by turning into a decision that has a binding legal character. This supreme power is, therefore, constitutive, in that its decisions are the foundations for a different political order, where the link between transcendence and immanence has been drawn anew. If, in theology, God ensures the moral and ethical validity of interpretations, in the case of the political it is impossible to pass such judgments, since the decision of the sovereign is guaranteed only by itself and is thus reduced to a self-referential performance. One aspect of the interpretative capacity of the sovereign is expressed in the act of naming that ascribes a specific status to the named: ‘But what is most phenomenal about Nahme and name is that with them abstractions cease, and the situation becomes concrete’ (Nomos 349). The arbitrary will of sovereignty reveals itself in naming, which maintains a fragile balance between the visible order of things and the invisibility of abstract concepts. Schmitt’s argument follows a conservative vein, in that the power of naming that he praises warrants the legitimacy of land appropriation, for instance, in a colonial setting. Yet, this theory offers a glimpse into a less authoritarian mode of interpretation that would be aware of its relative position within a plurality of potentially sovereign voices. To be sure, any interpreter performs a sovereign gesture of decisionmaking and appropriation of the interpreted, thereby founding a new Nomos that excludes a number of other viable alternatives. Nevertheless, this hermeneutical move does not need to fossilize into an eternal and singular verity that upholds the metaphysical ideal of an indivisible and self-identical entity. Parallel to the affirmation of a unique assertion, a self-critical interpreter is aware of the precariousness of her or his stance amid concurrent sovereignties that carry with them endless possibilities of naming. Analogous to the political sovereign, this interpreter departs from the theological model in that she or he lacks a transcendental guarantor testifying to the validity of her or his position, but, unlike such a monarch, she or he is acutely aware of the ungrounded nature of her or his decisions. Such an interpreter represents a paradox, since she or he both exercises and undermines sovereign power, in the same stroke making a novel and unique interpretation and unmaking its universalistic contention to represent the truth. Consequently, a

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self-critical hermeneuticist remains true to the invisible, in that in her or his mediation between the unseen and the seen, she or he refuses to fall into presentism and recognizes the inexhaustibility of the transcendent sphere. The interpreters of artistic and literary productions often encapsulate the sovereignty without sovereignty of self-critical decision-making. They take into account the limitless possibilities of meaning dwelling in art and know that there are infinite forms of negotiation between the invisible in an artwork and the visibility of hermeneutics.5 As subjects, they have to contend with the shifting shades of their objects, situated between the seen and the unseen, and their subjectivity is shaped by their role as mediators. Carl Schmitt’s theory demonstrates how difficult it is to acknowledge the coexistence of multiple sovereign subjectivities in the political arena. And yet, radical democracy, similar to art or literary criticism, necessitates these competing interpretations of what the visible instantiations of invisible political principles should be. Situated in the opposite extreme of the political spectrum, Louis Althusser espouses a conception of interpretation as a passage from the unseen to the visible analogous to Carl Schmitt’s. In his analysis of political economy in Reading Capital, Althusser sets out to define what he considers to be Marx’s most enduring methodological contribution, namely, a new mode of interpreting texts. The first step in pinpointing this revolutionary form of reading is the identification of two competing hermeneutical models: elucidative reading and symptomatic reading. To elucidate the insights of classical political economic thought, Marx proceeded by way of spotting the oversights in the works of his predecessors, a blindness that he saw as merely accidental. The purpose of this exercise was to fill in the gaps in the knowledge-producing mechanism and, therefore, to eliminate past weaknesses of vision: This single logic of sighting and oversight thus reveals itself to us as what it is: the logic of a conception of knowledge in which all the work of knowledge is reduced in principle to the recognition of the mere relation of vision; in which the whole nature of its object is reduced to the mere condition of a given. What Smith did not see, through a weakness of vision, Marx sees: what Smith did not see was perfectly visible, and it was because it was visible that Smith could fail to see it while Marx could see it. (Althusser, ‘From Capital’ 19)

The givenness of the object of knowledge constitutes the persisting

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legacy of empiricism, which presupposes reality as a ready-made element that can be directly translated into conceptual terms. According to this view, everything is at least potentially visible and the reason for a provisional concealedness of a certain aspect of the object is that it still awaits a more perceptive gaze. Althusser traces this understanding of knowledge back to the religious paradigm of reading that posits a complete overlap between Logos and Being, since scripture, as the Word of God, combines essence and existence and, therefore, is the truth. The religious myth of transparency in interpretation finds its most significant philosophical expression in Hegelian dialectics that culminates in the full visibility of ‘Spirit at the End of History,’ when the veils of the inessential are removed from the real, allowing the subject to contemplate reality’s true being. To this uncritical method Althusser opposes an interpretative strategy salient in Marx’s later writings. The innovative character of this reading consists in its valorization of absences as an intrinsic part of a body of writing and, concomitantly, of its interpretation. Blind spots are not perceived as gaps to be filled with the light of understanding but, rather, are articulated with the presences in the text: ‘The oversight is an oversight that concerns vision: non-vision is therefore inside vision, it is a form of vision and hence has a necessary relationship with vision’ (Althusser, ‘From Capital’ 21). Non-vision is a constitutive part of seeing, which results in the conception of the object of knowledge as inexhaustible in what is present or given to sight. Once conjoined, the lapses in a text form chains of signification that parallel its overt meaning and condense into a symptom of the unconscious intentions in a piece of writing. A ‘symptomatic’ mode of reading must therefore be attentive to omissions and attempt to interpret the illegible.6 In Reading Capital, Althusser proposes to undertake a symptomatic exegesis of Marxian political economy that follows in the footsteps of Marx’s methodological originality. He singles out those instances in Capital where the dialectical framework of value no longer applies, for example, in the non-teleological and non-subjective movement of valorization. In his departure from dialectics, as well as in his formulation of a new object of knowledge, different from that of classical political economy, Marx broke with the epistemological paradigm in which his discourse had been initially inscribed without being fully aware of his innovation.7 Althusser hopes to interpret the blind spots in Marxian texts and to formulate their theoretical novelty, which Marx himself was unable to recognize.8 This will lead to a conception of knowledge

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as a productive practice that takes into account both presences and gaps in the materials it transforms. By positing the existence of blind spots in classical political economy and its reinterpretation by Marx, Althusser opens the possibility that the theory of any interpreter, including his own, might be inflected by absences. In this, he coincides with Schmitt’s insistence on the irreducible need for a mediator, moving between the unseen and the seen. Despite their insurmountable political differences, both thinkers emphasize the significance of the invisible in hermeneutical endeavours and stress the unstable position of the interpreter, who is caught between her or his sovereign interpretative decisions and the fidelity to the blind spots in a text. However, while a substratum of transcendence undergirds the Schmittian model of interpretation, in that the invisible connotes spirituality not only in its theological instantiations but also, to some extent, on the political arena, such claims are absent from Althusser’s analysis. The latter considers the visible and the invisible as two immanent dimensions of the production of knowledge, which must be understood in terms of a materialist refusal to separate the ideal from the real. The subjectivity of the interpreter, responsible for the symptomatic reading of textual blind spots, constitutes the fulcrum where the two immanent strands of the seen and the unseen converge and is, consequently, torn by their centripetal and centrifugal tendencies. The political and philosophical reflections on the link between invisibility and interpretation have begotten offshoots in the field of literary theory proper, most notably in Paul de Man’s association of rhetoric and blindness. For de Man, literary texts are ineluctably rhetorical, since the metaphoric character of their language generates an unresolvable ambivalence that muddles the distinction between facts and their fictional representation. This rhetoricity creates a risk of misunderstanding that is constitutive of literature: The rhetorical character of literary language opens up the possibility of the archetypal error: the recurrent confusion of sign and substance […] We are entitled to generalize in working our way toward a definition by […] calling ‘literary,’ in the full sense of the term, any text that implicitly or explicitly signifies its own rhetorical mode and prefigures its own misunderstanding as the correlative of its rhetorical nature; that is, of its ‘rhetoricity.’ (‘Rhetoric’ 136–7)

De Man argues for a broad definition of the literary that would encom-

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pass both fictional and critical texts showing evidence of a rhetorical character.9 In critical writings, this rhetoricity takes the form of a necessary interaction between the blindness of their statement and the insight of their meaning. A latent desire to revel in their ambivalence is at work, to different degrees, in all literary texts, and this often leads them to foreshadow their future misreadings. It is the task of the interpreter to navigate the discrepancies created by the ineluctable obscurity of literary language. If the rhetorical nature of literature implies that blindness dwells at the core of the text-reader-critic triad, the locus of this moment of sightlessness varies, depending on the specific kind of literary utterances. For de Man, literary texts can be divided into two categories, namely those that include areas of blindness and those that, being lucid in their awareness of their own rhetoricity, trigger an interpretative blindness in their readers. In the first case, both reader and critic coincide in their efforts ‘to make the unseen visible’ (‘Rhetoric’ 141). The characterization of this strand of literature as blind does not imply a value judgment, since its blindness is defined not as lack but as an intrinsic part of the rhetorical specificity of texts, whose insight is then fleshed out by criticism. In the second case, literature is not blind to the obscurity of its statements and, rather than befalling the original text, blindness afflicts the first readers, often the traditional disciples or commentators of a body of work, who are led astray by its intricacies and self-reflexivity: ‘The existence of a particularly rich aberrant tradition in the case of the writers who can legitimately be called the most enlightened is therefore no accident but a constitutive part of all literature’ (‘Rhetoric’ 141). De Man states that, in this situation, a critic is needed to dispel the blind weight of the interpretative tradition and, through a hermeneutical tour-deforce, approach the original insight of the text.10 The models of interpretation corresponding to the two kinds of texts identified by de Man schematically represent a linear and circular way of reading, respectively. The areas of blindness dwelling in some literary works invite the critic to illuminate them, while, in turn, this reading might also contain new blind spots that await interpretation, forming a unidirectional chain that can potentially perpetuate itself ad infinitum. The criticism of non-blinded writing, on the other hand, entails a return to the originality of a text, which, in its self-referentiality, generates a closed hermeneutical circle. Yet, these two forms of literature are rather ‘ideal types’ situated at the extremes of the interpretative spectrum and

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do not correspond to existing textual productions, since any piece of writing shares features of both. Further, de Man’s classification harkens back to the Aristotelian idea of perfection reached in the circularity of thought thinking itself, a notion that culminates in Hegel’s differentiation between good infinity, predicated on circular closure, and bad, linear infinity. However, the completion of the closed circle mirrored in self-referential textuality precludes the emergence of new insights and reduces criticism to a predetermined medium, through which the text explicates itself. Both kinds of literary production presuppose a moment of insight, which, in the case of self-reflexive writings, is already a part of the text itself. De Man portrays critical insight as a move beyond blindness and, therefore, as a form of illumination. Even though, for him, obscurity does not possess negative connotations, it should ineluctably be superseded by clarity. De Man’s definition of interpretation is thus diametrically opposed to that of both Schmitt and Althusser, who advocate for a venturing into the unseen that underpins their hermeneutical strategies. Here, the invisible is not merely a point of departure on the path toward enlightenment, but Ariadne’s thread guiding the reader through the entire labyrinth of the text. The figure of the interpreter weaves the web of presences and absences in the literary edifice, without the presumption of shedding light onto the dark spots that punctuate it. Whether the invisible is a spiritual quality in Schmitt, or a premonition of an impending epistemological breakthrough in Althusser, it stands for a grounding element of reading, whose darkness cannot and should not be dispelled by light. Conversely, the subjectivity of de Man’s critic seems to be straightjacketed in the rhetorical necessity to perpetually translate the blindness of the textual statement into the insight of its meaning. According to de Man, rhetoricity, as the blindness or ambivalence at the core of literary texts, heralds the possibility of hermeneutical misunderstanding and errors, which require a critical supplement to dispel them. Yet, instead of devising strategies to overcome the rhetoric of blindness with insight, one might want to imagine, along with de Man, what blindness’s rhetoric would be – a rhetoric of blindness, one that is proper to it. We would need to divest ourselves of the suspicion that blindness leads us astray and allow ourselves to be seduced by its insights. What would the voice of blindness sound like? What kind of critical subject could be attuned to its subtle words and silences? The logos of blindness convokes a way of speaking that does not

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aim to identify and categorize what it names and, therefore, eschews hierarchization. It is a whispering voice that includes the possibility of silence, replete with the infinite potentialities of speaking, and welcomes the passivity proper to listening. Tentatively sounding in a space it does not wish to dominate, the rhetoric of blindness neither prescribes nor asserts, but enunciates the dream of meaning without force. Such is the language of the blinded subject that emerges in the literary and artistic productions analysed in this book. This nascent speech marked by pain does not aspire to be the general discursive articulation of the oppressed. Rather, the rhetoric of blindness that fashions and is, in turn, shaped by the abject subjectivity of those deprived of vision, maintains a fragile balance between the unshareable singularity of suffering and the need for its universal expression. While it would be impossible to formulate a norm based on this new discursivity, the position and experience of the blinded subject do not remain unstated. Literature and art are privileged sites for the hesitant voicing of sightlessness in that their self-reflexive tendency does not allow the provisional intuitions they attain to solidify into categorical injunctions and rules. Accommodating the logos of blindness, they chart a prolegomenon that anticipates nothing but its own infinite recommencement. The rhetoric of blindness is cognizant of its position as one among many concurrent logoi that often form a dissonant ensemble. Unlike its classical counterparts, it does not aim to be the loudest voice in the agora, where it would occupy the brightest spot, thereby confirming Plato’s condemnation of the worst excesses of democracy. Further, the speech of blindness is split into a spectrum of sounds arranged in an internal polyphony that reverberates in literature and art. In the aesthetic sphere, the critical subject heeds the language of blindness when she or he tarries with the barely perceptible strands of its music, while retaining its plurivocality of meaning. Whether in practising a spiritual hermeneutics mediating between the visible and the invisible, in engaging in a symptomatic reading, or in acknowledging the irreducibility of the invisible in rhetoric, the interpreter lends an attentive ear to the echoes of the unseen. Indeed, interpretative subjectivity does not preexist its object but arises out of the encounter with what it reads. Instead of shedding light on an aesthetic artefact, this subject displays a critical blindness of her or his own that consists in the ability to discern the invisible moments of the text without identifying them as provisionally withheld units of meaning awaiting enlightenment. Not a calamity besetting the subject, the interpreter’s blindness comes as a

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choice, a technique to be honed through repeated practice that she or he embraces in order to escape the objectifying traps of a hermeneutics of (in)sight. This book provides the stage for an encounter between the blindness of the critic and the texts’ rhetoric of blindness in an effort to rescue different shades of criticism from the monotonous field of full visibility.

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Notes

Introduction: Shadows of Vision 1 ‘Open for me, dream The tenebrous door to madness, Because obscurity is less dark than this light’ (my translation). 2 I use the term ‘blindness’ as an umbrella concept that encompasses the inability to see caused by insufficient light as well as by a transient or permanent anomaly in the eye, conditions that can stem from natural causes or be the result of human intervention. 3 Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, following Claude Lefort, point out that, in democratic societies, power becomes an empty signifier, no longer guaranteed by a transcendent authority such as God, a situation that opens the possibility for endless questioning. Totalitarianism can be understood, in this context, as an attempt to re-establish a unitary centre of power (186–7). 4 Sontag believes that the modern idea of politics has been complemented by a modern idea of disease. She points out that the rhetoric of social illness has frequently been deployed to justify a revolution: when a society is diseased, revolution becomes the only way to extirpate this evil (81). 5 Jorge Luis Borges is another Latin American intellectual who has written extensively on blindness and could be regarded as a precursor of the topic. However, Borges’s texts do not explicitly draw a connection between literary accounts of blindness and political resistance; this is why an analysis of his work is not included in this book. 1. At the Blink of an Eye: Vision, Ethics, and Politics 1 ‘The eye you see is not

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Notes to pages 10–13 An eye because you see it; It is an eye because it sees you’ (my translation). Moshe Barasch points out that, in Greco-Roman Antiquity, transgressions associated with an encounter with the gods were often punished with blindness: ‘Other maimed people were sometimes also believed to be guilty of a crime, but only the guilt of the blind is derived from an encounter with the divine’ (11). Maurice Blanchot also describes the danger inhering in beholding divinity in ancient Greek culture: ‘The prohibition upon seeing sounds once more. This taboo is a constant in the Greek tradition which remained nevertheless the domain of the visible: presence is divine merely by virtue of appearing and also in the sheer multiplicity of its appearances. There is always, however, something not to see. And this is not so much because one should not look at everything, as because – the gods being essentially visible and, indeed, the visible – it is vision that exposes men to the peril of the sacred whenever the gaze, through its arrogance quick to scrutinize and to possess, fails to look with restraint and in a retiring mode’ (Writing 128). Freud distinguishes between primary narcissism, as a lack of differentiation between the I and the other, and secondary narcissism, which stands for an attachment to oneself and, consequently, for the love of those who are similar to me (‘On Narcissism’ 90–1). The figure of Narcissus has been traditionally read as a case of secondary narcissism. However, one could conceive of this mythological character as suffering from primary narcissism, which is the basis of Blanchot’s interpretation of the myth. Aristotle states that no human being can live outside of the social sphere: ‘Any one who by his nature and not simply by ill-luck has no state is either too bad or too good, either subhuman or superhuman – he is like the war-mad man condemned in Homer’s words as “having no family, no law [athemistos], no home”’ (53–4). Here, Aristotle bans the subhuman and superhuman excesses from the polis. In doing so, he harkens back to the middling position of the Good in Plato, which was responsible for the balanced life of the city. Moshe Barasch explains that another version of the story of Tiresias imputes his blindness to Hera. Zeus and Hera were discussing the respective degree of their pleasure in love and asked Tiresias to give his opinion. He said that a woman had more pleasure than a man and Hera blinded him in a rage, while Zeus granted him immortality (32). More generally, Tiresias is also understood to have been blinded by the gods for revealing their secrets in the form of prophecies. In some versions of the story of Tiresias, he reputedly changed sex and

Notes to pages 13–17

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became a woman. This dual nature of the blind seer further attests to the porous borderline between interior and exterior in the myth. There is no reliable evidence as to the date when Parmenides’ poem was written. Parmenides was most likely born in the second half of the sixth century BC, possibly in 515 BC, which would mean that the poem dates from the first half of the fourth century BC. The poem has survived only in fragments that amount to about one third of the original work (see Gallop, Introduction 3–5). Martin Heidegger emphasizes the connection between speech and light in History of the Concept of Time. He explains that the term phenomenology derives from a combination of the Greek words phainomenon, which means to show itself, ‘to bring something to light, to make it visible in itself, to put it in a bright light’ (81), and logos, signifying speech or discourse. Hans Blumenberg espouses a similar reading of the poem in his essay ‘Light as a Metaphor for Truth.’ According to Blumenberg, the dualism between light and darkness belongs to the realm of the doxa, which Parmenides attempts to overcome: ‘In the center of his work, Parmenides uproots the dualism of Being and not-Being, truth and appearance, light and darkness […] light is not essentially the opposite of darkness; rather, in the essence of light, darkness is destroyed and overcome’ (32). The Platonic cave has given rise to multiple interpretations, where light and darkness play a central role. Hans Blumenberg traces the history of reception of Plato’s cave in ancient Roman and medieval thought. For Cicero, the normal situation is to live outside the cave and the Platonic metaphor is only a thought experiment whose purpose is to help men appreciate the world outside. Already in the Middle Ages, the cells of Christian monks were often compared to a cave, where the light appears only from within men’s conscience, as a result of their belief in God. Later, the cave becomes synonymous with men’s socialization and with the abandonment of the state of nature (34–9). Similarly, the English word ‘intuition’ derives from the Latin intueor, which meant ‘to look at.’ Plato compares the Good and the Sun, even though they are not exactly situated on the same level. The Good generates the Sun as its offspring, which means that ethics is the condition of possibility for light and visibility. Plato differentiates between two disturbances of the eyes: ‘There are two kinds of disturbances of the eyes, stemming from two sources – when they [the eyes] have been transferred from light to darkness and when they have been transferred from darkness to light’ (Republic 518a). When mov-

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Notes to pages 17–22 ing out of the cave, the eyes of the former prisoners are blinded by eidetic light, to which they are not accustomed. Conversely, the one who has seen the brightness of ideas and returns to the cave to free others is, at first, rendered sightless in the cave’s darkness. Socrates depicts the task of the philosopher through an image (a metaphor) constituted by an image (the eclipse reflected on water). He goes on to emphasize the limitations of this procedure, questioning the power of an image to describe what is: ‘Now perhaps my metaphor is not quite accurate; for I do not grant in the least that he who studies realities by means of conceptions is looking at them in images any more than he who studies them in the facts of daily life’ (Phaedo 99e–100a). This methodological statement is symptomatic of Plato’s writings and indicates his ambivalence toward images. In volume 1 of The Open Society and Its Enemies, Karl Popper advances an argument that presents Plato’s ethico-political program as totalitarian. According to Popper, the key elements of Platonic authoritarianism are the desire to halt all change and the uncertainties associated with it, the striving toward the ideal harmony of the state of nature, the attack on pluralism, and the privileging of the collective good over the individual will. An almost verbatim copy of this commandment appears in Exodus 20:3. As Moshe Barasch points out, the healing of the blind in the Old Testament was associated with the Messianic age: ‘So utterly utopian appeared the healing of the blind that it was understood as a distinctive mark of the messianic age […] The transplantation of the healing of the blind into the messianic age may help us understand that the returning of sight to those who have lost it plays only a minor role in the Old Testament’ (48). Moshe Barasch emphasizes the contrast between Paul’s spiritual and physical blindness before and after his conversion: ‘Before his conversion, Paul has full command of his bodily eyesight, but he does not see the spiritual light. The spell of blindness brings about a dramatic inversion. The loss of his physical eyesight, even if only temporary, “opened his eyes” to the ineffable vision of divine revelation’ (60). For Barasch, Paul’s blindness constitutes an ecstatic experience that allows him to reevaluate the tenets that guided his former life and convert to Christianity (62). It is the task of the believer to permanently attempt to reach heavenly light, which has withdrawn from the world. As Hans Blumenberg points out, it is this egression of the divine from the world that makes religion possible, in that it feeds the human desire for a union with God that can never be

Notes to pages 22–4

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fully attained: ‘The cosmic flight of light is the precondition for the concept of “revelation,” which announces a return of light as an eschatological event and bids man prepare himself for it’ (34). Juan Cruz Mendizábal notes that many Christian mystics state the necessity to become blind to the world as a precondition for moving toward God: ‘there is a voluntary blinding in order to open the eyes to another reality’ (129, my translation). Communion with the divine in mysticism entails a nostalgia for an originary unity with God. It often leads to the mystic’s withdrawal from politics and from the communal sphere in general, in an effort to distance her- or himself from the mundane as the cause of separation from the divinity. For a detailed discussion of the origins and uses of the term ‘Enlightenment,’ see Harry Ritter’s Dictionary of Concepts in History 133–7. The emphasis on the eye as the main source of knowledge espoused by empiricist philosophers of the Enlightenment had been prepared during the Rennaissance by the development of a variety of optical instruments that enhanced vision, such as lenses and telescopes (see Virilio 4–5). This particular point is later refuted in Diderot’s ‘Addition to the Preceding Letter’ (1782), where he narrates his conversation with a blind girl who denies that the blind would be incapable of experiencing compassion: ‘She would not forgive me for my statement that the blind, to whom the symptoms of suffering are invisible, must be cruel. “Do you imagine,” said she, “that you hear a cry of pain as I do?” “There are people,” said I, “who suffer in silence.” “I believe,” she said, “that I should soon discover them and pity them all the more”’ (148). Following a blind man’s statement that he has been living in a figurative prison, Diderot writes: ‘We leave life as we would a charming scene, the blind leave it as a dungeon’ (‘Letter’ 78). Diderot attributes the origin of knowledge to data gathered by the various senses. Therefore, if sight is missing in one individual, she or he will have a different perspective on reality: ‘As to me, it has always been very clear that the state of our organs and our senses has a great influence on our metaphysics and our morality, and that those ideas which seem purely intellectual are closely dependent on the confirmation of our bodies’ (‘Letter’ 80). When comparing the sense of modesty of the blind with that of a seeing person, Diderot states: ‘Though living in an age when philosophy has rid us of a great number of prejudices, I do not think we shall ever arrive at

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such complete insensibility to the prerogatives of modesty as this blind man’ (‘Letter’ 81). This question occupied numerous thinkers of the time, such as John Locke, George Berkeley, or Étienne de Condillac. The answer to the question often depended upon whether these philosophers sided with empiricism or idealism. Diderot divides the Molyneux problem into two different questions: whether one would need to train the eyes in order to see after being cured from blindness and whether one would recognize through sight what one already knew from touch (‘Letter’ 123). Diderot argues that individual training modifies the way different people would react in the situation described by Molyneux. An uneducated person would not be able to compare the sensations resulting from touch with those of sight, while a metaphysician would be able to establish this connection (‘Letter’ 134–5). In his Meditations Descartes uses the terms ‘natural light’ (lumen naturalis) and ‘light of reason’ (lux rationis) interchangeably (Cottingham, ‘General Introduction’ xxiii). This luminosity, adopted by Descartes from the scholastic tradition, is associated with the presence of the divine inherent in every human being. The empiricist rejection of this heritage has yielded the notion of the mind as a ‘clean slate.’ Kant reconciles the positions of rationalism and empiricism by reaffirming the priority of reason and, at the same time, arguing that the experience derived from the senses is essential for knowledge. The centrepiece of this critical delineation may be found in the distinction between phenomenal appearances and the noumenal thing-in-itself drawn by Kant in his Critique of Pure Reason. While the former are potentially accessible to human epistemology, the latter falls outside of the purview of all finite knowing that depends on sense data: ‘The concept of a noumenon is therefore merely a boundary concept, in order to limit the pretension of sensibility’ (350). Kant differentiates between the public and the private use of reason in the following way: ‘The public use of man’s reason must always be free, and it alone can bring about enlightenment among men; the private use of reason may quite often be very narrowly restricted’ (‘What is Enlightenment?’ 55). The terms ‘theoreticism’ and, later, ‘theoreticist’ are used in the sense attributed to them by Martin Heidegger and, subsequently, Emmanuel Levinas, in their criticism of Husserlian phenomenology, which priviledged pure consciousness over practical experience of the world. These philosophers linked theoreticism to a contemplative and detached stance

Notes to pages 27–33

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vis-à-vis reality, which went hand in hand with the emphasis placed by Husserl on the sense of vision. Incorporation stands for a desire to merge with the other, which is also characteristic of the infantile primary narcissism, where the subject is unable to differentiate between itself and the outside. Scoptophilia may, therefore, be understood as a regression to this state, which can happen through the oceanic feeling of fusion with the object or through its melancholic internalization. The relation between disavowal and a difference that is both maintained and cancelled out is established most clearly in Alan Bass´s Difference and Disavowal. Martin Jay links the Heideggerian criticism of vision to the philosopher’s privileging of time over space: ‘His [Heidegger’s] hostility to the heliocentric rationalism of Platonism was no less explicit, as was his rejection of the dualism of subject and object entailed by priviledging distantiating vision […] Heidegger bemoaned the neglect of temporality in Western metaphysics since Heraclitus in favor of a spacializing ontology based on the synchronicity of the fixating gaze’ (‘New Ontology’ 146). For Husserl, the subject is shaped auto-affectively in the ideal medium of the voice, when one hears oneself speak. This coincidence with oneself is the source of the subject’s living presence. Contrarily, in Heidegger, hearing oneself presupposes a temporal disjunction between one’s futural Dasein, who places the call, and the present Dasein who receives it. Heidegger claims that the main attribute of the human Dasein is that it is ‘ecstatic.’ In other words, insofar as one is a living subject, one never fully coincides with oneself, but runs ahead of oneself in one’s still unfulfilled possibilities. This disjuncture implies that a human being is neither completely present nor completely futural, but is temporally beside itself. As Jacques Derrida points out, the auditory sense organs are more open and less susceptible to being controlled by the subject than vision. Freud explains the ear’s opening unto exteriority by the fact that the infant cannot wilfully shut it in the way that her or his eyes can be closed (Derrida et al., Ear 33). Chloé Taylor points out that Levinas constrasted the Greek emphasis on luminosity and forms with the Hebraic rejection of images. Christianity follows the Greek desire for visibility and thus departs from Judaism, where God is heard, rather than seen (1). According to Levinas, ontological inquiry has been the privileged mode of philosophizing in the West. In turn, he wishes to demonstrate that this theoretical activity is predicated on an unacknowledged ethical foundation that falls outside the categories of being.

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42 Levinas attributes the quality of synchronicity to space and describes time as diachronous. That is to say, space is always a single totality, however subdivided it may be, whereas time entails the two asymmetrical temporalities of the I and the other, who stands for the immemorial past that has never been present or represented: ‘The dia-chrony of the past is unequalled. The subjection preceding the understanding of the order attests to or measures an infinite authority’ (Time 112–13). 43 The first sentence of The Communist Manifesto reads as follows: ‘A spectre is haunting Europe – the spectre of Communism’ (2, emphasis added). 44 In defining democracy to-come, Derrida refuses to delimit its scope or to equate it with a determinate concept. It is ‘the concept of a democracy without concept, a democracy devoid of sameness and ipseity, a democracy whose concept remains free, like a disengaged clutch, freewheeling, in the free play of its indetermination; it […] is never properly what it is, never itself’ (Rogues 36–7). 2. Darkness and the Animal in Graciliano Ramos’s Memórias do Cárcere (Memoirs of Prison) 1 ‘By going-into-itself, Spirit sank into the night of its self-consciousness, but its vanished existence was kept therein. And this sublated existence – the previous one, which was born again from knowledge – is the new existence, a new world and a new form of Spirit’ (my translation). 2 Graciliano only began to work on this text toward the end of his life and he died before completing it. Memórias was published in 1953 without the author’s revisions and without the final chapter, and its publication was surrounded by a heated debate about the manuscripts that served as a basis for the final version of the narrative. In an article published on 6 December 1953, Wilson Martins accuses the editors of having changed the originals and of suppressing negative references to the Communist Party, a statement that both the publisher José Olympio and the author’s son Ricardo Ramos strongly denied (Abel 149–51). Later, in her autobiography of her father, Mestre Graciliano: Confirmação Humana de uma Obra from 1979, Clara Ramos rekindles the debate about possible changes to the manuscripts, stating that the published version is not the final one prepared by the writer (257). It is now known that the Brazilian Communist Party tried to interfere in the publication of Memórias, demanding that the text be approved by its leaders. However, this request was not heeded by the writer’s family or by the publisher. The slight variations between different versions of the narrative can be explained by the writer’s constant revisions of his work (Abel 153–5). The manuscripts of Memórias do Cárcere are

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kept in the archive of the Instituto de Estudos Brasileiros at the University of São Paulo. 3 Graciliano denies his direct affiliation with communism, since he was not a Party member (I, 58). However, the author acknowledges his leftist ideals: ‘O que eu desejava era a morte do capitalismo, o fim da exploração’ (I, 119) (What I wanted was the death of capitalism, the end of exploitation) or ‘Não me repugnava a ideia de fuzilar um proprietário por ser proprietário. Era razoável que a propriedade me castigasse as intenções’ (I, 46) (I was not averse to the idea of shooting a property owner because he was a property owner. It was reasonable that property owners would punish me for these intentions) (my translations). In the 1930s in Brazil, the Communist Party was the main opposition movement. It combined the fight against fascism, represented by the fringe group of the ‘Integralistas,’ and the resistance against the Vargas government, called ‘reacção’ (see Castro 139). 4 The theme of vision, blindness and obscurity had already been dealt with in other writings by Graciliano. In Infância, the author’s account of his childhood, he depicts an illness that affected his eyes. The semi-blindness caused by this condition is described as a ‘plunge into shadow’ (135) that separated him from the rest of the world. The eyes also play a significant role in Graciliano’s children stories. Alexandre, the protagonist of a number of texts, had a ‘crooked’ eye that allowed him to see what others could not behold (Alexandre). In ‘A Terra dos Meninos Pelados,’ Raimundo is described as a child who has one black and one blue eye and no hair on his head, which leads other children to mock him and make him retreat into a fantasy world. He imagines a community where all children have one blue and one black eye and no hair on the head and where there is no hunger, cold, or any form of pain (Alexandre 118). In all of these narratives, the eyes bear a mark of the difference separating the protagonist from those around him and this difference in vision constitutes a point of departure for the main characters’ reflection upon the social environment in which they find themselves. 5 In Graciliano’s first night in prison, in the barracks lodging the Brazilian Army’s 20th Battalion in Alagoas, light illuminates his prison cell, while the shadows remain outside, in the courtyard. The writer is unable to sleep due to the brightness in his room and is forced to use his hat to protect the eyes (I, 53). Already in Recife, in his second night spent in jail, obscurity predominates. The author stays awake, interrogating the shadows, and tries to decipher the shape of two objects close to the gate of the building where he is incarcerated, only to realize at dawn that those were the ominous outlines of two canons (I, 71). But it is only aboard the Manaus that the author is completely enveloped in darkness. There is thus a progres-

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Notes to pages 41–5 sive move into obscurity, as the conditions of the different prisons where the protagonist is kept deteriorate. This and all other quotes from Memórias do Cárcere are rendered into English in my translation, as Graciliano’s book has not yet been translated. Graciliano Ramos was friends with several authors who participated in the Regionalist Movement in the northeast of Brazil, namely, José Lins do Rego, Jorge Amado, and Rachel de Queirós. These writers emphasized local themes and language in their novels but their work was still dependent upon traditional techniques of narration that dated back to nineteenth-century realism (Feldmann 46–8). Furthermore, the texts produced by this group were characterized by a strong critique of social inequalities in the northeast. Even though Graciliano shared the Regionalists’ main political tenets, he never nurtured the ambition that his literature would directly lead to social emancipation. The author did not espouse the group’s valorization of social class in detriment of individual characters in his novels and believed that literature could not survive without a psychological analysis of individuals. Graciliano progressively distanced himself from the realist techniques employed by many members of the Regionalist group and embarked on literary experiments characteristic of modernist prose, such as the interior monologue (Feldmann 50–1). Literary critic Adolfo Casais Monteiro defines Graciliano as an anti-Regionalist, since he rejected the nostalgia for the past that characterized the work of several members of the group (271). Graciliano points out that already in the Colony, obscurity remains a permanent reminder of the prisoners’ debasement, as they move through dense mist (II, 56), to a narrow and dark room (II, 59) and finally to their quarters, where a dim light cannot cast away the shadows (II, 78). Graciliano comments upon the banality of the process of depersonalization he went through: ‘Impossível adivinhar a razão de sermos transformados em bonecos. Provavelmente não existia razão: éramos peças do mecanismo social – e os nossos papéis exigiam alguns carimbos. A degradação se realizava dentro das normas’ (II, 55) (It was impossible to guess why we were being transformed into puppets. There was probably no reason: we were cogs in the social wheel – and our papers needed some stamps. Degradation took place according to the norms). In the text, the character Nunes Leite, a lawyer who was imprisoned, marks the failure of the legal system to deal with the situation of political prisoners. Nunes Leite’s breakdown comes about when he realizes that legality no longer applies to the situation in which he finds himself (I, 101–2). Communism is ironically portrayed by Graciliano with traits of a contagious disease: ‘Outro conhecido, também visto de relance numa estação,

Notes to pages 46–7

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foi o deputado José da Rocha. Ao ter conhecimento da infeliz notícia [of Graciliano’s imprisonment], recuou, temendo manchar-se, exclamou arregalado: Comunista!’ (I, 57) (Another acquaintance I briefly saw in a train station was congressman José da Rocha. When he learned the unfortunate news [of Graciliano’s imprisonment] he stepped back, fearing that he would be stained, and said, in amazement: Communist!). Graciliano himself recognizes that death is the most likely outcome of his stay in the Penal Colony: ‘Estávamos ali para morrer’ (II, 74) (We were there to die). The term ‘naked life’ translates the Italian ‘nuda vita’ in Means without Ends. Another translation would be ‘bare life,’ the form used in Homo Sacer. Agamben’s description of ‘form-of-life’ is a version of Heidegger’s concept of Dasein: ‘This entity which each of us is himself and which includes inquiring into the possibilities of its Being’ (Heidegger, Being 27). Also, for Agamben as for Heidegger, possibility is what defines human beings, as stated in Being and Time: ‘Higher than actuality stands possibility’ (63). Schmitt distinguishes between commissarial dictatorship, which aims to restore or defend the existing constitution, and sovereign dictatorship, which becomes permanent. For the thinker, the latter is the political form that best exemplifies the state of exception (Agamben, State 32). Agamben delineates the history of modern concentration camps. Some investigators trace these back to the ‘campos de concentraciones’ created in 1896 by the Spanish in Cuba to repress the insurrection of the population of the colony. Others date their existence back to the concentration camps in which the English imprisoned the Boers at the beginning of the twentieth century. In both cases there was an extension of a state of exception linked to a colonial war to an entire civilian population. The camps were thus not born out of ordinary law but originated in the state of exception and in martial law (Means 38). Graciliano refers to the prolongation of the state of siege in Brazil various times in Memórias: ‘Comprei um jornal e, com esforço, repisando a leitura cheia de lacunas, agarrei a notícia infeliz: o estado de guerra ia ser prorrogado’ (II, 34) (I bought a newspaper and, with some effort, repeatedly going through the content full of lacunae, I grasped the unfortunate news: the state of siege had been prolonged). Later, he writes: ‘Mencionei a prorrogação do Estado de Guerra, desdisseram-me com azedume; exibi o jornal, repeliram a nota agoureira: a unanimidade alienaria provisoriamente o sucesso aziago’ (II, 35) (I mentioned the prolongation of the state of siege and they bitterly denied it; I showed the newspaper and they rejected the ominous note: the unanimous decision was to provisionally deny the unfortunate event).

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18 For Agamben, the police always operate at the threshold of exception, even under political circumstances that fall outside the state of emergency (Means 104). 19 Graciliano is first held in army facilities and is then transferred to the custody of the police, under which the darkest passages of his incarceration take place. 20 According to Graciliano, the fact that the regime needed to control the press was a sign that it was not as strong as it wished to appear: ‘A liberdade de imprensa funcionava contra nós, achava o governo excessivamente generoso, e essas mentiras me davam a certeza de que a reacção ainda precisava enganar o público e não dispunha de muita força, como nos queria fazer supor’ (I, 343) (The freedom of the press worked against us; the press thought that the government was too generous and those lies gave me the certainty that the conservatives still needed to deceive the public and were not as strong as they wanted us to believe’). In fact, the propaganda and censorship efforts of the Vargas government multiplied throughout the 1930s, and after the creation of the New State on the 10th of November 1937 the Department of Press and Propaganda (Departamento de Imprensa e Propaganda: DIP) was set in place. Three years later, the State Departments of Press and Propaganda (Departamentos Estaduais de Imprensa e Propaganda: DEIPs) came into being (see Goulart for more on this topic). 21 Agamben states that this liberation from the law can only be attained through study or play. It would be the opposite of the state of exception, where law remains frozen and confused with its practical application. Here is how this futural state of liberation is described: ‘One day humanity will play with law just as children play with disused objects, not in order to restore them to their canonical use but to free them from it for good. What is found after the law is not a more proper and original use value that precedes the law, but a new use that is born only after it. And use, which has been contaminated by law, must also be freed from its own value. This liberation is the task of study, or of play’ (State 64). 22 Tiago is one of the prisoners the author meets in the Penal Colony. A Brazilian sailor aboard a British vessel, he landed for a day in his homeland. When he refused to pay a taxi driver more than he thought fair for a fare, the driver called him a thief and a communist, which led to his imprisonment by police officers who happened to be nearby (II, 132). 23 Antonio Prado had already pointed out that many of the main characters in Graciliano’s novels are classified as powerless animals (20). In São Bernardo, for instance, the protagonist often describes himself as possess-

Notes to pages 51–7

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ing animal features that go hand in hand with his increasingly irrational behaviour. The author considers that the detainees’ informal attire can have the positive consequence of levelling the different prisoners, who belonged to very disparate social backgrounds. This equality disappears when the inmates put on their clothes for the weekly visits of their families (I, 256). However, for Graciliano, the drawback to the prisoners’ seeming equality, namely the fact that, as a group, they loose the contours of a society and slip into an animal-like state, outweighs its temporary advantages. ‘Bicho’ is a slightly more restrictive term than ‘animal.’ It can mean any animal, particularly insects and worms, but it is usually not used to refer to fish or fowl. ‘Beast’ corresponds to the Portuguese ‘fera’; this term is almost completely absent from Graciliano’s text. Referring to the general whom he deems responsible for his arrest, Graciliano comments: ‘Se ele embirrasse comigo e quisesse matar-me, comportar-se-ia animalmente’ (I, 111, emphasis added) (If he disliked me and wanted to kill me, he would behave in an animal-like way [animalmente]). In another passage, Graciliano reflects upon how the prisoners were perceived by a priest who came to visit them in the Penal Colony: ‘Sem dúvida nos julgava animais perigosos enjaulados. Entrava na jaula mas sentia-se defendido, livre das nossas garras, e esfregava as mãos, satisfeito’ (II, 137, emphasis added) (He certainly thought that we were dangerous caged animals [animais perigosos enjaulados]. He entered the cage but felt protected, free from our claws, and he rubbed his hands together, happily). Significantly, in Memórias the terms ‘animal’ and ‘bicho’ are at times used interchangeably, as if to signify the porous nature of the border between the two. In fact, one could conceive of a permanent displacement between these two notions, as prisoners move from aggression to passivity and back in a vicious circle from which there is no escape. While on the Manaus, Graciliano used the baker’s cubicle to write. This was a small compartment, separated from the hold of the ship in which the other passengers travelled (I, 169). In the Penal Colony the author also isolated himself from the crowd in order to write. He often hid next to the washroom for this purpose, while the other prisoners were having their meals (II, 109). Becoming animal is only a segment in a long list of becomings that include becomings-woman, becomings-child, becomings-molecular, etc. Becomings are thus a way to destructure the totality of the unified human being (Deleuze and Guattari 248).

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32 Deleuze and Guattari mention that the goal of art is to release becomings (272). The music of John Cage, the films of Jean-Luc Godard, or the writings of Nathalie Sarraute are some examples of the plane of immanence reached through artistic creations (267). 33 Immanence and transcendence are not mutually exclusive but represent for Deleuze and Guattari two poles of a continuum. The philosophers caution against a regression into undifferentiated animality and argue that it is necessary to maintain a minimum of form (270). The nature of the plane of consistency is to fail, since absolute immanence cannot be kept and what actually takes place is a perpetual move between the two extremes. 34 The author is forced to part with different segments of his prison notes at various stages of his imprisonment. When he is being moved to the Penal Colony he throws the pieces of paper where he jotted down his comments into the water for fear that these might be used against him in case they were found (II, 39). Later, he tells another inmate that he has already lost his prison writings twice since he was incarcerated and has therefore given up on taking notes (II, 208). 35 In Ricardo Ramos’s portrait of his father in Graciliano: Retrato Fragmentado, he mentions a conversation he had with Graciliano about the accuracy of the events described in Memórias do Cárcere. When asked why he omitted certain events, Graciliano answered that these lacked verisimilitude. To Ricardo’s question as to whether the text was a memoir or fiction, the author replied: ‘I proceeded up to the point where I could or should proceed. Please note, the meaning is clear, it’s just that it became resistant. Or reluctant’ (50, my translation). Several critics have commented on the fictional character of Memórias. Assis Brasil, for instance, states that, in spite of its confessional character, the narrative is very close to a novel (98). Joanna Courteau also stresses the proximity between fiction and history in Graciliano and emphasizes the similarities between the themes of the author’s novels and those of Memórias (‘Memórias’ 46). 36 Nancy inscribes himself in an antimimetic tradition in that, in his view, images do not reproduce the real but recreate it as composed of self-contained discrete unities (‘Ground’ 20). 37 This is how Nancy describes the creation of an image: ‘It [the image] is violent by virtue (that is, by force) of an array of reasons that are part of its very being: it must irrupt, tear itself from the dispersed multiplicity, resisting and reducing that multiplicity; it must grasp itself, as if with claws of pincers, out of nothing, out of the absolute non-unity that first is given as the partes extra partes of a dispersed interior’ (‘Ground’ 23).

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38 This becomes clear when the author, having been released from the Penal Colony, tells its director that he intends to write a detailed account of the time he spent there. This true but violent narration would be a response to the brutal violence employed by the authorities in the colony: ‘O senhor é jornalista? / – Não senhor. Faço livros. Vou fazer um sobre a Colônia Correcional. Duzentas páginas ou mais. Os senhores me deram assunto magnífico. Uma história curiosa, sem dúvida’ (II, 158) (Are you a journalist?/ – No, sir. I write books. I am going to write one about the Penal Colony. Two hundred pages or more. You gave me a magnificent topic. A very peculiar story, no doubt). 39 The pessimistic world view of Graciliano is emphasized by some of the criticism written about his work. Otto Maria Carpeaux, for instance, inscribes the writer’s texts in a lineage of pessimistic authors inspired by Schopenhauer (28–30). Similarly, Alfredo Bosi emphasizes the author’s pessimism when he compares him to Guimarães Rosa: ‘Perspectives: Graciliano Ramos, from a desired heaven to an actual hell; Guimarães Rosa, the reverse path’ (50, my translation). 40 There are several moments in the text when Graciliano questions his prejudices on homosexuality: ‘Faltava-me examinar aqueles homens, buscar transpor as barreiras que me separavam deles, vencer este nojo exagerado, sondar-lhes o íntimo, achar lá dentro coisa superior às combinações frias da inteligência. Provisoriamente, segurava-me a estas. Porquê desprezálos ou condená-los? Existem – e é o suficiente para serem aceitos. […] Preliminarmente lançaremos opróbio àqueles indivíduos. Porquê? Porque somos diferentes deles. Seremos diferentes ou tornamo-nos diferentes? […] Penso assim, tento compreendê-los – e não consigo reprimir o nojo que me inspiram, forte demais. Isto me deixa apreensivo. Será um nojo natural ou imposto? Quem sabe se ele não foi criado artificialmente, com o fim de preservar o homem social obrigá-lo [sic] a fugir de si mesmo?’ (I, 311) (I still had to examine those men, to try to move beyond the barriers that separate me from them and to overcome my exagerated disgust, to study their inner core and to find in it something superior to the cold facts of reason. Provisionally, I held on to these. Why should I despise them or condemn them? They exist – and this is enough for them to be accepted […] We preliminarily condemn these individuals. Why? Because we are different from them. Are we different or do we become different? […] This is what I think and I try to understand them – and I cannot contain the disgust I feel for them; it is too strong. This makes me apprehensive. Is this disgust natural or has it been imposed upon us? Maybe it has been arti-

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Notes to pages 61–3 ficially created in order to preserve the social man force [sic] him to run away from himself?). De Man follows Jean Starobinski, in that this author defines autobiography as self-interpretation: ‘Every autobiography […] is a self-interpretation. Style is here a marker of the relationship between the writer and his own past’ (Starobinski 85, my translation). However, for de Man, the interpretation of the past and its rendering in a certain style are part of a process of replacement of the biographical self for the autobiography, during which the former is defaced by the latter. Derrida considers that all testimony is a kind of autobiography: ‘In essence a testimony is always autobiographical: it tells, in the first person, the sharable and unsharable secret of what happened to me, to me, to me alone, the absolute secret of what I was in a position to live, see, hear, touch, sense, and feel’ (Instant 43). Derrida considers that testimony establishes a link between the singular and the universal, since it concerns a unique instant that is repeated in order to acquire an exemplary condition: ‘The exemplarity of the “instant,” that which makes it an “instance,” if you like, is that it is singular, like any exemplarity, singular and universal, singular and universalizable. The singular must be universalizable; this is the testimonial condition’ (Instant 41). Lejeune defines autobiography in the following way: ‘retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his personality’ (4). The autobiographical pact established between the author and the reader resides in the fact that the name of the author and that of the protagonist coincide. Elisabeth Bruss identifies a number of characteristics shared by all autobiographies: the autobiographer is the source of the subject-matter (as the object of narration) and the source of the structure to be found in the text (as an author); autobiography has a truth-value, since the events narrated supposedly have happened; and the autobiographer purports to believe in what he asserts (10–11). Bruss states that the genre depends on the distinction between fiction and non-fiction, between rhetorical and empirical first-person narration. However, the author acknowledges that these distinctions are cultural artefacts and might be differently drawn (8). Significantly, one might interpret the title of Graciliano’s narrative, Memórias do Cárcere, as the ‘memoirs’ of prison itself, which would

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decentre the authorial voice even more. Prison, not a specific subjective experience, would thus lie at the core of the text. In his final explanation at the end of Memórias, Graciliano’s son Ricardo Ramos states that his father was for a long time undecided between two possible titles for his text: ‘Memórias do Cárcere’ (Memoirs of Prison) or ‘Cadeia’ (Jail). The choice of the latter would have emphasized that his was an account of the experience of incarceration as such, the specific details notwithstanding. The final title of Graciliano’s text might have been inspired by nineteenthcentury Portuguese novelist Camilo Castelo Branco’s Memórias do Cárcere, a narration of the time he spent in prison in Oporto. If an autobiography is never finished, in that its writer is still living at the time when the work is produced, in Graciliano’s narration this lack of finitude is inscribed into the structure of the text, which does not have the last chapter. Clara Ramos states that her father had enough time to finish Memórias but kept postponing the task until the end of his life. According to Clara Ramos, the last unwritten chapter, which would narrate the writer’s release from incarceration, would not be true to his experience since Graciliano found that reality was in prison, and not in freedom (251). The indeterminacy of the text’s ending gave rise to Silviano Santiago’s novel Em Liberdade (In Freedom), which purports to be an edition of some hitherto unknown manuscripts by Graciliano relating his experiences in the first months after his release from prison. Kenneth David Jackson considers this fictional autobiography to fall under the category of a postmodern simulacrum, since it blurs the boundaries between literature and document, fact and fiction (28–9). Bastos associates this tendency toward incompletion with a questioning of the value of literary creation for Graciliano, since the author produces texts about the oppressed but his writings are accessible only to the privileged: ‘There is a basic conflict in Graciliano’s oeuvre: even though his literature is written for the oppressed, he knows that, given the complexity of his oeuvre, he is reinforcing literature as an institution and the society that this kind of literature upholds’ (23, my translation). According to Bastos, incompletion signals Graciliano’s realization that literature cannot replace direct action (31). However, the author’s tendency toward incompletion might be read differently. Its source might reside not so much in the writer’s disbelief in literature but in his desire not to reproduce an overarching, totalizing model of writing. Wander Miranda, for instance, considers that there are numerous bio-

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Notes to pages 65–6 graphical elements in the author’s fictional works (44–58). This proximity of life and literature was acknowledged by the writer himself. In a letter from 1949 to Marili Ramos, Graciliano states: ‘We can only put in writing our feelings, our life. Art is blood, it is flesh. Beyond that, there is nothing’ (241, my translation). The interconnection between Graciliano Ramos’s life and his literature might explain the proliferation of biographies of the writer and of biographical interpretations of his work. Eunaldo Verdi, in his work Graciliano Ramos e a Crítica Literária has already pointed out that a large part of the criticism on Graciliano has a biographical basis. Some of the works focusing on the author’s life are Rolando Morel Pinto’s Graciliano Ramos: Autor e Ator (1962), Richard Mazzara’s Graciliano Ramos (1974), Lamberto Puccinelli’s Graciliano Ramos: Relações entre Ficção e Realidade (1975), Paulo de Castro Silveira’s Graciliano Ramos: Nascimento, Vida, Glória e Morte (1982), Celso Lemos de Oliveira’s Understanding Graciliano Ramos (1988), Paulo Mercadante’s Graciliano Ramos: O Manifesto do Trágico (1993), Dênis de Moraes’s O Velho Graça (1993), and Vasco dos Santos’s Graciliano Ramos: Vida e Obra (2003), to name only a few.

3. Twists of the Blindfold in Art, Fiction, and Film 1 ‘When I was among them, I was overcome by a feeling of terrible loneliness; I felt as someone who was locked up in a garden with many statues without eyes’ (my translation). 2 Blindness has frequently been portrayed in painting, most notably by Pieter Bruegel, the Elder, in his Parable of the Blind leading the Blind from 1568. The painting illustrates Christ’s saying: ‘And if the blind lead the blind, both shall fall into the ditch’ (Matt 15:14). 3 According to Idelber Avelar, dictatorships in Latin America served as instruments in the transition of the countries in the region from a focus on state and national economies to globalized market economies (Alegorias 21). Totalitarian political systems created in Latin America’s Southern Cone and in Brazil thus share many similarities, including affinities in the methods of repression used to control the opposition to these regimes. Torture was commonly practised against political prisoners in Argentina, Chile, and Brazil, among other countries. 4 Ana Maria Pacheco is a sculptor, painter, and printmaker who was born in Goiás, Brazil. After studying art and music and lecturing at Goiás University, Pacheco moved to the United Kingdom, where she has lived ever since. From 1985 to 1989 Pacheco was Head of Fine Art at Norwich School of Art and, since then, she has focused solely on her work as an artist. She

Notes to pages 67–78

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has exhibited her work at a number of venues, particularly in Europe, the United States, and Brazil. The two prints forming the series And They Inherited the Earth, 210 cm x 112 cm, were based on two large woodcuts. In order to produce these, the artist adapted the direct carving technique she uses in her sculpture (Willmoth 11). The multi-figure sculpture titled Dark Night of the Soul was the result of the artist’s residency at the National Gallery in London in 1999 as an Associate Artist. The sculpture was exhibited at the National Gallery between 29 September 1999 and 9 January 2000, together with a series of paintings: Luz Eterna (Eternal Light) and Queen Sheba and King Solomon in the Garden of Earthly Delights. This exhibition then toured to Wolverhampton Art Gallery, Glynn Vivian Art Gallery (Swansea), The Whitworth Art Gallery (Manchester) and the Mappin Art Gallery (Sheffield). After the National Gallery tour in January 2001, Dark Night of the Soul was exhibited at the Ashmolean Museum (Oxford) and, in January 2002, at the Salander-O’Reilly Galleries in New York. This was the artist’s inaugural exhibition of sculpture in the city (Ana Maria Pacheco). According to Nicolau Sevcenko, the sculpture Dark Night of the Soul was very well received both by critics and by the general public and it contributed to Ana Maria Pacheco’s growing visibility in Europe and in the United States (Sevcenko 15). There are human figures wearing animal masks in the series of paintings In Illo Tempore, in the collection of drypoints titled Terra Ignota, and in the prints from the series Comedia, among others. Unfortunately, the naked child cannot be seen in the photograph of the sculpture reproduced here. Brazilian death squads were formed in the 1970s and were linked to the military police. They performed extra-judicial killings targeting purported criminals who escaped justice. At present, Brazilian death squads are composed of police officers and vigilantes who circumvent the law by executing supposed criminals, often in exchange for monetary compensation. The encounter of the tortured with reality described by Améry resonates with the Lacanian notion of the ‘Real.’ For Lacan, the Real is the traumatic core of experience and, therefore, falls outside of the realm of the symbolic. It is the constitutive limit of psychoanalysis, in that it both instigates interpretation and resists it (Écrits). The experience of torture also lies beyond the mediation of interpretation, and the trauma resulting from the victim’s non-mediated encounter with reality does not lend itself to symbolic deciphering. An earlier, abridged version of my analysis of Death and the Maiden was published in Chasqui: Revista de Literatura Latinoamericana 38.2 (November

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2009): 126–37. I thank the editor of Chasqui for granting me permission to reproduce here an enlarged and revised version of that article. 12 The initial title of Death and the Maiden was Scars on the Moon. The play was first presented to the public in a reading at the Institute for Contemporary Art in London on 30 November 1990. The first stage performance of the text took place in Santiago, Chile, on 10 March 1991. The play was not well received by the Chilean public, a fact that Dorfman had already anticipated in an interview with Andrew Graham-Yooll: ‘The play will be criticized in Chile. There are people who might think I am attacking the Commission of Inquiry, or there will be people who think that I am attacking the victims. The point about the play is that it works in the grey zone of ambiguity. It allows each person in the audience, or each reader, to ask themselves who they are in relation to each character. In Chile, everybody has lived that situation. How do you make the truth, how do you pervert one truth to bring out another?’ (4). In a retrospective analysis of the Chilean opening of the play, Dorfman states: ‘My main problem was that I had a pact with truth, I was trying to put salt in Chile’s wounds, and I wanted them to like me while they howled in pain because of the salt I was using. It was unreal, I acknowledge it openly’ (Štambuk 31, my translation). The play was then staged in London, at the Royal Court Upstairs, where it premiered on 9 July 1991, preceeded by Harold Pinter’s drama New World Order, which also deals with the theme of torture. Stephen Gregory, who traces the dramatic careers of Dorfman and Pinter, emphasizes the similarities between the two playwrights and Dorfman’s indebtedness to Pinter. The English translation of Death and the Maiden was dedicated to Pinter and the British dramaturge was among those listed in the program for the Sydney Theater Company production of the play as having encouraged Dorfman (Gregory 8). The London staging of the play was later transferred to the Mainstage at the Royal Court. In London, Death and the Maiden was a success both with the audience and with the critics. It received an Olivier and a Time Out award for best play and best actress. The play rapidly achieved international recognition and, according to Robert Morace, by mid-1995 it became the most widely seen new drama of the time. Up until that year, there were sixty-three separate performances in Germany alone (Morace 139) and it has meanwhile been presented in more than 100 countries (Martínez Tabares 85). The play’s American premiere took place in New York at the Brooks Atkinson Theater on 17 March 1992. Even though it was a financial success, the performance was not popular among the critics, who accused it of downplay-

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ing the political connotations of the text and, therefore, reviewed it as an escapist thriller (Maree 288). 13 In his stage directions at the beginning of the play, Dorfman defines the temporal and local coordinates of Death and the Maiden: ‘The time is the present and the place, a country that is probably Chile but could be any country that has given itself a democratic government just after a long period of dictatorship.’ Even though the playwright acknowledges that his text is rooted in the political circumstances of his country, he makes a gesture toward universality. He realizes that any society that has gone through a dictatorship will face similar problems upon the return to democracy. In an interview, Dorfman states about the play: ‘I believe this might be the first large work where I try to situate the universe created in the exact conjunction of the everyday and the unreal, of the political and the mythical’ (Dorfman, ‘Nuestros Escritores’ 193, my translation). In the afterword to the text, the playright adds: ‘this piece of fiction […] was not merely Chilean in scope but addressed problems that could be found all over the world, all over the twentieth century, all over the face of humanity through the ages’ (74). As Sophia McClennen points out, Death and the Maiden establishes a bridge between specific events and a global perspective: ‘His [Dorfman’s] work has achieved an interesting balance between global and local resonance. In fact, the more specifically local the tale, the more global the impact, as evidenced by the play Death and the Maiden’ (97). 14 Javier Campos states that, even though there are many testimonial accounts of the atrocities that took place in Chile during the dictatorship, there are not many literary texts on the subject. Campos blames the economic pressures of the literary market for this situation (303). Dorfman’s text would thus be an exception to literature’s silence over the Chilean dictatorship. 15 The title of the play was inspired by the string quartet Der Tod und das Mädchen, composed by Franz Schubert, who set to music a homonymous poem by Matthias Claudius. As Carolyn Pinet points out, the word ‘maiden’ echoes ‘iron maiden,’ a medieval instrument of torture (97). Paulina’s torturer used to play Schubert’s quartet while he raped his victims and Paulina has been unable to listen to the works of the composer ever since her imprisonment. The fact that the play ends with the protagonist listening to Schubert’s piece in a concert hall suggests that she will have to face her memories. The correlation between classical music, torture, and death harkens back to the infamous instances in which detainees arrived at the Auschwitz concentration camp to the sound of Johann Strauss’s waltzes.

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Notes to pages 79–80 By referring to Schubert’s quartet, Dorfman might be alluding to the question previously formulated by Theodor Adorno, on whether art can be tainted by its association with violence and crime. Gerardo lies to Paulina on various occasions throughout the play. In the beginning, he denies that he has accepted a position as part of the newly created Commission investigating political crimes, which his wife later finds out to be untrue (12). Further, he deceives Paulina by passing on information about her to Doctor Miranda, in an attempt to help him forge a credible confession. Even though Gerardo’s deceptions are his way of protecting his wife, Paulina often interprets them as a breach of trust. In an interview with Ilan Stavans, Dorfman states that Death and the Maiden was written in Spanish and almost immediately translated by the author into English (56). There were various versions of the text, in Spanish and in English, as Dorfman worked with the actors and directors that staged different performances of the play in Chile, London, and New York. Here, I use the definitive version in English, namely the second edition of the text published by Penguin Books. In an article titled ‘Adiós, General,’ Dorfman states that the dictatorship and the figure of Pinochet have been etched into the memory of Chileans: ‘He [Pinochet] is burned into our memory, into our customs, into the way we speak, into our dreams. How are we to exorcise him?’ (473). Death and the Maiden might be read as a first step in an attempt to perform this impossible exorcism. Dorfman believes that politics necessarily comes through in a work of art, since every writer is immersed in a social and political context. Therefore, the political situation of his country is bound to transpire in his literature. However, as the playwright points out in an interview with John Incledon, it is not the task of the writer to persuade the reader of her or his personal commitments: ‘If, as a human being, you are involved in social and political issues, it is absolutely legitimate that you should bring them into your fiction if you so desire, because your life is made up of those issues. It’s impossible for me not to write about politics, because politics has been a determining factor in my life […] This does not mean that you have to browbeat your readers trying to convince them of a certain point of view. For me, the politics of a work of literature is present much more than just in the content of the work. What the writer should do is to provoke his readers into asking themselves a series of questions […] Politics for me is the way in which moral issues are worked out in terms of power. I think that you can say unequivocally that there are no major writers who do not

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deal with moral issues or who, at least implicitly, do not have a political stance’ (100). In the play, it is unclear whether Paulina killed Doctor Miranda. Scene 1 of act 3 ends as she is about to shoot him and when he reappears in the last scene he is enveloped in a phantasmagoric light and, according to the stage directions, ‘he could be real or he could be an illusion in Paulina’s head’ (67). In the afterword to the play, Dorfman states that the performance could have a cathartic effect: ‘I felt that Death and the Maiden touched upon a tragedy in an almost Aristotelian sense, a work of art that might help a collective to purge itself, through pity and terror, in other words to force the spectators to confront those predicaments that, if not brought into the light of day, could lead to their ruin’ (74). Kimberly Rostan argues that Dorfman establishes a link between literary tragedy and historical tragedy and therefore goes back to classical tragedy as a site of confrontation between different social factions (10, 13). The following dialogue evinces the different positions of the two characters regarding the past: gerardo: We’ll die from so much pain and resentment […] paulina: Forgive and forget, eh? gerardo: Forgive yes, forget, no. But forgive so we can start again. There’s so much to live for, my … (54). Améry expresses the victims’ inability to forget in the following way: ‘Twenty-two years later I am still dangling over the ground by dislocated arms, panting, and accusing myself. In such an instance there is no “repression.” Does one repress an unsightly birthmark?’ (36). Améry states that, unfortunately, slave morality will not succeed: ‘The fears of Nietzsche […] actually were not warranted. Our slave morality will not triumph. Our resentments – emotional source of every genuine morality, which was always a morality for the losers – have little or no chance at all to make the evil work of the overwhelmers bitter for them’ (81). In the play, Gerardo mentions that he fears Paulina could have a relapse, which implies that she has experienced psychological problems before, presumably as a result of her imprisonment and torture (8). Caruth defines trauma in the following way: ‘Trauma describes an overwhelming experience of sudden catastrophic events in which the response to the event occurs in the often delayed, uncontrolled repetitive appearance of hallucinations and other intrusive phenomena’ (Unclaimed 11).

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27 Throughout the play, Doctor Miranda tries to convince Gerardo that his wife is suffering from delusions: ‘She’s mad. You’ll have to excuse me for saying this, Gerardo, but your wife…’ (43); later, the doctor adds: ‘She’s absolutely insane’ (46). 28 Throughout Death and the Maiden, Paulina’s husband treats her in a paternalistic way. In the beginning of the play, he addresses her as: ‘Silly. Silly girl, my baby’ (11). Further in the text, he tries to impose his views on her: gerardo: Paulina, you are going to listen to me. paulina: Of course I’m going to listen to you. Haven’t I always listened to you? […] gerardo: Don’t interrupt (30). Paulina realizes that she needs a gun in order to make her voice heard: gerardo: While you point it [the gun] at me, there is no possible dialogue. paulina: On the contrary, as soon as I stop pointing it at you, all dialogue will automatically terminate. If I put it down, you’ll use your strength to win the argument (24). The protagonist also declares that she no longer intends to obey her husband’s commands: paulina: When are you going to stop telling me what I can and can’t do. ‘You can’t do this, you can do that, you can’t do this.’ I did it (24). She also denies the accusation of being mad: ‘So you can see that I’m not that irresponsible or emotional or … sick, I propose that we reach an agreement’ (39). 29 Both Heidrun Adler (125) and Norman Cheadle (71) point out that, for Dorfman, politics is a way to solve moral questions. In his interviews, Dorfman also emphasizes this association of the public and the private domains. In a conversation with Matt Wolf, the author declares that dictatorships represent the culmination of what already happens in many households. In an interview with Caridad Svich the playwright adds that, in Death and the Maiden, he intended to undermine the public’s certainty about their political positions, in that the play shows how a victim of torture could become an oppressor: ‘This sort of ambiguity breaks down our categories, refuses to let the audience off the hook, and contaminates them the way the dictatorship contaminates all those who live under its shadow, even the best among us’ (Svich 350–1). In an interview with Silverio Muñoz, Dorfman states: ‘Isn’t fascism, in the end, also a phenomenon of language and culture? […] It pains me, it pains me to think that I have fascist elements inside me, but I do. And I think that if we are able to admit to this, we will have progressed a bit’ (75, my translation). 30 Foucault describes the connection between blindness and madness in the

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following way: ‘Blindness: one of the words which comes closest to the essence of classical madness. It refers to that night of quasi-sleep which surrounds the images of madness ’ (Madness 105–6). In his comments on vision in philosophy, Arkady Plotnitsky also discusses the interrelation between madness and blindness: ‘Madness and blindness are interconnected in the conceptual, metaphorical and narrative (en)closure of our discourse’ (75). 31 In Roman Polanski’s adaptation of the play into a film, Paulina is also persistently associated with darkness. The power is cut when she is alone at home and she has to resort to candles; she is in a dark room while Doctor Miranda and her husband talk in the lit living room after the doctor arrived at the house; and she is on the dark balcony at night when her husband talks to the doctor, who is by then gagged and tied to a chair. 32 In the beginning of the play, Doctor Miranda does not seem to remember Paulina. As the action unfolds, it is unclear whether he does not remember her or whether he has recognized her but is trying to hide his identity with his silence. 33 As Dorfman states in the afterword to the play, Patricio Aylwin, Chile’s first democratically elected president after Pinochet’s rule, named a commission – called the Rettig Commission after the lawyer who headed it – to investigate the crimes of the dictatorship. However, this Commission’s work was limited to looking into crimes that had ended in death or the disappearance of prisoners. The cases of those who had been tortured and later released would not be addressed. Furthermore, the perpetrators would not be publicly named or tried (72). Even though Dorfman recognizes the president’s need for caution, given the impending threat of another coup if attempts were made to punish Pinochet’s supporters for their crimes, he equally realizes that the muffling of the voices of victims who were still alive would create difficulties for the country’s transition to democracy: ‘It was then and is now more than ever my belief that a fragile democracy is strengthened by expressing for all to see the deep dramas and sorrows and hopes that underlie its existence and that it is not by hiding the damage we have inflicted on ourselves that we will avoid its repetition’ (73). Eusik Kim argues that Dorfman’s play constitutes a critique of the Chilean government, who tried to shroud the atrocities of the past using the same devices employed during the dictatorship period (180–1). Death and the Maiden would thus be the author’s attempt to give literary voice to issues that were being stifled during the Chilean transition.

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34 After Paulina was tortured, Gerardo had promised her that the culprits would one day be put on trial, but this never happened (35–6). The protagonist thus feels that democracy has not lived up to her expectations. 35 Manuel Alcides Jofre puts forth an interpretation of the names attributed to the characters in the play: the name ‘Paulina’ evokes Saint Paul, who suffered in jail, while ‘Salas’ refers to the rooms where the protagonist was tortured; ‘Escobar’ reminds one of a brush that cleans and tries to impose order (92). 36 Manuel Alcides Jofre equally believes that Paulina stands for the left: ‘Paulina Salas is the victim, the tortured and raped person that can represent the repressed Chilean left and, in particular, those who later performed tasks of solidarity. Roberto Miranda can represent the torturer who denies everything, he can represent the right, the government of the anti-democratic exception’ (93–4, my translation). However, Alcides Jofre emphasizes the fact that the roles of the different characters evolve throughout the play, as the nuances of the mock trial staged by Paulina are played out (94). 37 In an interview with Cristina Pacheco, Ariel Dorfman is asked about the role of the observer in his writings, a question to which he replies: ‘In all my works there is a male figure who observes other human beings and is more powerful than they are. It is as if I always saw two levels of reality’ (441–2, my translation). Pércio B. de Castro Jr has further highlighted the fact that Gerardo plays the role of a mediator, trying to create a precarious balance between oppressor and oppressed (65). 38 The iconographic representation of justice usually takes the form of a woman. The fact that Gerardo stands for justice in the play is congruous with his non-confrontational approach to events, which is traditionally ascribed to women. Gerardo’s conciliatory stance leads Doctor Miranda to question his masculinity: ‘Instead of proposing dishonorable solutions to me, you should be out there convincing that madwoman of yours to cease this criminal behavior before she ruins your career and ends up in jail or in an insane asylum. Tell her that. Or can’t you impose a little authority in your own house’ (45). 39 The representation of justice as a woman wearing a blindfold, balancing scales in one hand and holding a sword in the other derives from the image of the Roman goddess Justitia. In ancient Greece there was also a goddess of divine Justice called Themis, and a goddess of Justice, Themis and Zeus’s daughter Dike, but they were not represented with a blindfold, even though Dike sometimes held scales. Themis might have originated in the goddess Ma’at from ancient Egypt, who assisted Osiris in the judgment of the dead and was often depicted carrying a sword.

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40 Dorfman rejects the temptation to impose a single interpretation of a literary text upon the reader. In an interview with John Incledon, the author advocates ambiguity and open-endedness in literature: ‘I feel that many writers have a tendency to dominate the reader, in that their text does not allow for multiple interpretations, does not provoke and challenge the reader. The more this is true, the less human the reader can become, the more of a soliloquy the work turns out to be. So I’ve always felt that the struggle against the dictatorship of the author upon the reader is one of the central questions in my work’ (99). 41 In an interview with Peggy Boyers and Juan Carlos Lertora, Dorfman states that his writing style should not be equated with postmodern relativism: ‘This [Dorfman’s writing style] should not be understood as a postmodernist gliding over surfaces all of which have identical value. I think that in the midst of the confusion, there are certain ethical certainties which guide us or should guide us’ (156). 42 The creation of a film script based upon the play Death and the Maiden was a collaborative project undertaken by Dorfman and Roman Polanski. 43 In an interview with David Thompson, Polanski states that, even though one imagines Doctor Miranda as guilty, his culpability is never spelled out in the play. The filmmaker believes that the film would need to convey a stronger sense of closure: ‘I had a clear idea that something was amiss with the end of the play. I felt there was no third act, and I knew that would have to be fixed […] It [the play] doesn’t give an answer to a whodunnit, which the play seems to be for its first three quarters’ (8). 44 See Orit Kamir’s article ‘Cinematic Judgement and Jurisprudence: A Woman’s Memory, Recovery, and Justice in a Post-Traumatic Society (A Study of Polanski’s Death and the Maiden)’ for a discussion on law and justice in Polanski’s film. 45 In an interview with Vivian Martínez Tabares, Dorfman remarks that Death and the Maiden is a text about perversity and its relationship to dictatorship (84). In Polanski’s film, it seems that the play’s exploration of sexual perversity is overemphasized, in detriment to a reflection about the regime that exploited this perversity to torture political prisoners. 46 The journalist Fernando Gabeira published his book in 1979, where he described his experience as a left-wing activist during the Brazilian military dictatorship. 47 See Page DuBois, Torture 148. Michel Foucault had already made a similar point in Discipline and Punishment. The author argues that, in the early modern age, torture was commonly inflicted not so much to find out the truth about a certain crime but as a legal form of chastisement (16). The change to more humane sentences marks a transformation of paradigm in

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Notes to pages 98–9 Western legal systems, which coincides with what the author defines as the decline of the ‘hold on the body’ and the end of punishment as a spectacle (14). For a history of torture and its uses, see Torture by Edward Peters.

4. The Reason of Vision 1 ‘Let us resist the illusion of supposing that everything can be inundated with light. We would stop seeing’ (my translation). 2 An earlier, abridged version of my analysis of Ensaio sobre a Cegueira was published in the Luso-Brazilian Review 46.2 (2009): 1–21, © 2009 by the Board of Regents of the University of Wisconsin System. I thank the University of Wisconsin Press for granting me permission to reproduce here an enlarged and revised version of that article. 3 Ensaio sobre a Cegueira was published by Editorial Caminho in 1995. It was planned by the author as the first part of a trilogy that continued with Todos os Nomes (1997) and A Caverna (2000) (see Klobucka xv). Most critics consider it a turning point in José Saramago’s (1922–2010) novelistic production, an idea that is corroborated by the author: ‘Of course, if you look at it in depth, there was a rupture between Blindness and The Gospel according to Jesus Christ’ (Halperín 81, my translation). Some of the innovations of Ensaio include an absence of historical and topographic references, the characters’ lack of first and given names, and a simplification of the narrative style. Saramago describes the style of the novel in the following way: ‘Now I realize that I am somehow refusing something that used to amuse me, namely a kind of baroque style […] and I am witnessing in these last two books (Blindness shows it very clearly and so does the book I am writing now) a bigger need for clarity’ (Reis, Diálogos 43, my translation). David Frier argues that the changes in Ensaio mark an evolution, rather than a break, from the author’s previous novels. This critic considers that the new stylistic developments in the narrative draw the readers’ attention to considerations that are more immediately universal but believes that the underlying direction of Saramago’s fiction has remained unchanged (‘Righting Wrongs’ 97–8). 4 Saramago’s literary production has been the object of numerous critical studies, many of which touch upon Ensaio sobre a Cegueira. Orlando Grossegesse offers an overview of the secondary bibliography on the author in ‘Sobre a Obra de José Saramago: A Consagração e o Panorama da Crítica de 1998 até 2004.’ 5 In an article that came out shortly after the publication of the novel, Maria Alzira Seixo already emphasizes the allegorical dimension of the text

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(‘Crónica’ 98–9). David Frier equally stresses the parabolic aspects of the narrative. He compares the fall into blindness to a descent into chaos, from which the protagonists would arise with a desire to break the bonds of unreason tying them to a dark Platonic cave (‘Righting Wrongs’ 98–9). Joanna Courteau juxtaposes the irrational blindness that leads to moral and social ills in the sermons of Padre António Vieira to the one portrayed by Saramago. Another example of the interpretation of Ensaio as a depiction of unreason is the reading of Richard Preto-Rodas, who defines the Portuguese novelist’s writings as ‘art for reason’s sake,’ that is to say, art created in the name of reason. Beatriz Berrini espouses a similar interpretation, as she states: ‘The blindness of human beings is not a physical one; rather, it is the eyes of reason that are closed’ (135, my translation). Finally, José Ornelas argues for a socio-political interpretation of the plague of blindness: ‘The white blindness can and must be read as a social and/or political text, insofar as these diseases can be read as a correlative of an infection in the body politic and of social disorder and anarchy’ (‘Convergences and Divergences’ 122). 6 Isabel Pires de Lima reads the novel as an allegory for the post-modern condition, which is marked by metaphorical blindness (417). The author classifies the text as ‘meta-post-modern,’ since it comments upon the postmodern condition and upon postmodern fiction (422). 7 This and all subsequent English translations from Ensaio sobre a Cegueira will be quoted from the English version of the novel, Blindness, translated by Giovanni Pontiero and published by Harcourt, unless otherwise indicated. The page numbers of the quotes from the English translation will be noted after each citation in English. 8 This notion is reiterated by the narrator, who states, toward the end of the novel: ‘Costuma-se até dizer que não há cegueiras, mas cegos, quando a experiência dos tempos não tem feito outra coisa que dizer-nos que não há cegos, mas cegueiras’ (308) (It even used to be said there is no such thing as blindness, only blind people, when the experience of time has taught us nothing other than that there are no blind people, but only blindness [324]). As Teresa Cerdeira points out, the narrator often plays with proverbs related to blindness and other idiomatic expressions associated with vision in his comments about the actions depicted in the novel (257). This contributes to the dialogic quality of the narrating voice that seems to enter into a conversation with the reader. In an interview with Marie-Noelle Ciccia, Saramago comments on the use of expressions characteristic of spoken language in his novels: ‘It was a greater consciousness of the creativity of spoken language, when compared to writing, that led to my current nar-

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rative process, which entails carrying into writing not so much reality but the mechanisms of oral expression, namely the ability to interpelate’ (197, my translation). In the talk ‘Do Canto ao Romance, do Romance ao Canto,’ Saramago again expresses his wish to recreate spoken language in his writing and states that, with his texts, he tries to go back to the oral origins of literature. 9 Saramago is uncertain about how best to define his novel: ‘My book Blindness is maybe a novel. There was a time when I described it as a philosophical novel, like the ones from the eighteenth century’ (Baptista-Bastos 64, my translation). As the Portuguese title of the narrative suggests – literally, the English translation would be ‘Essay on Blindness’ – the text has essayistic traits, which the author traces back to the philosophical novel. In fact, Andrew Laird associates the novel with the fictional-satirical texts of Voltaire or Swift (121). Saramago frequently states that he sees himself as a writer of essays in the form of novels: ‘The novel is, for me, today, a way I have found to express some of my preoccupations or, if you want, my obsessions. Sometimes, all of this leads me to ask myself whether I am really a novelist or if my books are not, in the end, essays with characters’ (Baptista-Bastos 37, my translation). In another interview the author states: ‘I have said before that I am maybe not a novelist but an essayist who writes novels because he does not know how to write essays; maybe this is the case’ (Arias 80, my translation). Saramago considers that fiction and the essay can harmoniously coexist in the same text (Halperín 47), as he envisions the novel not as a genre but as a literary site that is open to receive various other genres and styles, including the essay (Reis, Diálogos 138). This idea is reiterated in ‘Do Canto ao Romance, do Romance ao Canto’: ‘But this very novel that I appear to be condemning perhaps already contains in itself and in its various present avatars the open possibility of becoming a literary site (I purposefully say site and not genre) that is able to receive a large, turbulent and loud sea, and torrential tributaries like poetry, drama, the essay, and also science and philosophy, thus becoming the expression of a knowledge, a wisdom and a worldview, like the poems of classical Antiquity were for their time’ (122, my translation). 10 Saramago has often stated that he considers the author to be essential in a novel and has denied the relevance of the concept of the narrator as a literary device: ‘I dare say that the narrator does not exist. I do not know who invented it. It is a very recent and scientific literary notion […] and I have nothing to do with that narrator issue’ (González) 30, my translation). The writer reduces the distance between the author and the narrative voice to zero, which results in the conversational and intimate

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relationship with the reader established in his texts: ‘I would say that between the narrator, myself in this case, and the narrated story, there is no space that could be occupied by that kind of determining filter or by something impersonal or neutral that would simply narrate without any implications’ (Arias 35, my translation). Saramago considers the figure of the author to be significant not only in his texts but also for the wider implications of literature. In fact, the novelist believes that fiction does not directly contribute to societal change and it is thus up to the writer, in his role as an intellectual, to express his opinion about social issues (‘Sobre Literatura’ 15). In his interview with Jorge Halperín, Saramago also links reason with the respect for the other: ‘The reason I am more interested in is the one that has to do with my peers, with the relationship I have with the other’ (60, my translation). Saramago states his answer to readers who complain about the violent character of the novel: ‘You are able to put up with and we are all able to put up with and we have gotten used to whatever we get for free on television every day: wars, genocide, all of this is part of the daily menu. You can put up with it, but when you read it as a metaphor, in a novel, you can no longer put up with it’ (Halperín 53, my translation). Saramago directly links Ensaio with the decline of the values of the Enlightenment: ‘If you want to look for an explanation for the topics of these novels [Blindness and All the Names] I don’t think you will find it in technological changes. You will find it, rather, in the fast changes in human mentality, in the worrisome traits of the new man delineated on our horizon. The kind of man born out of the Encyclopedia, the Enlightenment, the Illustration, is bidding us farewell, and it is already getting difficult to recognize him in the faces of our contemporaries, let alone in their actions’ (Halperín 46–7, my translation). In another interview, the author reiterates the notion that Western civilization, based upon the ideas of the Enlightenment, is coming to an end: ‘What is really clear is that we have reached the end of a civilization […] Everything is changing’ (Arias 74, my translation). In the text ‘Reflexiones de un Escritor en torno a un Humanismo para el Siglo XXI’ the writer again states that the solution for the inequalities prevalent in our society would be the return to humanism, based upon the values of the Enlightenment. Vincenzo Arsillo emphasizes the influence of the Enlightenment in Saramago’s novels. According to this critic, Saramago’s texts evince a pull toward both the Enlightenment and Marxism (71). In his interview with Baptista-Bastos, Saramago describes Ensaio sobre a

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Notes to pages 102–4 Cegueira as a text that questions the nature of human reason: ‘My purpose, in this book, is to question myself and my readers about our rationality, whether we are objectively rational. And if the thing we call reason really deserves that name. And if it deserves it, whether we use reason rationally, if a fair way, as a defence of life […] And what I want in Blindness is precisely to ask myself what is reason for us?’ (65, my translation). Saramago does not depart from a pre-defined notion of rationality. His novel could be read as a collation of different approaches to the question of what reason is. Adorno and Horkheimer’s Dialectic of Enlightenment was published in 1944 and the spectre of fascism looms over their reflections. The authors state that ‘Enlightenment is totalitarian’ (4), and thus directly link the political situation in Europe at the time with a certain version of enlightened rationality. In an interview with Carlos Reis, Saramago recognizes that there are different manifestations of reason. The novelist acknowledges that rationality can encompass both oppression and respect for the other: ‘Even doctrines that we could easily define as irrational, are all of them a product of reason’ (149, my translation). According to Saramago, there is no necessary connection between reason and ethics, which makes it all the more pressing for the former to be guided by the latter, as he states in his diary: ‘If ethics does not govern reason, reason will despise ethics’ (Cadernos III 147, my translation). Saramago has emphasized his support for communism in various interviews. In his conversation with Jorge Halperín, the author states, in a somewhat ironical way: ‘I suffer from what one might call hormonal communism […] Well, here you have the reason why I am still a communist: because of a hormone that imposes upon me an ethical obligation’ (16, my translation). In the same interview the novelist proclaims his atheism: ‘That is to say, I, an atheistic citizen, do not need God […] I need nothing. I only need my own sense of responsibility. What I believe to be my ethics of responsibility’ (36, my translation). Following the classification of Elana Gomel, Sandra Stanley distinguishes between apocalyptic utopias, where destruction and death are followed by a utopian future, and postapocalyptic ones that only depict the dissolution of pre-existing structures. While Marxism would fall under the first, Ensaio belongs to the second category, in that it does not present a solution to the chaotic situation it describes (Stanley 294). Harold Bloom identifies this latent threat as the return of fascism: ‘The open nature of the allegory in Blindness allows the reader to wonder if this

Notes to pages 104–5

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is not yet another parable of the perpetual possibility of the return of Fascism, or of its first advent’ (xviii). Vibha Maurya also associates the novel with the possibility of totalitarianism. This critic argues that some of the passages in the text allude to the period of the Salazar dictatorship in Portugal (276). In his interview with Jorge Halperín, Saramago describes the Ensaio as the portrayal of ‘the world converted into a concentration camp’ (52, my translation). Werner Thielemann also points out that the circumstances inside the mental asylum are comparable to those in a concentration camp (11). Christopher Rollason, in his article ‘How Totalitarianism Begins at Home: Saramago and Orwell,’ considers Ensaio sobre a Cegueira to be a political novel that can be read as a critique of totalitarianism, much in the same way as George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Saramago declares in various interviews that he does not believe in a universal truth: ‘Truth does not exist […] there are many truths and they must fight one another and then we see what works’ (Viegas 39, my translation). The fact that there is no single truth is linked to the multiplicity of forms that reason may take. The moment of blindness triggers in each individual a reflection about what kind of truth she or he will espouse. The narrator half-jokingly comments on the relevance of the body in human affairs: ‘Com a tripa em sossego qualquer um tem ideias, discutir, por exemplo, se existe uma relação directa entre os olhos e os sentimentos, ou se o sentido de responsabilidade é a consequência natural de uma boa visão, mas quando a aflição aperta, quando o corpo se nos desmanda de dor e angústia, então é que se vê o animalzinho que somos’ (243) (When the bowels function normally, anyone can have ideas, debate, for example, whether there exists a direct relationship between the eyes and feelings, or whether the sense of responsibility is the natural consequence of clear vision, but when we are in great distress and plagued by pain and anguish that is when the animal side of our nature becomes most apparent [253]). For a comparison between Saramago’s and Camus’s novels, see José Ornelas, ‘Convergences and Divergences in Saramago’s Ensaio sobre a Cegueira and Camus’s The Plague.’ After the outbreak of the plague, some people volunteer to help the blind but, in spite of their kind gesture, they lose their sight almost immediately: ‘Ao princípio, muito ao princípio, algumas organizações caritativas ainda ofereceram voluntários para irem tratar dos cegos […] Os pobres queridos cegavam imediatamente, mas ao menos ficava para a história a beleza do gesto’ (125–6) (At the beginning, the very beginning, several charitable organisations were still offering volunteers to assist the blind […] These dear people went blind immediately but at least the generosity of their

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Notes to pages 105–9

gesture would go down in history [123–4]). Since even altruistic individuals are afflicted by blindness, the plague cannot be read as a punishment for poor moral conduct. In the novel, the white blindness is a condition that affects society as a whole, without any well-defined motive. As José Ornelas points out, it is hard to make the case that the plague has moral underpinnings, since the narrator does not describe its origin or causes (‘Convergence and Divergence’ 128–9). When the blind are rounded up in the mental asylum, the doctor’s wife states: ‘Aqui todos somos culpados e inocentes’ (101) (Here we are all guilty and innocent [96]). Once inside the asylum, all share the same fate. Blindness results in the levelling of the afflicted beyond class or other divisions, whose artificiality is revealed by the plague. The delusive individuation afforded by class or gender dissipates as the real individuation brought about by blindness arises. The passage quoted above is an abridged version of the moment in the novel where the characters narrate how they became blind. The descriptions of the instant of losing vision omitted in the quote are all related, in one way or another, to a reflection about sight: the doctor was reading treatises on eye diseases when he went blind; the hotel maid was looking at a white sheet when she started seeing the white light of blindness, etc. (129–30). The voice of this unkown person is not marked in terms of gender. It seems to represent an ‘everyman’ or, more to the point, an ‘everyperson’ or an ‘every-body.’ The epigraph of the novel already states that, more than seeing, one should reflect upon one’s act of looking and upon what is being seen: ‘Se puderes olhar, vê. Se podes ver, repara’ (If you can see, look. If you can look, observe). The characters in the novel need to become blind in order to achieve this awareness. The epigraph of Ensaio derives from the fictional Livro dos Conselhos (Book of Exhortations), whose origin the author traces back to Jorge Luis Borges’s influence upon his writing. The equally fictional Livro das Evidências (Book of Obviousnesses, my translation) would be, according to the author, a compilation of obvious statements (Viegas 36–7). Saramago writes in his diary about the decision not to attribute names to the characters in Ensaio: ‘I decided that there would be no proper names in Blindness […] I am conscious of the enourmous difficulties that will arise for the narrative without the usual and, to a certain point, inevitable crutch of names, but what I really do not want is to have to carry by the hand those shadows we call characters, to make up lives for them and to prepare their destinies. I prefer, this time, that the book be populated by shadows

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of shadows, so that the reader will never know who we are talking about, that when someone appears in the narrative, he will ask himself whether it is the first time that this happens, whether the blind person on page one hundred is the same blind person of page fifty, so that, in the end, the reader will really enter into the world of others, those we do not know, all of us’ (Cadernos I 102, my translation). According to the author, the absence of names in the novel highlights the fact that blindness is the main trait of each character. This is stated in the narrative, when the doctor’s wife declares that names would be useless in a situation where people are solely defined by blindness: ‘Tão longe estamos do mundo que não tarda que comecemos a não saber quem somos, nem nos lembrámos sequer de dizer-nos como nos chamamos, e para quê, para que iriam servir-nos os nomes ’ (64) (We’re so removed from the world that any day now, we shall no longer know who we are, or even remember our names, and besides, what use would names be to us [57]). 30 In his interview with Jorge Halperín, Saramago once again stresses that we are immersed in ideology: ‘Because the truth is that when one asks oneself the question: why do I think the way I think? one is entering the territory of ideology. What we should not do is to adopt a reductive view of ideology, calling a certain kind of ideology the only ideology: socialist ideology, Marxist ideology, whichever’ (63, my translation). Ideology does not refer only to Marxism or socialism. Rather, it is the web of socio-cultural values and ideas that determine the way people think. Therefore, similarly to the unconscious, which grounds all subjectivity, there is also no subject outside of ideology. 31 Almeida points out that the concept of ideology used by Saramago would be close to the notion of ‘world view,’ which derives from the German ‘Weltanschauung’: ‘Such a conception of ideology is nowadays usually called “world view.” This change in vocabulary is not insignificant. The replacement of the term is here beneficial, since it avoids the negative semantic undertones that the word ‘ideology’ has gained in almost bloody theoretical wars’ (26, my translation). 32 The difficulties of being the only one to possess vision when everyone else is blind is the subject of H.G. Wells’s short story ‘The Country of the Blind.’ The protagonist of this story leaves the community of the blind because they could not understand the fact that he was able to see. The very notion of sight was foreign to a society composed only of blind individuals. For a comparison of Saramago and Wells on blindness, see David Frier, ‘Kant You See? Fictions of Blindness in Saramago and H.G. Wells.’

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Notes to pages 111–18

33 For Fernando Venâncio, the fact that one of the characters is able to see is a necessary narratological device in Ensaio. It is through the perspective of the doctor’s wife that the narrator describes the degrading circumstances in which the blind find themselves (73). This portrayal would not have been as powerful if it were depicted from the standpoint of a disembodied omniscient voice. 34 In the essay ‘The Subject and Power,’ Michel Foucault states that the purpose of his work has been to ‘create a history of the different modes by which, in our culture, human beings are made subjects’ (777). The author stresses that his study of power is only relevant insofar as it sheds light on the formation of subjectivity. 35 Saramago states that he has always been interested in the notion of power and in the way it works: ‘What worries me is the question of power, not the relationship that the artist or the intellectual has or is forced to have with power’ (Reis, Diálogos 55, my translation). The author is mainly concerned with the functioning of power in a given society and sees the tensions between power and the intellectuals as an offshoot of this issue. 36 The passage when the doctor’s wife, the girl with the shades, and the wife of the first blind wash in the rain on the balcony of the doctor’s house can be read as a counterpart to the washing after the rape. This episode evokes the pain brought about by the rape but the washing is here narrated in a joyous key, as the women are compared to the three graces (267). In both events, the women are presented as a collective, whose suffering can only be born and whose happiness can only be enjoyed when shared. 37 José Ornelas identified the main tenets that guide the group formed by the protagonists of the novel as the following: ‘The group led by the optometrist’s wife is founded on principles of the humane aspects of all relationships: generosity, solidarity, respect for others and self-sacrifice’ (‘José Saramago’ 293). Christopher Rollason states that this group embodies ‘the survival of collective values and human solidarity, developing a tenacious coherence in the face of adversity’ (117). 38 Anna Klobucka suggests that Saramago’s writing is guided by a principle of ‘rooted cosmopolitanism’ that entails an attachment to a certain region and, at the same time, encompasses the acceptance of a multiplicity of roots and allegiances (xviii). In the author’s later novels, it becomes clear that, even though Portugal remains a point of reference, the texts reflect upon forms of community and belonging in any post-industrial society, where characters often have very disparate loyalties. In Ensaio, there is an attempt to conceptualise a notion of community in the midst of this differ-

Notes to pages 119–20

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ence, in that characters share only the circumstances brought about by the plague. In many of Saramago’s novels there are strong female characters who often became symbols of righteousness in the face of weak men. In an interview with Francisco José Viegas, Saramago expounds on his indebtedness to women, which, according to the author, translates into the characters in his texts: ‘I have lived much longer with women than with men and I believe that what I think I know, what made me the person that I am, I believe I got it much more from women than from men. I believe I owe nothing to men’ (36, my translation). As Maria Alzira Seixo points out, there are obvious parallels between Blimunda and the doctor’s wife (‘Crónica’ 101): both possess a vision that goes beyond the capabilities of those around them and both put that skill at the service of others. Saramago himself stated in an interview with Clara Ferreira Alves that the doctor’s wife was created as a twin sister of Blimunda (82). The doctor’s wife, who is presented as the one who leads the group into collective organization, is compared in the novel to Eugène Delacroix’s iconographic symbol of liberty in the painting La Liberté Guidant le Peuple (Cerdeira 222): ‘Alguém tinha deitado mão ao último farrapo que mal a tapava da cintura para cima, agora ia de peitos descobertos, por eles, lustralmente, palavra fina, lhe escorria a água do céu, não era a liberdade guiando o povo, os sacos, felizmente cheios, pesam demasiado para os levar levantados como uma bandeira’ (225) (Someone had grabbed the last rag that had barely covered her from the waist up, she was now going around with her breasts exposed and glistening, a refined expression, with the water from heaven, this was not liberty leading the people, the bags, fortunately full, are too heavy for her to carry them aloft like a flag [233]). Despite the similarities between the doctor’s wife and the image of liberty in Delacroix’s painting, the narrator rejects a romanticized view of this character. Instead of holding a flag, the doctor’s wife is very pragmatically carrying a bag with food, which, as the narrator seems to be ironically saying, is more central to people’s freedom than a national flag. The doctor’s wife recognizes the similarities between the blindness that afflicts her companions and her tears: ‘Vou cegar, pensou, mas logo compreendeu que ainda não ia ser desta vez, eram só lágrimas o que lhe cobria a visão, lágrimas como nunca as tinha chorado em toda a sua vida’ (188) (I’m going blind, she thought, but then realised it would not be just yet, these were only tears blurring her vision, tears such as she had never shed in all her life [192]).

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43 In the novel, the blind do not cry often and, when they do so, tears seem to be associated with the memory of their past lives. They cry out of their attachment to what is no longer, like the first blind man when he realized he could not see, or the blind in the mental asylum: ‘Era uma canção, uma canção sem importância, mas os cegos foram-se aproximando devagar […] alguns choravam, como provavelmente só os cegos podem chorar, as lágrimas correndo simplesmente, como de uma fonte’ (121) (It was a song, a song of no significance, but the blind internees slowly began gathering round […] some were crying, as probably only the blind can cry, the tears simply flowing as from a fountain [119]). Their tears slowly stream from their eyes, adding another layer of blindness to the white light that already prevented them from seeing. 44 For Derrida, tears are the blindness that opens the eye to a dimension beyond the gaze, namely that of individual and communal joy or suffering (Memoirs 126–7). 45 The ‘dog of tears’ attests to the fact that suffering is not limited to human beings. It is portrayed with features that make it seem almost human and it demonstrates that, in the novel, nature is not mere landscape. The dog becomes a member of the group, linked to humans by the evidence that, as a sentient being, it can share their pain. 46 Ensaio sobre a Lucidez was first published in 2004 by Editorial Caminho. 47 In a journalistic piece published 22 April 1975 in Diário de Notícias, Saramago had already defended the citizens’ right to submit blank ballots in case they do not agree with the program of any political party: ‘It should be clear that a blank ballot or a ballot that has no value because it was crossed out is also a vote. It is a vote that should be respected as much as the vote that choses a party. The blank ballot is the vote of someone who does not know and states it. The blank ballot is a way of protest against forty eight years of fascism that are really the true culprits in this unclear discussion, where one tries to fish for votes as one would fish for blind fish in murky waters’ (Apontamentos 199, my translation). 48 An example of solidarity occurs when those who did not cast blank votes decide to leave the city. They are stopped by the authorities and are forced to return to their homes. The rest of the population comes out to the streets to help them carry their belongings back to their apartments (167). 49 For example, when the government plants a bomb in a subway station to suggest that the blank vote was related to terrorist activities, the population of the city takes to the streets in a quiet demonstration of support for the victims (136–40). 50 The way Saramago describes the methods of control used by the government in Ensaio sobre a Lucidez echoes his comments on liberal democracy

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in the text ‘A Verdade e a Mentira,’ published in Extra on 12 August 1977. Here the author states that bourgeois democracy is the easiest way to render freedom of the press meaningless, since the regime can absorb and neutralize all the accusations levelled against it (Folhas Políticas 28). In Ensaio sobre a Lucidez, the press is completely controlled by the government, who uses it as a channel to spread its version of the news. When a smaller news channel or newspaper attempts to break free from government control, it is silenced by censorship and by government-approved accounts of events. 51 Kenneth Krabenhoft suggests that Saramago moves from a belief in the perfectibility of humanity to an increasing pessimism about society and that Ensaio sobre a Cegueira would illustrate this shift (133). Luciana Stegagno Picchio also discusses the pessimism of Ensaio and states that the conclusion one can draw from the novel is that all men are intrinsically bad (‘A Lição’ 16). Saramago himself comments upon the pessimism of his text in his diary: ‘As I continued to speak it became ever clearer how much the pessimism of this book worries me […] It will be cruel, fleshless, not even style will soften its sharp edges. In Blindness there is no crying over the sorrows of invented characters. What shouts out there is the interminable and absurd pain of the world’ (Cadernos III 58, my translation). Conclusion 1 ‘Out of everything, a little remains’ (my translation). 2 The two sides of the process of de-politicization may be understood as the competing legacies of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries: ‘In the eighteenth century the idea of progress was primarily humanitarian-moral and intellectual, it was a spiritual progress; in the nineteenth it became economic-industrial-technological’ (Concept 74–5). 3 In the ‘The Theory of the Partisan’ Schmitt rethinks political agency beyond the constraints of state structures and foregrounds the partisans as the embodiment of the political, in that they operate exclusively on the basis of the enemy/friend distinction and their fighting involves the whole of the civilian population that thus becomes politicized. The effectiveness of the partisans’ strategy depends upon their invisibility, since their concealment gives the impression that they are an omnipresent force, much larger than their real numbers. 4 As Schmitt puts it: ‘All significant concepts of the modern theory of the state are secularized theological concepts’ (Political Theology 38). 5 The artwork, already a mediator between a visible, phenomenal surface and the invisible concept of art, requires, in turn, a mediation that takes the

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Notes to pages 130–2

form of interpretation. Likewise, both in the political and in the theological arenas, there are different levels of mediation. However, while theology culminates in the unmediated presence of God, there is no warranty that the chain of interpretations generated in either politics or art corresponds to the truth. Althusser does not define this new interpretative method only in terms of visibility and invisibility but also implicates the other senses and, for instance, equates blind spots with the silences dwelling in every text (‘From Capital’ 22). In his rethinking of dialectical materialism, Althusser distinguishes between the real object and the object of knowledge. The latter changes with every new epistemological paradigm, approximating different facets of the real object. According to Althusser, Marx’s analysis of capital created an object of knowledge that was qualitatively different from that of classical political economy. Althusser states that the breakthroughs of innovative thinkers are often not recognized by these or by their contemporaries, and only become evident much later: ‘What is true of the majority of great inventors in the history of the theoretical must be true of him [Marx] as well: time is needed before his discovery will even be accepted, and only then will it pass into normal scientific practice’ (‘From Capital’ 51). De Man argues for the ‘literariness’ of critical texts in the following way: ‘Since they are not scientific, critical texts have to be read with the same awareness of ambivalence that is brought to the study of non-critical literary texts, and since the rhetoric of their discourse depends on categorical statements, the discrepancy between meaning and assertion is a constitutive part of their logic’ (‘Rhetoric’ 110). De Man presupposes here that scientific texts are not ambivalent and, therefore, do not share the rhetoricity of literature. Yet, the differentiation between scientific and literary writings seems to depend upon different degrees of ambivalence rather than on a qualitative distinction between two kinds of texts. De Man argues that the misreadings of this second category of literary texts are necessarily based upon a lack of understanding and does not account for the possibility that these could be creative interpretations, which purposefully twist the original text in order to put forth a new idea.

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Index

Adler, Heidrun, 160n29 Adorno, Theodor, 9, 102–3, 158n15 Agamben, Giorgio, 45–50, 147nn14, 15, 148n18 aggression, 3–4, 47, 60, 96, 149n29 Alcides Jofre, Manuel, 89, 162nn35–6 Allende, Salvador, 78 Almeida, Onésimo Teotónio, 109 alterity, 8, 10, 13, 28, 32–3, 36, 115, 123 Althusser, Louis, 108–9, 111, 115, 126, 129–31, 133, 176n7 Alves, Clara Ferreira, 173n40 Amado, Jorge, 146n7 Améry, Jean, 68, 70, 77–9, 81, 83–4, 155n10 Ancient Greece (Ancient Greek, Greek Antiquity), 5, 8–9, 11–13, 15, 18–19, 30, 39, 42, 50, 61, 91, 107, 138n2, 139n8, 143n40, 162n39 Andrade, Carlos Drummond de, 125 animal (animality), 6, 40, 50, 51–5, 57–9, 61, 63, 66–8, 74, 108, 125, 148–9n23, 149nn24, 25, 27, 29, 31, 150n33, 155n7, 169n22 Arendt, Hannah, 68, 70 Arias, Juan, 166–7nn9, 10, 13

Aristotle, 11, 50, 138n4 Arsillo, Vincenzo, 167n14 ate, 9, 12 authoritarianism, 18, 38, 60, 128, 140n15 autobiography, 6, 40, 55, 58, 59, 60–4, 95, 125, 144–5n2, 152nn41, 42, 44, 45, 153nn47, 48 Avelar, Idelber, 83–4, 91–2, 154n3 Aylwin, Patricio, 161n33 Bacon, Francis, 65 Baptista-Bastos, Armando, 166n9, 167–8n15 Barasch, Moshe, 11–12, 18, 21, 138nn2, 5, 140nn17, 18 Barreto, Bruno, 7, 67, 95–6 Bass, Alan, 143n35 Bastos, Hermenegildo, 55, 57–8, 63, 153n49 Bataille, Georges, 52–4, 57 beast, 54, 113, 149n26 Bechis, Marco, 6, 67, 94, 96 Bentham, Jeremy, 112 Berkeley, George, 25, 142n28 Berrini, Beatriz, 165n5 bicho, 53–4, 57–8, 113, 149nn25, 29

192

Index

biopolitics, 46, 113–14 Blanchot, Maurice, 10, 58, 138nn2, 3 blindfold, 3, 6, 65–71, 75, 77–8, 85–9, 92–7, 116, 125, 162n39 blindness (blind), 3–25, 30, 35–9, 41, 43, 50, 53, 58, 62–3, 65–7, 86, 89–90, 95, 97, 98–126, 131–5, 137nn2, 5, 138–9nn2, 5, 6, 139–40nn13, 17, 18, 141–2nn20, 24, 25, 27, 28, 145n4, 154n2, 161n30, 162n39, 164n3, 164– 5n5, 165nn6, 7, 8, 166n9, 167n13, 168–9n20, 169n21, 169–70n24, 170nn26, 28, 170–1n29, 171n32, 172nn33, 36, 173n42, 174nn43, 44, 47, 175n41, 176n6 blind spots, 130–1, 176n6 Bloom, Harold, 168–70n20 Blumenberg, Hans, 139nn9, 10, 140n19 Borges, Jorge Luis, 137n5, 170n28 Bosch, Hieronymus, 68 Bosi, Alfredo, 151n39 Boyers, Peggy, 163n41 Bruegel, Pieter, 154n2 Bruss, Elizabeth W., 152n45 Butler, Judith, 111, 115–16 Cage, John, 150n32 Calbucci, Eduardo, 109 Camões, Luíz Vaz de, 54 Campos, Javier, 157n14 Camus, Albert, 105, 169n23 Candido, Antônio, 43, 64 Carpeaux, Otto Maria, 151n39 Caruth, Cathy, 82 Castelo Branco, Camilo, 153n46 Castro, Ricardo Figueiredo de, 145n3 Castro Jr, Pércio B., 89, 162n37 Cerdeira, Teresa Cristina, 165n8, 173n41

Cheadle, Norman, 160n29 Christianity (Christian), 8–9, 19, 20–3, 74, 104, 139n10, 140n18, 141n20, 143n40 Ciccia, Marie-Noelle, 165–6n8 Claudius, Matthias, 157n15 collectivity (collective), 5, 7, 10–11, 37, 39, 98, 115–20, 123–4, 126, 140n15, 159n21, 172nn36, 37, 173n41 communism (communist), 40, 104, 144n43, 144–5n2, 145n3, 146–7n11, 148n22, 168n18 community (communality, communitarian), 10, 18, 22–3, 34, 46, 50, 103–6, 116–21, 123–4, 126, 141n21, 145n3, 171n32, 172n38, 174n44 Condillac, Étienne de, 142n28 consciousness, 26, 28, 33, 50, 107, 109, 142–3n33 control, 4, 12, 29, 31, 33, 48, 95, 112–16, 123, 143n39, 148n20, 154n3, 159n26, 174–5n50 Costa, Antonella, 93 Cottingham, John, 142n30 Courteau, Joanna, 150n35, 165n5 Cruz, San Juan de la, 76 Cruz Mendizábal, Juan, 22, 141n20 crying, 20, 38, 107, 121, 174n43, 175n51 darkness, 3–6, 13–16, 19, 21–3, 25–6, 29, 38–46, 49–50, 52, 62–7, 74–7, 86–7, 92, 97, 99, 101, 115, 133, 137n1, 139–40nn9, 10, 13, 145–6n5, 146n8, 148n19, 155n6, 161n31, 164–5n5 Da Vinci, Leonardo, 107 dehumanization, 6, 43, 66–7 Delacroix, Eugéne, 173n41 Deleuze, Gilles, 57, 149n31, 150n33

Index de Man, Paul, 61–2, 126, 131–3, 152n41, 176n9 democracy, 4, 37, 49, 78, 80, 88, 113, 126, 129, 134, 137n3, 144n44, 157n13, 161n33, 162nn34, 36, 174–5n50, depersonalization, 45, 63, 146n9, Derrida, Jacques (Derridean), 9, 29, 35–8, 62, 66, 90, 118–21, 143n39, 144n44, 174n44 Descartes, René, 25, 142n30 dictatorship, 3–7, 38–9, 46, 65–7, 78–9, 81, 87–9, 92–3, 95–7, 147n15, 154n3, 157nn13, 14, 158n18, 160n29, 161n33, 163nn40, 45, 46, 168–9n20 Diderot, Denis, 23–5, 141–2nn24–9 dissident, 3–4, 60 Dorfman, Ariel, 6, 66, 78–92, 156–7n12, 157nn13, 14, 157–8n15, 158nn17, 18, 159n21, 160n29, 161n33, 162n37, 163nn41–2, 45 doxa, 13–19, 139n9 DuBois, Page, 70–1, 91, 163n47 ear (hearing), 20, 24–6, 29–32, 44, 62, 65, 85, 134, 141n24, 143nn37, 39, 40, 152n42 Eichmann, Otto, 68 empiricism (empiricist), 19, 23, 25, 130, 141n23, 142nn28, 30 Enlightenment, 6, 9, 19, 22–5, 16, 38, 100, 102–3, 105, 120, 132–4, 141nn22, 23, 142n32, 167nn13, 14, 168n16 ethics, 3, 5, 8–9, 12, 15, 17, 29–39, 43, 68, 70, 84, 99, 103, 112, 122, 125, 128, 139n12, 140n15, 143n41, 163n41, 168nn17, 18 Eurydice, 10, 12, 64

193

eye, 6, 8, 12, 16–22, 24, 26, 29, 31, 35–6, 38–9, 44, 47, 53, 65–8, 70–1, 77, 87, 89, 93–7, 99, 106–7, 109–10, 113, 116, 119–22, 137n2, 137–8n1, 139–40n13, 140n18, 141nn20, 23, 142n28, 143nn39, 40, 145n4, 145–6n5, 154n1, 164–5n5, 169n22, 170n26, 174nn43, 44 Fenichel, Otto, 27 fetishism, 27–8 fiction, 30, 43, 62–4, 78, 104, 106, 131–2, 150n35, 152n45, 153n48, 153–4n50, 157n13, 158n19, 164n3, 165n6, 166–7nn9, 10, 170n28, 171n32 finitude, 4, 19, 22, 33, 39, 118, 142n31, 153n47 forgetting, 81, 89 Foucault, Michel, 64, 85–6, 111–16, 123, 161n30, 163n47, 172n34 Fragonard, Jean-Honoré, 65 Franco, Francisco, 3 Frankfurt School, 38 Freud, Sigmund, 27–8, 138n3, 143n39 Frier, David, 164–5nn3, 5, 171n32 Gabeira, Fernando, 95, 163n46 gaze, 6, 8, 10–12, 17, 28–9, 32, 34–9, 52–3, 57, 65, 67, 70, 76–7, 88, 93–4, 96, 105, 110, 120, 122, 125, 130, 138n2, 143n37, 174n44 Gledson, John, 60 Godard, Jean-Luc, 150n32 Gomel, Elana, 168n19 Goya, Francisco de, 65 Graham-Yooll, Andrew, 156n12 Gregory, Stephen, 156n12 Grossegesse, Orlando, 164n4 Guattari, Felix, 57, 149n31, 150nn32, 33

194

Index

Gyges, ring of, 17 Halperín, Jorge, 100, 164n3, 166n9, 167nn11–13, 168–9nn18, 20, 171n30 Hamlet, 35–7 Hardt, Michael, 32 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich (Hegelian), 33–4, 40, 130, 133 Heidegger, Martin (Heideggerian), 9, 29–32, 46, 61, 118, 139n8, 142–3n33, 143nn36, 37, 147n14 heliocentrism, 4, 143n36 Hellenism, 18–20 Herder, Johann Gottfried, 26 hermeneutics, 27, 127–9, 131–5 Hills, Paul, 76 Hofmannsthal, Hugo von, 65 Homer, 138n4 hood, 6, 66–7, 75–7, 93, 95–7 Horkheimer, Max, 102–3, 168n16 Husserl, Edmund (Husserlian), 30–1, 35–6, 142–3n33, 143n37 idealism, 19, 142n28 ideology, 4, 98, 108–11, 126, 171nn30, 31 illumination, 21, 23, 25–6, 29, 37–8, 41–2, 44, 67, 75, 80, 86, 102, 132–3, 145–6n5 immanence, 52–4, 57, 63, 111, 123, 127–8, 131, 150nn32, 33 immortality, 99, 138n5 infinity, 33–4, 36, 101, 127, 129, 133–4, 144n42 interiority, 3, 6, 12, 31–3, 86, 97, 101, 111, 120 invisibility, 6, 28, 32–3, 36, 126–8, 131, 175n3, 176n6 Jackson, Kenneth David, 153n48

Jay, Martin, 18, 20, 24, 26, 29, 143n36 Judaism (Jewish, Judaic), 19, 20–2, 32, 143n40 justice, 5, 7, 14–15, 17, 34, 36, 38, 45, 47–9, 67, 78, 86, 88–92, 116–18, 125, 137n4, 148n21, 155n9, 162nn38, 39, 163n44 Kamir, Orit, 163n44 Kant, Immanuel (Kantian), 25–6, 89, 142nn30–2, 171n32 Kim, Euisuk, 161n33 Klobucka, Anna, 164n3, 172–3n38 Krabenhoft, Kenneth, 175n51 Lacan, Jacques, 155n10 Laclau, Ernesto,137n3 Laird, Andrew, 166n9 Laub, Dori, 88 law (legality), 10–11, 23, 45–9, 67, 78, 88–92, 97, 104, 109, 119, 128, 138n4, 146n10, 147n16, 148n21, 155n9, 161n33, 163n44, 163–4n47 Lefort, Claude, 137n3 Lejeune, Philippe, 63 Lertora, Juan Carlos, 163n41 Levin, David Michael, 30, 38 Levinas, Emmanuel (Levinasian), 9, 29, 32–4, 36–8, 62, 66, 84, 90, 122, 142–3n33, 143nn40, 41 light, 6, 9, 12–19, 21–6, 30, 36–44, 50, 63–5, 70, 74–7, 80, 83, 86, 91–2, 94, 100–5, 110, 124, 130, 133–4, 137nn1, 2, 139nn8–10, 12, 139–40n13, 140n18, 140–1n19, 142n30, 145–6n5, 146n8, 155n6, 159nn20–1, 164n1, 170n26, 172n34, 174n43 Lima, Isabel Pires de, 165n6 Lingis, Alphonso,118–19 Locke, John, 23, 142n28

Index logos, 13, 17, 130, 133–4, 139n8, Louis XIV, 23, 50 Lourenço, Eduardo, 98 luminosity, 14–17, 21–3, 41–3, 70, 74, 76, 97–8, 101–2, 142n30, 143n40 Machado, Antonio, 8, 60 madness (mad), 38, 44, 50, 78, 84–7, 91–2, 113, 125, 137n1, 138n4, 160nn27, 28, 161n30, 162n38 Marder, Michael, 36 Martínez Tabares, Vivian, 80, 156n12, 163n45 Marx, Karl, 37, 129–31, 176nn7, 8 Marxism (Marxian, Marxist), 109, 116, 167n14, 168n19, 171n30 Mazzara, Richard A., 154n50 McClennen, Sophia A., 89, 157n13 Medusa, 11–12 memory, 4, 28, 38, 52, 55, 59, 61–2, 66, 78, 80, 158n18, 163n44, 174n43 Mercadante, Paulo, 154n50 Messiah, 20, 23, 140n17 metaphysics, 33–4, 38, 79, 128, 141n26, 142n29, 143n36 Miranda, Roberto, 162n36 Miranda, Wander Melo, 153–4n50, 158n16 Monteiro, Adolfo Casais, 146n7 Morace, Robert A., 156n12 Moraes, Dênis de, 153–4n50 mortality (mortal), 4, 13–15, 33, 74, 118 Mouffe, Chantal, 137n3 Muñoz, Silverio, 160n29 mysticism (mystic), 22–3, 76, 141nn20, 21 naked life, 46–50, 63, 147n13 Nancy, Jean-Luc, 29, 31–2, 59–60, 150–1n37

195

Narcissus, 10–12, 138n3 Nazism (Nazi), 45–6, 68 Negri, Antonio, 32 Nietzsche, Friedrich (Nietzschean), 52, 81, 106, 159n24 Novalis, 26 obscurity, 4, 13–16, 22, 30, 39–44, 47, 50, 62, 64, 76, 86, 101, 132–3, 137n1, 145n4, 146n8 ocularcentrism, 19, 26, 29 Oedipus, 11–12 Oliveira, Celso Lemos de, 153–4n50 Olympio, José, 144–5n2 oppression (oppressor), 4–5, 39, 63, 66–7, 70–1, 74, 76–8, 81, 83–9, 91, 93–4, 96–7, 114, 119, 125, 134, 153n49, 160n29, 162n37, 168n17 Ornelas, José N., 164–5n5, 169– 70nn23, 24, 172n37 Orwell, George (Orwellian), 116, 168–9n20 other (otherness), 9, 11, 13, 24, 27–9, 32–8, 70–1, 77, 79, 84, 90, 100, 115, 138n3, 143n34, 144n42, 167n11, 168n17 Pacheco, Ana Maria, 6, 66–78, 86, 97, 125, 154n4, 155n6 Pacheco, Cristina, 162n37 pain, 16, 44, 66–8, 70–1, 74, 76–7, 79–80, 82–4, 87, 91–2, 97, 117, 134, 141n24, 145n4, 156n12, 159n22, 160n29, 169n22, 172n36, 174n45, 175n51 Parmenides of Elea, 8, 13–15, 19, 139nn7, 9 Perseus, 11–12 Pessoa, Fernando, 3 Peters, Edward, 163–4n57

196

Index

phenomenology, 3, 5, 7, 17, 27, 30, 35–6, 40, 92, 111, 128, 139n8, 142n31, 142–3n33, 159n26, 160n29, 175n5 Picasso, Pablo, 108 Picchio, Luciana Stegagno, 105, 175n51 Pinet, Carolyn, 157n15 Pinochet, Augusto, 78, 158n18, 161n33 Pinto, Rolando Morel, 153–4n50 Plato (Platonic, Platonism), 8, 12–13, 15–19, 21, 42–3, 134, 138n4, 139nn10, 12, 139–40n13, 140nn14, 15, 143n36, 164–5n5 Plotnitsky, Arkady, 161n30 Polanski, Roman, 92, 161n31, 163nn42, 43, 44, 45 police, 6, 42, 47–8, 54, 67, 78, 93, 108, 148nn18, 19, 22, 155n9 political prisoner, 3, 41–2, 45, 47, 51–3, 78, 87, 93, 146n10, 154n3, 163n45 Pontiero, Giovanni, 165n7 Popper, Karl R., 140n15 power, 4, 8, 11, 17, 22, 24–5, 42, 46–50, 52, 65–7, 71–2, 74, 76–8, 85–6, 88, 93–4, 96–8, 108, 111–16, 119, 123–8, 137n3, 140n14, 158–9n19, 161n31, 172nn34, 35 Prado, Antonio Armoni, 148–9n23 Preto-Rodas, Richard A., 164–5n5 psychoanalysis, 27–9, 115, 155n10 Puccinelli, Lamberto, 153–4n50 Queirós, Rachel de, 146n7 Ramos, Clara, 63, 144–5n2, 153n48 Ramos, Graciliano, 6, 40–64, 125 Ramos, Marili, 153–4n50

Ramos, Ricardo, 144–5n2, 152–3n46 rationalism, 25, 142n30, 143n36 reason, 23–6, 41, 86, 98–105, 116, 119, 124, 126, 142nn30, 32, 151n40, 165n5, 167n11, 167–8n15, 168nn17, 18, 169n21 Rego, José Lins do, 146n7 Reis, Carlos, 100, 109–10, 164n3, 166n9, 168n17, 172n35 Reis, Roberto, 60 resistance, 3, 39, 50, 66, 68, 78, 83, 87, 93, 95–6, 110, 115, 137n5, 145n3 revolution (revolutionary), 26, 48, 95–6, 129, 137n4 Reynolds, Bonnie Hildebrand, 86 rhetoricity (rhetoric), 50, 61, 131–5, 137n4, 152n45, 176n9 Ritter, Harry, 141n22 Rollason, Christopher, 168–9n20, 172n37 Romanticism (Romanticist), 10, 26–7 Rosa, Guimarães, 151n39 Rostan, Kimberly, 159n21 Salazar, António de Oliveira, 168–9n20 Santiago, Silviano, 153n48 Santos, Vasco dos, 154n50 Saramago, José, 7, 98–124, 125 Scarry, Elaine, 83–4 Schelling, Vivian, 71 Schlickers, Sabine, 86, 92 Schmitt, Carl, 46, 126–31, 133, 147n15, 175nn3, 4 Schor, Naomi, 5 Schubert, Franz, 157–8n15 Schulz, Bernard, 92 scoptophilia, 27–8, 143n34

Index Seixo, Maria Alzira, 104, 106, 164–5n5, 173n40 senses, 16–19, 24–6, 28, 44, 76, 97, 141n26, 142n30, 176n6 Sevcenko, Nicolau, 155n6 shadow, 4, 14–17, 25–6, 29, 38–42, 44, 58, 63, 80, 86, 145n4, 145–6n5, 146n8, 160n29, 170–1n29 Shakespeare, William, 35–6 sight, sightlessness, 4–6, 12, 15–22, 25–32, 37–8, 53, 88, 100, 106–10, 112, 115, 119–22, 125, 127, 130, 132, 134, 139–40n13, 140n17, 141n26, 142nn28, 29, 169–70n24, 170nn26, 28, 171n32 Silva, Jofre, 75 Silveira, Paulo de Castro, 153–4n50 sociality, 13, 31, 46, 67, 83, 86, 91–2, 97 Socrates, 15–17, 140n14 Sontag, Susan, 5, 137n4 sovereignty, 37, 48–50, 70, 79, 96, 128–9 spectre, 29, 35–7, 58, 144n43, 168n16 spirit (spirituality), 22, 40, 76, 104, 118, 126–7, 130, 133–4, 140n18, 175n2 Spivak, Gayatri, 4 Stanley, Sandra Kumamoto, 105, 168n19 Starobinski, Jean, 152n41 Stavans, Ilan, 158n17 Strauss, Johann, 157–8n15 subject (subjecthood, subjectivation, subjectivity), 4–5, 7–9, 11, 17–19, 23–5, 27–37, 40, 44, 53, 55–6, 61–5, 68, 78, 82–4, 88, 91, 98, 102, 105–11, 113–19, 122–6, 129–31, 133–4, 143nn34, 36–9, 144n42, 152n45,

197

152–3n46, 157n14, 171nn30, 32, 172n34 subordination (subordinate), 22, 52, 59, 87, 115–16 suffering, 5, 38, 42, 44, 54, 67, 70–1, 74–8, 82–4, 87, 91, 96, 116–19, 121, 134, 138n3, 141n24, 160n27, 162n35, 168n18, 172n36, 174nn44, 45 sun, 14–17, 21, 23, 26, 50, 104, 139n12 Svich, Caridad, 160n29 Swift, Jonathan, 166n9 Taylor, Chloé, 143n41 tears, 120–3, 173n42, 174nn43–5 terror, 26, 87, 159n21 testimony, 12, 20, 49, 62, 66, 88–9, 95, 120, 128, 152nn42, 43, 157n14 Thielemann, Werner, 168–9n20 Thompson, David, 163n43 Tiresias, 11–13, 138nn5, 6 torture (torturer), 3, 6, 47, 66–8, 70–1, 74, 76–89, 91–7, 117, 123, 125, 154n3, 155n10, 156n12, 157n15, 159n25, 160n29, 161n33, 162nn34– 6, 163n45, 163–4n47 totalitarianism, 4, 9, 32, 34, 37, 39, 67, 80, 87, 92–7, 103–4, 110, 137n3, 140n15, 154n3, 168n16, 168–9n20, 172n37 transcendence, 4–5, 8, 18, 22, 30, 33–4, 52–4, 57–8, 63, 111, 122, 127–9, 131, 137n3, 150n32 transgression, 9–12, 111, 138n2 trauma, 27, 67, 78, 81–4, 88–9, 92, 155n10, 159n26 unconscious, 27–9, 82, 109, 115–16, 119, 130, 171n30

198

Index

unreason, 85–6, 98, 100–2, 124, 165n5 Van der Lisse, Dirk, 65 Van Gogh, Vincent, 107 Vargas, Getúlio, 6, 40, 47–9, 52, 145n3, 148n20 veiling, unveiling, 14, 35, 61, 89, 91, 93–6, 101, 120, 130 Venâncio, Fernando, 172n33 Verdi, Eunaldo, 153–4n50 victim, 3–4, 6, 47, 66–8, 70–1, 74–9, 81–4, 87–9, 91–4, 96–7, 117–18, 155n10, 156n12, 157n15, 159n23, 160n29, 161n33, 162n36, 174n49 Viegas, Francisco José, 169n21, 170n28, 173n39 Vieira, Padre António, 164–5n5 violence, 3–4, 6, 27, 38, 54, 59–60, 66, 70, 75, 77, 82, 91, 93–7, 100, 103, 108, 118, 150n37, 151n38, 157–8n15, 167n12

Virilio, Paul, 37–8, 141n23 visibility, 4–5, 9, 17, 115, 126–7, 129–30, 135, 139n12, 143n40, 155n6, 176n6 vision, 3, 4–6, 8–13, 15–21, 24–39, 41, 43, 52–3, 57, 66, 86, 88, 100–2, 104–5, 107–8, 113, 116, 119–21, 125, 129–30, 134, 138n2, 140n18, 141n23, 142–3n33, 143nn36, 39, 144–5n2, 145n4, 147n17, 161n30, 165n8, 169n22, 170n26, 171n32, 173nn40, 42 Voltaire, 166n9 Wells, H.G., 171n32 Willmoth, Simon, 76, 155n5 witness, 6, 10, 16, 61–2, 66, 88–9, 117, 120–1, 164n3 Wolf, Matt, 160n29