É só isso?

a vida era para ser formada de vastos amanheceres
o mundo era para ser feito de selvas profundas e escuras
os amores deveriam ser selvagens e feitos de loucuras
o estudo provocaria a devastação formada por saberes
nunca ocultos
cegos
mudos
surdos
nunca morrer
sem ter vivido
nunca morrer
sem provocar dor
morrer apenas se isso causar impacto
morrer depois de viver cada segundo
o último segundo antes do segundo seguinte
como um mágico animal
deus desdenhoso
viver no agora
e não na sucessão do tempo

Mujeres filósofas

Publicado originalmente em El País:

CELIA AMORÓS 20/06/2009

La historia es investigación retrospectiva de nuestra propia problemática presente. Podemos preguntarnos, pues, ¿cuál era el presente del autor de la Historia Mulierum Philosopharum, escrita por Gilles Ménage, en el siglo XVII? Lo que configuraba la actualidad cultural en ese siglo era el movimiento de los salones literarios, donde se cultivaba el arte de la conversación, y a los que daban vida unas mujeres que se llamaron Las Preciosas. De acuerdo con Oliva Blanco, "preciosa" significa "la que se adjudica un precio", la mujer que logra su autoestima debida a su saber y a su capacidad de irradiación cultural en su medio. Interioriza así a la vez que requiere la estima de sus contertulios. Atrae sobre sí al mismo tiempo el estigma de la ridiculización por parte de otros: recordemos Las Preciosas ridículas de Molière. Nuestro autor era amigo de las figuras más sobresalientes entre Las Preciosas, como Madame de Sévigné y Madame de La Fayette, y un acérrimo defensor de su causa. Las consideraba intelectuales y eruditas de gran calidad y, en un sentido amplio, filósofas. No es así de extrañar que buscara para ellas lo que llamó Max Weber "legitimación tradicional", es decir, "si existieron en el pasado filósofas ilustres, no es de extrañar que florezcan en el presente". Su obra, pues, como lo apunta Rosa Rius en su excelente introducción, pertenece al género "catálogo de mujeres ilustres", que aparece significativamente en tratados de la Baja Edad Media y el Renacimiento dedicados a exaltar el honor y la excelencia de las mujeres. Con el racionalismo y la Ilustración desaparecerá el "catálogo de las mujeres ilustres". Lo que no es de extrañar: las vindicaciones feministas se articulan en un argumentario que, por recurrir de nuevo a Weber, afirmaremos que es característico de la "legitimación racional". El cartesianismo, contemporáneo del Preciosismo, en su radicalización por el peculiar discípulo de Descartes François Poullain de la Barre, surte de elementos para basar la igualdad de las capacidades de las mujeres y de los hombres en tesis filosóficas tales como "la mente no tiene sexo" o "la mente es de cualquier sexo". Asimismo, pondrá al servicio de la causa de las mujeres el programa cartesiano de lucha contra el prejuicio, es decir, el juicio emitido antes de ser contrastado con la regla de la evidencia, argumentando que la idea comúnmente aceptada de la desigualdad de los sexos no es sino el prejuicio más ancestral. En este contexto los catálogos de las mujeres ilustres pierden su función legitimadora: en la obra de Poullain de la Barre no aparecen. No es de extrañar si se tiene en cuenta que Poullain de la Barre, que publicó De la igualdad de ambos sexos en 1973, es un filósofo, así como Ménage (1613-1692) es un gramático y un lexicógrafo. Ambos simpatizan con la causa de Las Preciosas y la apoyan en sus respectivos registros. Y ambos se refuerzan mutuamente: la "legitimación tradicional" puede ser convalidada en términos de "legitimación racional": si siempre ha habido mujeres filósofas, cabe suponer, aunque esto no se tematice filosóficamente, que las mujeres y los varones tienen la misma capacidad intelectual. Si los rendimientos históricos de las mujeres son menores, ello es debido a la educación y el prejuicio. Ésta sería la aportación de Poullain de la Barre. La de Gilles Ménage consiste en una búsqueda erudita y apasionada de los logros femeninos en los tiempos más remotos, dura labor de rescate contra lo que aparece como una conspiración de silencio.

Analysis hits critical mass

Artigo publicado no dia 17 de junho de 2009 no The Australian

IF I could make one wish for the members of my profession, college and university professors of literature, I would wish that for one year, two, three or five we would give up readings. By a reading, I mean the application of an analytical vocabulary - Karl Marx's, Sigmund Freud's, Michel Foucault's, Jacques Derrida's or whoever's - to describe and (usually) to judge a work of literary art. I wish we'd declare a moratorium on readings. I wish we'd give readings a rest.

This wish will strike most academic literary critics and perhaps others as well as - let me put it politely - counter-intuitive. Readings, many think, are what we do. Readings are what literary criticism is all about. They are the bread and butter of the profession. Through readings we write our books; through readings we teach our students. And if there were no more readings, what would we have left to do? Wouldn't we have to close our classroom doors, shut down our office computers and go home?

The end of readings, presumably, would mean the end of our profession.

So let me try to explain what I have in mind. For it seems to me that if we kicked our addiction to readings, our profession would be stronger and more influential, our teaching would improve and there would be more good books of literary criticism to be written and, accordingly, more to be read.

I think the experience of change is at the heart of literary education. Teachers who've been inspired by great works have been moved to pass on the gift. "What we have loved, others will love," says William Wordsworth, addressing his friend Samuel Taylor Coleridge in The Prelude, "and we will teach them how." The highest objective for someone trying to provide a literary education to students is to make moments of transformation possible. Teachers set the scene for secular conversion. These conversions may be large scale. Like the one Walt Whitman seems to have undergone when he read Ralph Waldo Emerson's The Poet and realised that though Emerson could not become the American poet prophesied in the essay, he, Whitman, could. But the changes that literary art brings can be relatively minor, too.

Reading a book may make a person more receptive to beauty than he otherwise would have been; may make him more sensitive to injustice; more prone to be self-reliant. Granted, books can have negative effects, too. One has read Don Quixote; one has read Madame Bovary. But a prerequisite for sharing literary art with young people should be the belief that, over all, its influence can be salutary; it can aid in growth.

I said that transformation was the highest goal of literary education. The best purpose of all art is to inspire, said Emerson, and that seems right to me. But that does not mean literary study can't have other beneficial effects. It can help people learn to read more sensitively; help them learn to express themselves; it can teach them more about the world at large. But the proper business of teaching is change for teachers (who are themselves a work in progress) and (pre-eminently) for students.

When you launch, say, a Marxist reading of William Blake, you effectively use Marx as a tool of analysis and judgment. To the degree that Blake anticipates Marx, Blake is prescient and to be praised. Thus the Marxist reading approves of Blake for his hatred of injustice; his polemic against imperialism; his suspicion of the gentry; his critique of bourgeois art as practised by the likes of Sir Joshua Reynolds.

But Blake, being Blake, also diverges from Marx. He is, presumably, too committed to something akin to liberal individualism; he doesn't understand the revolutionary potential latent in the proletariat; he is, perhaps, an idealist, who believes that liberation of consciousness matters more, or at least must precede, material liberation; he has no clear theory of class conflict.

Thus Blake, admirable as he may be, needs to be read with scepticism; he requires a corrective, and the name of that corrective is Marx. Just so, the corrective could be called Derrida (who would illuminate Blake the logocentrist); Foucault (who would demonstrate Blake's immersion in, and implicit endorsement of, an imprisoning society); Julia Kristeva (who would be attuned to Blake's imperfections on the score of gender politics), and so on down the line. The sophisticated critic would be unlikely to pick one master to illuminate the work at hand; they would mix and match as the occasion required.

But to enact a reading means to submit one text to the terms of another; to allow one text to interrogate another, then often to try, sentence and summarily execute it.

The problem with the Marxist reading of Blake is that it robs us of some splendid opportunities. We never take the time to arrive at a Blakean reading of Blake, and we never get to ask whether Blake's vision may be true. By which I mean, following William James, whether it's good in the way of belief. The moment when the student in the classroom or the reader perusing the work can pause and say: "Yes, that's how it is; Blake's got it exactly right", disappears. There's no chance for the instant that Emerson and Longinus evoke, when one feels that he's written what he's only read, uttered what he's only heard.

Nor, it's worth pointing out, does Marx get much real opportunity here either. He's assumed to be a superior figure: There are in fact any number of Marxist readings of Blake out there; I know of no Blakean readings of Marx. But the student who has heard the teacher unfold a Marxist reading of a work probably doesn't get to study Marx per se. He never gets to have a potential moment of revelation reading The Manifesto or The Grundrisse. Marx, too, disappears from the scene, becoming part of a technological apparatus for processing other works. No one asks: "Is what Marx is saying true?" "Is Foucault on to something?" "Is what Derrida believes actually the case?" They're simply applied like paint to the side of a barn; the paint can go on roughly or it can go on adroitly, with subtle variations of mood and texture. But paint is what it is.

It should be clear here that my objection isn't to theoretical texts in themselves. If a fellow professor thinks Marx or Foucault or Kristeva provides a contribution to the best that has been thought and said, then by all means read and study the text. (I've worked on these figures with students and not without profit.) But the teacher who studies, say, Foucault probably needs to ask what kind of life Foucault commends. Is it one outside of all institutions? Is it one that rebels against all authority? Can that life be in any way compatible with life as a professor or a student? These are questions that are rarely asked about what are conceived of as the more radical thinkers of the era. It is not difficult to guess why this is so.

The standard for the kind of interpretation I have in mind is rather straightforward. When a teacher admires an author enough to teach his work, it stands to reason the teacher's initial objective ought to be framing a reading the author would approve. The teacher, to begin with, represents the author; he analyses the text sympathetically, he treats the words with care, caution and due respect. He works hard with the students to develop a vision of what the world is and how to live that rises from the author's work and that, ultimately, the author, were they present in the room, would endorse.

Herman Northrop Frye does something very much like this in his book on Blake, Fearful Symmetry; George Orwell achieves something similar in his famous essay on Charles Dickens. In both cases, the critic's objective is to read the author with humane sensitivity, then synthesise a view of life based on that reading. Arthur Schopenhauer tells us all important artists ask, and in their fashion answer, a single commanding question: "What is life?"

The critic works to show how the author frames that query and how he answers it. Critics are necessary for this work because the answers most artists give to important questions are indirect. Artists move forward through intuition and inference; they feel their way to their sense of things. The critic, at his best, makes explicit what is implicit in the work.

We need to befriend the texts we choose to teach. They, too, are the testaments of human beings who have lived and suffered in the world. They, too, deserve honour and respect. If you have a friend whose every significant utterance you need to translate into another idiom -- whose two is not the real two, as Emerson says -- then that is a friend you need to jettison. If there are texts you cannot befriend, leave them to the worms of time or to the kinder ministrations of others.

In a once-famous essay, Against Interpretation, Susan Sontag denounced interpretation and called for an "erotics of art". She wanted immersion in the text, pleasure, the drowning of self-consciousness. She sought ecstatic immediacy. To be against readings, as I am, is not to be against interpretation and it is not to be against criticism. If interpretation means the work, often difficult, often pleasurable, of parsing the complexities of meaning a given text offers, then interpretation is necessary before we decide what vision of the world the text endorses.

To be against readings is also not to be against criticism. Once the author's vision of what Wallace Stevens calls "How to Live. What to Do" is made manifest, it's necessary to question it.

But this sort of questioning needs to occur once the author's vision is set forth in a comprehensive, clear, sympathetic manner. Criticism is getting into sceptical dialogue with the text. Mounting a conventional academic reading -- applying an alternative set of terms -- means closing off the dialogue before it has a chance to begin.

That gesture of befriending should have a public, as well as a classroom, dimension. The books we professors of literature tend to write are admirable in many ways. They are full of learning, hard work, honesty and intelligence that sometimes, in its way, touches on brilliance. But they are also, at least in my judgment, usually unreadable. They are composed as performances. They are meant to show, and often to show off, the prowess of the author. They could not conceivably be meant to provide spiritual or intellectual nourishment. No one could read a representative instance of such writing and decide, based on it, to change their life. Our books are not written from love but from need.

I think it is possible to write books and essays on behalf of literature that will demonstrate its powers of renovation and inquire into the limits of those powers.

As a profession, our standing in and influence on society beyond our classrooms is minuscule. Yet we are copiously stocked with superb talent; some of the best young minds continue to be drawn to the graduate study of literature. But unless we, as a profession, change our ways and stop seeking respectability and institutional standing at the expense of genuine human effect, they are destined, as Alfred Tennyson has it, to rust unburnished, and that's a sorry fate for them and for all of us.

We professors of literature hold the key to the warehouse where the loaves lie fresh and steaming, while outside people hunger for them, sometimes dangerously. We ought to do all we can to open the doors and dispense the bread: We should see how far it'll go.

The Chronicle of Higher Education

Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. He is author of The Death of Sigmund Freud: The Legacy of His Last Days, published in 2007 by Bloomsbury.

Solidão

A nuvem no céu azul
Profundamente blue
Reclama solidão.
Precipita-se, então,
Desmanchando lágrimas
De amor enlouquecido
Sobre um selvagem jardim
Há muito esquecido.

Cinzas do Norte

Milton Hatoum é um escritor que já há muito tempo tinha vontade de conferir. Como obteve reconhecimento com seus romances e é considerado bom escritor pelas resenhas de jornais e revistas de grande circulação, queria saber se ele estava mesmo com essa bola toda. Afinal um ganhador de tantos prêmios deve ter suas qualidades. Por isso foi com muita expectativa que adquiri seu último romance, o Cinzas do Norte que é de 2005 e vencedor do prêmio Jabuti de 2006, segundo me informa a leitura da orelha do livro. E minhas expectativas não foram em vão, de fato é uma boa história.
Os elementos que prendem a atenção estão todos lá. O narrador é em primeira pessoa, mas não é o protagonista. É o que chamamos narrador testemunha, ele, Lavo, conta a história da família de Mundo, um rapaz que quer ser artista. No entanto, sendo filho de Trajano Mattoso, um rico exportador de juta, vê os seus planos se complicarem devido à dificuldade de relacionamento com o pai. As famílias do narrador e do protagonista têm relações fortes, porque a mãe de Mundo, Alicia, mantém um caso com um tio de Lavo, Ranulfo, desde de antes do seu casamento com Trajano.
A violência nas relações entre pai e filho; o pai incapaz de compreender um filho que não quer ser herdeiro de seu império, mas sim ser artista; o fato de a mãe não dar a menor importância ao marido, preferindo a jogatina e a bebida, além de viver um casamento de aparências, baseado em interesses, já que seu amor é destinado apenas ao amante, culminam na dissolução da família. Tudo isso tendo como pano de fundo a ditadura militar, o que piora ainda mais a falta de entendimento entre as duas gerações, visto que Mundo se revolta contra os militares, aos quais o pai venera.
É um romance que tem motivos edipianos: o relacionamento mãe sedutora, pai violento e filho que sente adoração pela primeira e hostiliza o segundo, é enredo perfeito para especulação ao estilo freudiano. O que torna a história bem universal e mesmo a ambientação na cidade de Manaus, retira o autor do risco de ser considerado regionalista. Literatura regionalista é um rótulo que todos os teóricos desejam amarrar aos escritores que escrevem do interior do país. Mas não se pode dizer isso deste romance, é uma história que não tem pátria, esse difícil relacionamento em família, as incertezas geradas no filho pelo comportamento dos pais.
O fato é que Cinzas do Norte merece ser lido. É bem escrito, tem um enredo complexo, o narrador como não participa dos fatos ocorridos pessoalmente, conta uma história que ele mesmo conhece de maneira fragmentária. O que torna o todo muito mais interessante para o leitor, pois os mistérios da trama vão sendo revelados aos poucos. Isso prende a atenção do começo ao fim da leitura. Diversão garantida e sem as simplificações de Best Sellers.

Nudez

A minha alma
vadia
anda
prostituta
nos becos
A minha alma
noturna
cavalga nua
por estradas desertas
Deserta também
Minha alma escura
E no céu
A lua

No meio das pernas

Nós temos tantos planos altissonantes
Buscamos cultivar o espírito
Lemos, estudamos, colecionamos diplomas, certificados, títulos
Escrevemos críticas, crônicas, contos, romances, poesia
Inventamos remédios para curar o cancer no coração
Inventamos meios tecno(i)lógicos de nos relacionar com o mundo, com a vida, com os outros
Buscamos cultivar a alma e ser mais bondosos, caridosos
Compartilhamos o pão nosso de cada dia com nosso irmão necessitado
Vamos à igreja todos os domingos
Para cumprir os ritos de purificação
E assim cada vez mais puros
Amamos de uma maneira muito humana
Amamos com delicadeza e sem nenhuma sujeira
Amamos como quem toca piano
Com as pontas dos dedos e muito sentimento
E o amor nos eleva
Chegamos com isso a um grau máximo de perfeição
e assim perfeitos como anjos
nos perguntamos:

mas por que será que a vida se gera é no meio das pernas?

Diante da página em branco

Diante da página em branco
Perplexidade

Diante da vida em branco
Inatividade

Diante do meu olhar castanho
Novidade

Diante do seu olhar esgazeado
Suavidade

Diante de nós uma pintura
Impossibilidade