It has become commonplace to portray Machado de Assis as a preeminent pessimist or nihilist. This reading, however, is highly questionable, since he used to use humor as one of the main principles of literary composition in his works. In fact, writing with a playful pen, he used to ironize the pessimism and nihilism of his time. This paper is an attempt to explicit the concept of playful nihilism as it appears in the novel The posthumous memoirs of Brás Cubas (1881). This paper focuses on the following issues: Brás Cubas narrative, with a playful pen, combines philosophy and literature in such a way that philosophical content and literary form become inseparable; Machado also laughs at the death of God, as a confrontation of metaphysical seriousness. A comparison is made between Nietzschean nihilism and Machadean playful nihilism.

Cioran is often labeled as a " nihilist " , which is to a great extent the result of his equivocal ties with Friedrich Nietzsche, one of his main youth influences. However, nihilism does not constitute a key notion in Cioran's writings, and neither does the Romanian-born author of French expression employs it as self-describing category. Instead, he accepts the category of the Skeptic as that which best suits his intellectual stance. We shall argue that, even if it is inevitable to speak of nihilism when it comes to Cioran's thought and works, it is nevertheless an equivocal concept that must be relativized and held only as a propaedeutic hermeneutical operator that should later be abandoned, as it does not manage to encompass the depth and the complexity of his thought. Where readers and critics would see " nihilist " , Cioran says " skeptic ". Instead of labeling him as a nihilist in the strict sense of the concept, we suggest replacing the concept of nihilism for that of meontology: a theory of nothingness, which does not amount to the same thing as nihilism. Finally, our contention is that Cioran's philosophical and theological concerns for issues such nothingness and evil does not make him a nihilist as the Nietzschean tradition of philosophy would put it. He is rather a meontological metaphysician and also a heterodox mystic spirit, and yet a tragic character of a kind.

We propose that Machado de Assis was only able to create groundbreaking work when he came to terms with the circumstance of Brazil as a “peripheral” country. This particular location allowed him to develop what I would call “belatedness as a critical project.” Let us clarify these concepts; otherwise, my approach could be readily misunderstood. First of all, I am using the concept of “peripheral" not as an objective description of a given place but rather as a complex set of politically, culturally, and economically asymmetrical relationships—the “peripheral” pole being located in a hierarchically secondary position—and these positions are naturally dynamic and change in the course of a historical process. Moreover, “belatedness as a critical project” presupposes a skeptical detachment from the hierarchy usually attributed to tradition, and favors an ironic gaze regarding contemporary values—trademarks of Machado de Assis’ work. Introdução ao número especial de "Portuguese Literary & Cultural Studies"(13-14, 2005), "The Author as Plagiarist: The Case of Machado de Assis".

In Machado de Assis’s last novel, Counselor Aires’s Memorial (1908), the main characters see themselves stuck between, on the one hand, an “abol- ished past”, which is related to the vanishing Empire and the end of slavery, and, on the other hand, the absence of any future. The sense of hopeless- ness is conveyed by a powerful poetic depiction of a world that cannot be changed. Therefore, this article aims to show how slowness and the lack of definition in Machado’s late production is a cryptic, but profound critique of the unfulfilled promises of the Brazilian Republic.

Machado de Assis’s poem “Soneto de Natal” and the chapter “Um soneto” from his novel Dom Casmurro exhibit striking points of intersection that describe the same process: the creation of a sonnet. In the novel, Bentinho abandons his attempt with only a first and last line. “Soneto de Natal” presents a full fourteen; yet, when scrutinized, it rings as hollow as Bentinho’s. This idea of the lacuna speaks to much of Machado’s early poetry, which suggests that access to the poetic muse is bestowed through suffering by experience. Thus, the young Bentinho, not unlike the mute prophet of one such early poem, struggles for inspiration while “Soneto de Natal” presents the inverse: the prophet granted experience who discovers that he is, like a poet-Moses, slow of verse. By analyzing these two sonnets, taking into account their shared imagery, vocabulary, themes, and the stylistic choices of “Soneto de Natal,” we not only find a Machadian critique of the sonnet-mania of the 1890s, but also unmask “Soneto de Natal” as the anti-promethean exemplar of Bento’s sonnet-making blueprint. In a deft sleight of hand, Machado illustrates his point in the most effective way possible: by passing off satire as the genuine article.

This research aims to present how one of the most known satirical writers in Brazilian history, Gregório de Matos Guerra, approached satire in his very unusual way. The paper names some of his poems in order to represent how he created and developed his works; moreover, the author himself and his creation development will be analysed here as well. However, it is considered important to give a brief historical panorama of how the satire as a genre was constructed and how Guerra approached not only poetry itself, but the subject in his works, which could be noted in reason of the obscenity, the freedom of speech and yet the morality in his poems.

This paper relates Vilém Flusser's and Oswald de Andrade's philosophical approaches by examining and comparing Flusser's quasi-poetical way of writing philosophy in newspapers articles of the 1960s with de Andrade's Telefonema, newspapers articles of the 1940s and 1950s. It is analyzed their supposedly minor texts, setting the principle that the manifestos and the large theoretical novels that both composed could be present as a horizon of analysis. If it was to work with minor authors within a minor philosophy, it would be necessary to go even more to the micro. The purpose was to follow the fleeting traces of their literary-philosophical machines and their (dis)articulation with (neo)colonial powers. The assumption is that there is a similarity in the way they deal with the question of otherness, which is manifest in the approach that they do towards philosophy, literature and journalistic activity. They not only share several criticism and frustrations about the philosophical program that was intended to be established in Brazil but are also to be seen as exploring the boundaries between thought and literature, announcing and expecting philosophies to come.

The aim of this work is to Analyse the argumentation in the play Death and Life of a Severino, in order to verify if there are elements in this process that justify the discourse that João Cabral de Melo Neto is the poet of reason, sustained by critics, scholars and by the writer himself in several interviews. As method of investigation, it is used some key concepts of French Discourse Analysis, such as discourse, interdiscourse, discursive formation, ideological formation and imaginary formations, which we discuss and apply to three parts of Death and Life of a Severino. Notwithstanding the diferences concerning the meaning of reason among several rationalist philosophers, it was taken as a platonic idea, position antidiscursive at first. The interpretation of the corpus reveals the interpellation of irrationalist discursive formations, for logos (reason, word) shows itself inefficient both to describe and to argue in the most famous opus of the Pernambucan poet. The solution for such impotence is using concrete things as proof.

Literature and psychoanalysis are put into dialogue in order to perform an innovative reading of Machado de Assis's the Posthumous Memoirs of Brás Cubas, which is considered one of his masterpieces, alongside Quincas Borba and Dom Casmurro. The psychoanalysis of sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan is used as a theoretical reference.