Trauma Histórico
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Recent papers in Trauma Histórico
The figure of the victim has gone from occupying a marginal role to establishing itself in a quasi-universal position. Such a transformation would find its correlate in the process during which the concept of trauma was consolidated as an... more
The figure of the victim has gone from occupying a marginal role to establishing itself in a quasi-universal position. Such a transformation would find its correlate in the process during which the concept of trauma was consolidated as an epistemic category with moral consequences.The objective of this text is to reconstruct and analyze the various historical, social and epistemic experien-ces that have led to the current semantic relationship that maintain the concepts of victim and trauma, as well as to raise some reflections about how this new relationship affects the way history is made and thought
THE PAIN OF HISTORY OR A PERPLEXED HISTORY OF CEMETERIES AND VULTURES IN A TIME THAT WAS NO TIME: STUDIES ON THEORY OF HISTORY AND LITERATURE This project evolved out of an earlier project, which aims to investigate in an... more
THE PAIN OF HISTORY OR A PERPLEXED HISTORY OF CEMETERIES AND VULTURES IN A TIME THAT WAS NO TIME: STUDIES ON THEORY OF HISTORY AND LITERATURE
This project evolved out of an earlier project, which aims to investigate in an interdisciplinary way the conceptual and socio-political relations between violent historical experience, its (non) remembrance, historical and literary theories, and the authoritarian or dictatorial political conditions, concerning the “State of Exception” (or “State of Emergency”), especially in Brazil between 1964 and 1984. The expression “pain of history” is a term deliberately vague. It is meant to express the interrogation of the possibility to turn in some way understandable the relation between subjective suffering and historical processes, insofar as this concern the historical experience as well as the difficulties present in Historiography or historical and literary theories (in other words, the correlated experience of those who live and those who study and write about history, as observed by Koselleck). Arlette Farge alerts to the fact that the specificity of the processes and relations in different moments and societies demands special attention from Historiography, since its privileged place of representation and memory have been the arts in general. By emphasizing that all that happens to the individual is the outcome of the encounter of inextricable personal and socio-historical dimensions, we can see there are historical experiences of these years of dictatorship that Brazilian Historiography still needs to incorporate, in order to get a better understanding of what life and history in that period might have been.
At this stage, this postdoctoral project aims at studying the (non)relation between Theory of History and suffering, by critically considering the way how Brazilian poetry treated quotidian historical experience during the last dictatorship (1964-1985). Taking three selected poets as its main corpus – Afonso Henriques Neto, Alex Polari and Ferreira Gullar – it pretends to analyze the images constructed to represent experiences of State violence (in daily situations; in political prison, and in exile, respectively) and the way how it affects the conception of history. To do so, this research project makes use of theoretical and methodological contributions that stem from the Intellectual History and Literary Theory, especially those researchers associated with the Theory of Knowledge and Critical Theory. It is worthwhile to stress the works of – a) Carlo Ginzburg and Antonio Candido, both based on Eric Auerbach, who make use of a differentiated understanding of concepts such as “mimesis” and “realism” as a re-creative transfiguration of the real, which is however permeated by its existence, as well as to affirm the inextricable dialectics between localism and cosmopolitanism as a trait of Brazilian and Latin-American cultures, and in relation to which the local specificities must be thought; b) Enzo Traverso and his studies on the “torn history” and the way how intellectuals dealt with the political and civilizing exceptionality contained in the events that happened during the great wars and the holocaust, as well as his debates on a kind of just measure between memory’s subjective dictates and the protocols of historical discipline; c) Dominick La Capra’s discussions concerning the traumatic unfolding of the holocaust on history and language, and so, on Historiography; d) Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the concept of history and the poetic production under a repressive State regime, as well as Adorno’s reflections on “damaged life” in the 20th century’s civilizing crisis, and on the necessity of a “non-concept” to construct knowledge by starting from the concreteness of the world.
Already during my Ph.D. studies, I observed that the Brazilian historical sources, be they literary, mediatic or historiographical, repeat the idea and the word “perplexity” to talk of the dictatorial context. In my recent research papers, I intended to define better this perplexity, comparing similarities and differences as regards the concepts of “socio-historical trauma” and “Literature of testimony”. In general terms, taking the idea of perplexity as the key-notion for these reflections, the hypotheses and proposals of this research understand that – a) there is a kind of “Literature of perplexity” produced in contexts marked by a “state of exception”, not only in Brazil, but also in other countries. This could possibly be considered a literary “type”, that refers in a complex way to history, since it wants the acknowledgement of pain as a historical reality, refusing to let it dissolve into fiction, but without abandoning the poetic modus; b) this Literature/Poetry offers new elements to understand the peculiarities of local political “exceptions” which also broaden Historiography’s/Theory’s apprehension of historical subjects’ pain, since Theory approaches the painful historical experience with the Adorno’s “non-concept” as its tool; c) in terms of Political History, perplexity relates symptomatically to the risk of “dis-historizing” that exists in (semi)traumatic contexts, given the gaps in representation and transmission of experience. In cognitive terms, it traverses the conceptual pair of “proportion/disproportion” that is a fundamental element in Political Theory since Antiquity; it relates to the philosophical tradition of the “astonishment” as a mobilizing force for knowledge, as well as to “exile” as a place from which one speaks. Considering these elements mark the occidental Historiographical tradition, this project understands it is important to retrieve their diverse relations, in order to clarify the potential of perplexity as a link between history and pain in states of exception.
Key-words: perplexity, historical trauma, political violence, historiographical tradition, poetry, exile
This project evolved out of an earlier project, which aims to investigate in an interdisciplinary way the conceptual and socio-political relations between violent historical experience, its (non) remembrance, historical and literary theories, and the authoritarian or dictatorial political conditions, concerning the “State of Exception” (or “State of Emergency”), especially in Brazil between 1964 and 1984. The expression “pain of history” is a term deliberately vague. It is meant to express the interrogation of the possibility to turn in some way understandable the relation between subjective suffering and historical processes, insofar as this concern the historical experience as well as the difficulties present in Historiography or historical and literary theories (in other words, the correlated experience of those who live and those who study and write about history, as observed by Koselleck). Arlette Farge alerts to the fact that the specificity of the processes and relations in different moments and societies demands special attention from Historiography, since its privileged place of representation and memory have been the arts in general. By emphasizing that all that happens to the individual is the outcome of the encounter of inextricable personal and socio-historical dimensions, we can see there are historical experiences of these years of dictatorship that Brazilian Historiography still needs to incorporate, in order to get a better understanding of what life and history in that period might have been.
At this stage, this postdoctoral project aims at studying the (non)relation between Theory of History and suffering, by critically considering the way how Brazilian poetry treated quotidian historical experience during the last dictatorship (1964-1985). Taking three selected poets as its main corpus – Afonso Henriques Neto, Alex Polari and Ferreira Gullar – it pretends to analyze the images constructed to represent experiences of State violence (in daily situations; in political prison, and in exile, respectively) and the way how it affects the conception of history. To do so, this research project makes use of theoretical and methodological contributions that stem from the Intellectual History and Literary Theory, especially those researchers associated with the Theory of Knowledge and Critical Theory. It is worthwhile to stress the works of – a) Carlo Ginzburg and Antonio Candido, both based on Eric Auerbach, who make use of a differentiated understanding of concepts such as “mimesis” and “realism” as a re-creative transfiguration of the real, which is however permeated by its existence, as well as to affirm the inextricable dialectics between localism and cosmopolitanism as a trait of Brazilian and Latin-American cultures, and in relation to which the local specificities must be thought; b) Enzo Traverso and his studies on the “torn history” and the way how intellectuals dealt with the political and civilizing exceptionality contained in the events that happened during the great wars and the holocaust, as well as his debates on a kind of just measure between memory’s subjective dictates and the protocols of historical discipline; c) Dominick La Capra’s discussions concerning the traumatic unfolding of the holocaust on history and language, and so, on Historiography; d) Walter Benjamin’s Theses on the concept of history and the poetic production under a repressive State regime, as well as Adorno’s reflections on “damaged life” in the 20th century’s civilizing crisis, and on the necessity of a “non-concept” to construct knowledge by starting from the concreteness of the world.
Already during my Ph.D. studies, I observed that the Brazilian historical sources, be they literary, mediatic or historiographical, repeat the idea and the word “perplexity” to talk of the dictatorial context. In my recent research papers, I intended to define better this perplexity, comparing similarities and differences as regards the concepts of “socio-historical trauma” and “Literature of testimony”. In general terms, taking the idea of perplexity as the key-notion for these reflections, the hypotheses and proposals of this research understand that – a) there is a kind of “Literature of perplexity” produced in contexts marked by a “state of exception”, not only in Brazil, but also in other countries. This could possibly be considered a literary “type”, that refers in a complex way to history, since it wants the acknowledgement of pain as a historical reality, refusing to let it dissolve into fiction, but without abandoning the poetic modus; b) this Literature/Poetry offers new elements to understand the peculiarities of local political “exceptions” which also broaden Historiography’s/Theory’s apprehension of historical subjects’ pain, since Theory approaches the painful historical experience with the Adorno’s “non-concept” as its tool; c) in terms of Political History, perplexity relates symptomatically to the risk of “dis-historizing” that exists in (semi)traumatic contexts, given the gaps in representation and transmission of experience. In cognitive terms, it traverses the conceptual pair of “proportion/disproportion” that is a fundamental element in Political Theory since Antiquity; it relates to the philosophical tradition of the “astonishment” as a mobilizing force for knowledge, as well as to “exile” as a place from which one speaks. Considering these elements mark the occidental Historiographical tradition, this project understands it is important to retrieve their diverse relations, in order to clarify the potential of perplexity as a link between history and pain in states of exception.
Key-words: perplexity, historical trauma, political violence, historiographical tradition, poetry, exile