remain only as trace? Against the reduction of oneself to a trace, we see a destiny that projects itself forward in the form of hope, of hope’s temporality of expectation. And what is philosophy if not that which rhymes Denkenden and kommenden, what is to come and the one who thinks? Every thought emits a throw of the dice, as Mallarmé, for whom Celan had so much respect, would say; every thought is the expectation stirred by the word.
At this point the poem brings into play some of the images that were dearest to Heidegger’s thought: the clearing as open space, the path or track through the forest. For there is no word to outline the common; neither the philosophical nor the poetic word can do that. Philosophy and the poem cannot be the space in which the common finds its word, even if this word is “Being.” On the contrary, the common will insist against the word, since it lacks a grammar of its own. For philosophy stretches language as far as its point of non-identity, where its capacity to name things collapses, and that is the true critical function that, as Bento Prado knew so well, it cannot but share with the poem. It recognizes the risk of technical domination over phusis, it knows that “[t]echnical production is the organization of the departure”;29 but the source of departure is a common devoid of a proper language. This impropriety will have to implicate the one who until now has seen herself as “human,” it will have to transform her for the experience of ipseity to be reconstituted.
If orchids are the exuberant flowers that grow in the swamp in their autarkic beauty, then the poem will be the path leading the orchid to the swamp, from the most exuberant form to a living chaos in which humidity is the emergence of the many, of the multiple. There will thus be a direction that combines rawness, a time that is always other (später, that is, “later”) and the insistence of a deutlich (“clearly”) in which one can hear both clarity and the name of the soil, the German land. But this direction is a trail that remains half-trod. Paradoxically, this does not prevent it from leading somewhere. But it only gets there when, becoming conscious of the retreat of the first healing figures of phusis, arnica and eyebright, we open ourselves up to a phusis that teaches us how to love what, in us, pertains to the swamp. Nevertheless, as Bento Prado could observe on the basis of that experience of decentered ipseity with which Celan’s interrogations resonated, we will never see this form of thinking emerge anywhere near the Todtnauberg hut. This is the point at which Bento Prado’s originality can be measured.
Translated by Rodrigo Nunes
Notes
1 1 [Translator’s note: The military dictatorship that lasted from 1964 to 1985 officially pardoned everyone it had persecuted on August 28, 1979. This amnesty is very polemic in Brazil because it also included state agents who had killed and tortured under the regime. The two-way nature of the pardon was one of several conditions that the military put in place when negotiating the reinstatement of civilian government.]
2 2 Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes, “Cinema: A Trajectory within Underdevelopment,” in Brazilian Cinema, ed. Randall Johnson and Robert Stam (New York: Columbia University Press, 1995), p. 245.
3 3 Bento Prado Jr., Ipseitas (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2017), p. 82.
4 4 [TN: I-monde in the original involves an untranslatable play on monde “world” and immonde “mucky.” See n. 17.]
5 5 Bento Prado Jr., “Le dépistage de l’erreur de catégorie,” in Lógica e ontologia: ensaios em homenagem a Balthazar Barbosa Filho, ed. Fátima Évora et al. (São Paulo: Discurso, 2004), pp. 347–8.
6 6 Ipseitas, published in 2017. [TN: See n. 3.]
7 7 Bento Prado Jr., Alguns ensaios: filosofia, literatura, psicanálise (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2000), p. 210.
8 8 Prado Jr., Alguns ensaios, p. 205.
9 9 Prado Jr., Alguns ensaios., p. 210.
10 10 [TN: The reference to Whitehead in Bento Prado Jr. that Vladimir Safatle picks up on here probably has Maurice Merleau-Ponty as its hidden mediator: “the edges of nature are always ragged” [les bords de la nature sont toujours en guenilles] is how the latter translated Whitehead’s statement “nature as perceived always has a ragged edge.” See Maurice Merleau-Ponty, Nature: Course Notes from the Collège de France, trans. Robert Vallier (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 2003), p. 114; Alfred North Whitehead, The Concept of Nature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1920), p. 50.]
11 11 Prado Jr., Ipseitas, p. 90.
12 12 Prado Jr., Ipseitas, p. 181.
13 13 Prado Jr., Ipseitas, p. 196.
14 14 Prado Jr., Ipseitas, p. 86.
15 15 Prado Jr., Ipseitas, p. 88.
16 16 Prado Jr., Alguns ensaios, p. 187.
17 17 “As is the case with other American peoples, our formation is not natural, spontaneous, or, so to speak, logical. Hence the muck of contrasts that we are.” Mario de Andrade, Aspectos da literatura brasileira (São Paulo: Martins, 1974), p. 8. [TN: The word for “muck”—imundice, itself a corruption of imundície—echoes Bento Prado’s play on i-mundo (at once “unworld” and “mucky”). See n. 4.]
18 18 As Paulo Arantes would say in relation to this phantasm: “In short, in an ‘amorphous and dissolved’ social environment, to borrow Tobias Barreto’s words in Um discurso em mangas de camisa, everything conspired to produce listless souls, a certain weariness felt by all, an invitation to a voluntarism drawn hither and thither by the flickers of curiosity, as lacking in fiber as the matter of the formless social body was ‘soft, excessively plastic and ductile.’” Paulo Arantes and Otília Fiori, Sentido da formação: Três ensaios sobre Antonio Candido, Gilda de Mello e Souza e Lúcio Costa [The Meaning of Formation: Three Essays on Atonio Candido, Gilda de Mello e Souza and Lúcio Costa] (São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 1997), p. 18.
19 19 Jürgen Habermas, Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 100–1.
20 20 Prado Jr, Alguns ensaios, p. 96.
21 21 See page 63 in this volume.
22 22 [TN: Fernando Henrique Cardoso—like Bento Prado Jr., a former professor at the University of São Paulo persecuted by the military regime—was the president of Brazil from 1995 to 2002.]
23 23 See page 20 in this volume.
24 24 Prado Jr., Ipseitas, p. 88.
25 25 See Paul Celan, “Todtnauberg,” Breathturn into Timestead: The Collected Later Poetry: A Bilingual Edition, trans. Pierre Joris (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014), 254–6: Arnika, Augentrost, der / Trunk aus dem Brunnen mit dem / Sternwürfel drauf / in der / Hütte, / die in das Buch / wesen Namen nahms auf / vor dem meinen? / die in dies Buch / geschriebene Zeile von / einer Hoffnung, heute, / auf eines Denkenden / Kommendes / Wort/im Herzen, / Waldwasen, uneingeebnet / Orchis und Orchis, einzeln, / Krudes, später im Fahren / deutlich, / der uns fährt, der Mensch / der’s mit anhört, / die halb- / beschrittenen Knüppel- / pfade im Hochmoor / Feuchtes / viel.
26 26 Martin Heidegger, Introduction to Metaphysics, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 224.
27 27 Martin Heidegger, “Why Poets?” in idem, Off the Beaten Track, trans. Julian Young and Kenneth Hayes (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), p. 224.
28 28 Heidegger, “Why Poets?,” p. 224.
29 29 Heidegger, “Why Poets?,” p. 220.
Preface
This volume contains five lectures and one interview, all given between 1994 and 1996, in addition to a small article on Bergson, which is much more recent. Each of the texts is entirely autonomous and can be read independently of the others. All of them, however, are related and mutually supportive, and the same basic question pervades them. However, even if they present