A classic of Brazilian literature is twinned with an overheated tract
in which tropical delirium swallows up Western philosophy, attacking the
decolonial question with poetic ferocity.
A classic of Brazilian literature is twinned with an overheated tract in
which tropical delirium swallows up Western philosophy. Both attack the
decolonial question with poetic ferocity, ignited by the moment when
colonialist rationality meets its limits in the "magnificent disorder"
of the Amazon jungle.
Described in Eduardo Viveiros de Castro's foreword as "no longer an
interpretation of Brazil but an interpenetration with Brazil,"
Jean-Christophe Goddard's strange theory-fiction plunges Western
philosophy into the great American schizophrenia, where its ordered
categories are devored by uncontainable contaminations--first and
foremost the rainforest itself, a "monstrosity unapproachable by the
cogito."
In 1664, the Portuguese Bento de Espinosa wrote of his terrifying
hallucination of "a scabby black Brazilian." But rather than a vision of
"the Other," the dream figure was a frightful glimpse of Bento's own
duplicity. Upon adopting the "clean white nickname" of Benedict de
Spinoza, the philosopher cut ties with his homeland and its colonial
misadventures, repudiating this specter that flees along the lines of
migration: "Spinoza is American ... the journey is intensive." And in
his wake, a cannibalized cast of conceptual personae are sucked into
Goddard's Pernambucan delirium: Franny Deleuze, Dina Levi-Strauss, Chaya
Ohloclitorispector, Galli Mathias...
The rainforest also precipitates a deregulation of the senses in
Verdant Inferno, Alberto Rangel's classic 1904 work of Brazilian
literature. In Rangel's astonishing tales, this "poet-engineer" sent
into the dark interior as a state representative records his encounters
in a style that shimmers between objective documentary and visionary
limit experience.
