Call for papers: A pause in the struggle: art, politics, insurgency
Guest editors: Manoel Ricardo de Lima, Davi Pessoa, and Bruna Carolina Carvalho
In today’s world, who rises up against ongoing civil wars? Civil war – Stasis – has long been the condition of politics events. Thus, subjects become figures of vital importance in the struggle for democracy. After all, democracy cannot be taken for granted a priori; instead, it is a singular struggle constantly in play, always submitted to accidents and contingencies. The philosopher Giorgio Agamben, who reflects on political conflicts through various biopolitical apparatuses, writes in Stasis: Civil War as a Political Paradigm (2015), that there is no “political substance,” since “politics is a field incessantly traversed by the tensional currents of politicization and depoliticization,” and he adds: “Between these opposed polarities, disjoined and yet intimately bound together, the tension […] is irresolvable.” Furthermore, as the philosopher argues in his lecture “What is an apparatus?”, “What defines the apparatuses that we have to deal with in the current phase of capitalism is that they no longer act as much through the production of a subject, as through the processes of what can be called desubjectification,”, since the latter is already implicit in every subjectification process. However, the emphasis on this tension produces a new subject in our times: “What we are now witnessing is that processes of subjectification and processes of desubjectification seem to become reciprocally indifferent, and so they do not give rise to the recomposition of a new subject.”
On another end of a spiralling thread the poet Pier Paolo Pasolini had already indicated this tension proposed by Agamben when, on March 15th, 1969, he publishes in the weekly Tempo, in his column titled “Il caos”, a commentary on Franco Fortini’s book Poesia e Errore, which collects poems written between 1946 and 1957, as well as 25 “more recent” poems, made between 1961 and 1968, compiled in a separate section. Pasolini drives his attention particularly to this part. He states that it contains an “escape from zeal” and “a new reflection in a pathetic zone”, both responsible for reassembling Fortini as an “essayist and moralist: political,”, with his “obsession with real war.” Pasolini imagines that, with these poems, Fortini squirmed in the impasse of being immersed in a struggle while at the same time being outside of it, an ambivalence that engenders a “different tension”. For Pasolini, the point is that Fortini, in front of his rigid comrades in struggle, feels ashamed of being a poet and seeks a captatio benevolentiae, because they understand that “utility is the only valid category to judge human beings”. Hence, Pasolini suggests that Fortini writes his poems during “a pause in the struggle” (sosta della lotta). Pasolini manoeuvres his attention to this pause as a suspension in time and history, which is present in each line reconfiguring – also through the thought and the poetry of Giacomo Leopardi and Eugenio Montale – “the cruel despair of ascetism that only has as its substance nothing”, because Pasolini understands that “a pause in the struggle” is also the possibility of “reassessment of the struggle."
This is the idea that serves as a suggestion for this thematic dossier: to read what reinvents itself as a suspended drift from time and history. A reading out of sync, capable of dismembering Narcisus, the character of the absolute self, to touch some other ontological dispersion, a what-ever before a certain significant void. At the same time, it is an endeavour to activate and leave some questions active, such as: how not to advance on the now? How can we avoid the trap of understanding things only as they are now? How to tread the small spaces we still have more and more slowly? How to reassess life in a strong and joyful way, freer from grief by proposing a little or brief pause in the struggle? Such critical exercises could embrace other artistic expressions beyond literature, such as cinema, visual and performative arts, music, theatre, among others. We suggest that the articles approach the following investigation topics or expand them:
- Critical analysis of literary texts, audiovisual, visual, musical and/or performative works made or exhibited during historical processes of repression or political regime change;
- Studies on the presentations/representations in artistic works capable of producing new subjectivities, reflecting on their relationship with the State, labour, economy, class struggle, sexuality, desire, bodies, violence (social, racial, gender or class-based, ethnic);
- Monographic or comparative investigations about some idea of struggle inscribed in artistic or critic works that explore the ambivalence between act and gesture, action and reflection, movement and pause in sociopolitical transformation environments.
- Studies proposing an archiphilology (arquifilologia), as suggested by the critic Raúl Antelo, whose singular trait is composing a thinking in action, “a pause in the struggle”, pursuing what Pasolini highlights. Raúl Antelo writes in The Ruinology (A Ruinologia), a short essay published in 2016: “the archiphilology is an emergency strategy, a non-normative writing practice that crystallizes conflict in an in-between place of fiction and theory, sometimes as a fusion of logos and phone, sometimes as the emergence of biopolitical discourse. It does not propose a synchronic or a diachronic reading, but rather an anachronic one”.
Submission deadline: até 28/2/2025