Just another one: spoken words and a badly counted democracy

Abstract

This article proposes the reading of some spoken words, in the Brazilian Poetry Slam scene, in order to think about compositional strategies that denounce two “techniques of making mistakes” in contemporary Brazilian democracy: a technique of confusion and one of an embarrassment. These techniques are understood from the image of the people as “a class of damage”, object of a “mistake” in the counting of parts, that rejects the “people of nothing” in Rancière’s reading of Plato and Aristotle about the division of the Greek polis. The absence of property and the enunciative place of those who were rejected to silence or to an “animal noise”, in Rancière’s terms, reenact another platonic image, khôra. An interpretive hypothesis is that the enunciative place and the compositional strategies of the spoken words, exposing such techniques, have a political potential to reenact the problem subtracted by philosophical thinking in naming a harm and designing one’s own place.