16,99 €
Mehr erfahren.
- Herausgeber: John Wiley & Sons
- Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
- Sprache: Englisch
This book makes available in English the work of one of the most important Brazilian philosophers and intellectuals of the twentieth century. First published in 2004, Error, Illusion, Madness is an original contribution to the debate about the nature and role of the subject and its forms of expression. In a context where the category of the subject was being at once dismissed by structuralist and post-structuralist thinkers and sidelined by the intersubjective turn of critical theory, Bento Prado Jr.’s book represented a unique intellectual intervention. He mobilized authors as diverse as Wittgenstein and Deleuze to formulate a notion of the subject as both a critique of identity and an affirmation of difference, a notion that dismantled the foundational character usually associated with this category. In this way Bento Prado Jr. opened up a new and distinctive kind of critical thinking that emphasized subjectivity while avoiding both foundationalism and relativism.
This important book will be of great interest to those working in philosophy, critical theory, cultural theory, and Latin American studies.
Das E-Book können Sie in Legimi-Apps oder einer beliebigen App lesen, die das folgende Format unterstützen:
Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
Ähnliche
Table of Contents
Cover
Series Title
Title Page
Copyright Page
Dedication
Publisher’s Note
Quote
Foreword—Vladimir Safatle
Is there such a thing as a point of view of the periphery?
A common place without a proper grammar
Persuasion
Phusis
Notes
Preface
Notes
1 Error, Illusion, Madness
I
II
III
IV
Error, Illusion, Madness
Commentary by Arley Ramos Moreno
Notes
2 Descartes and the Last Wittgenstein: The Dream Argument Revisited
I
II
III
IV
Notes
3 Wittgenstein: Culture and Value
I
II
III
IV
Notes
4 The Plane of Immanence and Life
I
II
III
Acknowledgments
Translator’s note
Values and the Plane of Immanence
Commentary by Arley Ramos Moreno
Notes
5 Relativism as a Counterpoint
I
II
III
IV
Bento Prado Jr.’s Lecture on Relativism
Commentary by Sérgio Cardoso
Neither Apel nor Rorty
Commentary by Paulo Eduardo Arantes
Notes
6 On Deleuze: An Interview
Notes
7 Bergson, 110 Years Later
Notes
Bibliography
Extras
Index
End User License Agreement
List of Illustrations
Preface
Figure 1. Francisco Goya y Lucientes,
No saben el camino
, etching nr. 70 ...
Guide
Cover
Table of Contents
Begin Reading
Pages
ii
iii
iv
vi
vii
viii
ix
x
xi
xii
xiii
xiv
xv
xvi
xvii
xviii
xix
xx
xxi
xxii
xxiii
xxiv
xxv
xxvi
xxvii
xxviii
xxix
xxx
xxxi
xxxii
1
2
3
4
5
6
7
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32
33
34
35
36
37
38
39
40
41
42
43
44
45
46
47
48
49
50
51
52
53
54
55
56
57
58
59
60
61
62
63
64
65
66
67
68
69
70
71
72
73
74
75
76
77
78
79
80
81
82
83
84
85
86
87
88
89
90
91
92
93
94
95
96
97
98
99
100
101
102
103
104
105
106
107
108
109
110
111
112
113
114
115
116
117
118
119
120
121
122
123
124
125
126
127
128
129
130
131
132
133
134
135
136
137
138
139
140
141
142
143
144
145
146
147
148
149
150
151
152
153
154
155
156
157
158
159
160
161
162
163
164
165
166
167
168
169
170
171
172
173
174
175
176
177
178
179
180
181
213
214
215
216
217
218
219
220
221
222
223
224
225
226
227
228
229
230
231
232
233
234
Series Title
Critical South
The publication of this series is supported by the International Consortium of Critical Theory Programs funded by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation.
Series editors: Natalia Brizuela and Leticia Sabsay
Leonor Arfuch,
Memory and Autobiography
Paula Biglieri and Luciana Cadahia,
Seven Essays on Populism
Aimé Césaire,
Resolutely Black
Bolívar Echeverría,
Modernity and “Whiteness”
Celso Furtado,
The Myth of Economic Development
Eduardo Grüner,
The Haitian Revolution
Karima Lazali,
Colonial Trauma
María Pia López,
Not One Less
Pablo Oyarzun,
Doing Justice
Néstor Perlongher,
Plebeian Prose
Bento Prado Jr.,
Error, Illusion, Madness
Nelly Richard,
Eruptions of Memory
Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui,
Ch’ixinakax Utxiwa
Tendayi Sithole,
The Black Register
Error, Illusion, Madness
Bento Prado Jr.
Commentaries by
Arley Ramos Moreno,
Sérgio Cardoso, and
Paulo Eduardo Arantes
Translated by
Marco Alexandre de Oliveira and Rodrigo Nunes
polity
Copyright Page
Originally published in Portuguese as Erro, ilusão, loucura. Copyright © Editora 34 Ltda./Heirs of Bento Prado Jr., 2018. Copyright © Arley Ramos Moreno, Sérgio Cardoso, and Paulo Eduardo Arantes, for their texts, 2018. Published by arrangement with Editora 34 Ltda. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.
This English edition © 2021 by Polity Press
Chapter 4, ‘The Plane of Immanence and Life’ by Bento Prado Júnior and translated by Michael B. Wrigley, was originally published in Introduction to the Philosophy of Gilles Deleuze, edited by Jean Khalfa. English translation copyright © 2003 Continuum Publishing. Reprinted with permission of Bloomsbury Publishing PLC.
Polity Press
65 Bridge Street
Cambridge CB2 1UR, UK
Polity Press
101 Station Landing
Suite 300
Medford, MA 02155, USA
All rights reserved. Except for the quotation of short passages for the purpose of criticism and review, no part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior permission of the publisher.
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3704-4 hardback
ISBN-13: 978-1-5095-3705-1 paperback
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Prado Júnior, Bento., author. | Oliveira, Marco Alexandre de, translator. | Nunes, Rodrigo, translator. | Moreno, Arley Ramos, other.
Title: Error, illusion, madness / Bento Prado Jr. ; commentaries by Arley Ramos Moreno, Sérgio Cardoso and Paulo Eduardo Arante ; translated by Marco Alexandre de Oliveira and Rodrigo Nunes.
Description: English edition. | Cambridge, UK ; Medford, MA, USA : Polity Press, [2021] | Series: Critical south | “Originally published in Portuguese as Erro, ilusão, loucura. Editora 34 Ltda./Heirs of Bento Prado Jr., 2018.” | Includes bibliographical references and index. | Summary: “A key work on the nature and role of the subject by one of Brazil’s most important philosophers”-- Provided by publisher.
Identifiers: LCCN 2020038421 (print) | LCCN 2020038422 (ebook) | ISBN 9781509537044 (hardback) | ISBN 9781509537051 (paperback) | ISBN 9781509537068 (epub) | ISBN 9781509543571 (adobe pdf)
Subjects: LCSH: Philosophy, Brazilian--20th century. | Prado Júnior, Bento. | Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 1889-1951.
Classification: LCC B1042 .P7313 2021 (print) | LCC B1042 (ebook) | DDC 199/.81--dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038421
LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020038422
by Fakenham Prepress Solutions, Fakenham, Norfolk NR21 8NL
The publisher has used its best endeavors to ensure that the URLs for external websites referred to in this book are correct and active at the time of going to press. However, the publisher has no responsibility for the websites and can make no guarantee that a site will remain live or that the content is or will remain appropriate.
Every effort has been made to trace all copyright holders, but if any have been overlooked the publisher will be pleased to include any necessary credits in any subsequent reprint or edition.
For further information on Polity, visit our website: politybooks.com
Dedication
For my grandchildren, Sofia and Bentinho
Publisher’s Note
Chapter 4 was translated by Michael B. Wrigley. It is reproduced here by permission of Bloomsbury Publishing. The Foreword was translated by Rodrigo Nunes. The remainder of the text was co-translated by Marco Alexandre de Oliveira and Rodrigo Nunes.
Quote
I got lost inside myself
Because I was a maze
And to feel myself these days
Is to find I miss myself.
I am neither myself nor another,
I am something of a medium:
A pillar on the bridge of tedium
That goes from me to the Other.
Mário de Sá-Carneiro, ‘Dispersão’ and ‘7’, excerpts
ForewordNo Proper Place of Its OwnVladimir Safatle
A single lexicon is not enough.
João Guimarães Rosa
Is there such a thing as a point of view of the periphery?
Understanding the dynamics proper to traditions of critical thought that have grown on the periphery of core capitalist countries demands a double decolonial twist. For this is not simply a matter of searching there for the themes and questions perceived in European and North American universities as pertaining to the experience of overcoming colonial oppression. It is equally a matter of being attentive to the singular manner in which peripheral countries form traditions of critical thought according to their own demands and through the internalization of programs and problems. One of the most astute ways of perpetuating a certain colonial logic is by believing that some questions are out of bounds for the thought that develops in peripheral countries and belong exclusively to the core. One of the most important tasks for the decolonization of thought is to suspend that interdiction and to assume that anyone can think any question and no tradition is barred to us.
Maybe this is an adequate way of introducing the intellectual experience of Bento Prado Jr. Although he is widely regarded as a major name in the philosophy made in Brazil and one of the country’s foremost essayists, it is only now, ten years after his death, that he is having a book translated into English for the first time. His oeuvre consists of a handful of books that have influenced several generations of Brazilian thinkers. It begins with Presença e campo transcendental: Consciência e negatividade na filosofia de Bergson [Presence and Transcendental Field: Conscience and Negativity in Bergson’s Philosophy], the doctoral thesis he presented in the 1960s but published only in the 1980s, and includes Filosofia da psicanálise [Philosophy of Psychoanalysis] (1991), Alguns ensaios: Filosofia, literatura e psicanálise [Some Essays: Philosophy, Literature, Psychoanalysis] (2000), the Error, Illusion, Madness that readers now have before them, originally published in 2004, as well as the posthumous works A retórica de Rousseau [Rousseau’s Rhetoric] (2008) and Ipseitas [Ipseity] (2017).
A professor at the University of São Paulo, he was purged by the military dictatorship in the 1960s and had to go into exile. Upon returning to Brazil after the amnesty,1 Bento Prado would dedicate himself to a philosophy founded on the continuous incorporation of contents that seemed external to it, such as literature, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and cognitive science. In each of these areas he was capable of finding the means that philosophical reflection requires in order to come to grips with the problems bequeathed by the field’s history and tradition. But this dispersion of horizons was the manifestation of a more profound limitlessness with which he treated the subject of philosophical tradition itself. Between analytic philosophy and French poststructuralism, between Bergsonian vitalism and a theory of consciousness along Sartrean lines, if one were to examine the moves that Bento Prado made across the board, one would be excused for thinking that he inhabited an impossible space. In his own way, however, Bento Prado was providing a possible answer to the question concerning the specificity of philosophy in a country like Brazil.
From time to time, those working in the field of philosophy in Brazil ask themselves what the country’s “national philosophy” would consist in. Does the philosophy that is practiced in Brazil have a perspective of its own? Is there a positionality that would be all ours? But what are we talking about when we speak of “national philosophies”? For example, it is not a given that “English philosophy” describes an ensemble of intellectual experiences that share some style or signature to some degree. Perhaps there is absolutely nothing common, in the strong sense of the word, between Alfred Whitehead and John Austin apart from the fact that they were both citizens of the same nation-state and subjected themselves to the same political power. The same observation could be made about any other so-called traditions: Habermas and Nietzsche, Foucault and Gabriel Marcel …
We could take this dissociation game to its limits and turn it into a game of reversals. For instance, it is not entirely absurd to say that, from the perspective of how those traditions unfolded, Heidegger is more of a “French” philosopher than a “German” one, seeing as his influence was stronger, richer, and much more decisive on Gallic soil than it was across the border, on Germanic territory. The history of Heideggerianism, if we take into account mostly its processes of reception, may well be tied more intricately to France. In the same way, “French poststructualism” is a typically North American invention, created in order to accommodate intellectual experiments that did not fit the constricted mold set by the analytic philosophy dominant in the United States. If we look at Derrida from the point of view of the consequences of his thought, it would not be absurd to call him a North American philosopher either.
This game of territorial scrambling is more than the musings of a contrarian spirit. It is a reminder that most of the styles we call national are probably no longer sustainable as such by dint of actually being the anomalous cultural constructions of local bourgeoisies that, from the nineteenth century onwards, sought to justify their control and economic frontiers by creating the illusion of an organic arrangement of ideas and forms that would provide the privileged expression of the “spirit” of a people whose natural place was the nation-states, then in the process of consolidating their identity. Philosophy was not immune to this dynamic of tradition creation. Thus the country of Siemens, metallurgy, and the Ruhr also required a “made in Germany” that consisted of Grund (ground), the illusion of a continuity between Meister Eckhart and Hegel, and a Kantian moral philosophy that, at least according to Marx, was the desperate effort to turn the economic and political impotence of its bourgeoisie into a cult of good will; it needed all these just as much as it needed a music in which depth was conveyed through the symphonic game of contrasting characters.
All this takes us to the question, what good is there in insisting on the existence of national philosophies today, and in whose interest is this done? Do they really serve the purpose of describing the play of forces immanent in singular philosophical experiences, which take place through the refusal of tradition rather than respect for it, through improbable leaps that bind what previously did not go together—as in Deleuze and his “tradition” made of the Englishman Hume, the Frenchman Bergson, the Dutchman Spinoza, and the German Nietzsche? Or are they good only for reasserting the existence of a spirit whose purpose is solely to give a semblance of organic meaning to the institutional monstrosity that is the nation state—with its intangible, immaterial counterpart, “national culture”?
It is with questions of this nature in mind that we can measure the extent of Bento Prado’s innovativeness. Instead of trying to affirm some kind of national specificity or situating himself within some historically constituted philosophical lineage, Bento insisted on thinking without a place. That is, he insisted on a mode of thinking that has an ear for resonances to which the filiation of projects and traditions has made us deaf; a mode of thinking without regard for the limits that adherence to a lineage imposes on us. One’s distance from the centers that produced the texts that came to compose the philosophical canon, one’s decentered position vis-à-vis their geography, these features were experienced not as banishment or expatriation but as the opportunity to listen without bounds. Here the peripheral position is no longer a deficit but a singular potential.
In Bento Prado’s hands distance is no longer a failing, a lack of fiber (as the cliché of Brazil as a country lacking moral fiber often has it), but the condition for the exercise of a movement that demands continuous flows of translation, the reconstruction of problems in a language that is not the one in which they were originally posed. As if it were only possible to think by translating problems in an errant language—“errant” not in the sense that it is wrong or off course, but insofar as it results from errancy, from a displacement akin to the one that Samuel Beckett imposed on himself when he decided to write in a language other than his own.
We should be careful, however, not to miss the most important wager—frightening for some, unacceptable for others—that this operation presupposes. What Bento Prado’s thought suggests is that, if the place of thought is the collapse of place, if its geography is the abolishment of spatial limits, this is because every true exercise of thought allows itself to be carried along by an experience that is common, yet has no language of its own: a common background that is Grund as much as it is Abgrund (abyss). This reverses the poles on the horizon that seemed to furnish the normative conditions of our thought. There is no common grammar that could turn all traditions into an emulation of the same set of problems, a sort of philosophical Esperanto. Nevertheless, every specific grammar is traversed by that which it cannot fully apprehend and which produces experiences that lead to categorial metamorphoses. Bento Prado’s wager was that thinking should start from this movement of traversal, of facing up to this common that does not have its proper language but reveals itself in the chiasma between things that could be considered incompatible (just as Deleuze and Wittgenstein could be judged incompatible). At the end of the day, however improbable that may seem, this was the best possible answer to the question of what it means to do philosophy in Brazil. It was this answer that Bento Prado transmitted to us.
A common place without a proper grammar
Perhaps this can help us understand why one of the fundamental axes of Bento Prado Jr.’s intellectual trajectory was the philosophical decision not to suspend the essential ties connecting subject and reason, even after all the critiques of the subject that twentieth-century philosophy rehearsed. This decision is one of the main reasons for the originality of his approach, as it runs against the grain of the most important trends in contemporary critical thought; and its consequences remain unexplored. Ultimately, Bento Prado Jr. took his place alongside those minoritarian currents within contemporary philosophy that tried at once to produce a reflection on the subject that staved off any kind of return to a metaphysics of identity and to resist conceiving of difference as an irreducible dispersion in which no kind of mutual implication could exist—in which subjects would never know any kind of “transformation through contagion” and would never undergo change under the effect of events external to them.
Thus, far from a constitutive subjectivity that constructed the world from within representative thought, far from a self-identical substance that would ground its normativity on processes of self-legislation and self-jurisdiction, the subject is, for these minoritarian currents to which Bento Prado belonged, a system of reflexive implication in otherness or in what decenters it. In other words, there is in the category of subject a constitutive reflexivity, but it is not a simple expression of my possession of objects, or a categorial projection of my understanding onto the world. Reflection must be freed from the figures of proprietary consciousness. Instead, one must conceive of it as a form of contagion that connects us to what resists subjection to the subject as a center. It is as if this were a matter of drawing the broader philosophical conclusions from an observation on Brazilian culture made by one of its sharpest interpreters, Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes: “We are neither Europeans nor North Americans. Lacking an original culture, nothing is foreign to us because everything is. The painful construction of ourselves develops within the rarified [sic] dialectic of not being and being someone else.”2 Where we thought we were dealing with matters quite free of cultural context, we suddenly discover questions that are profoundly rooted in an indirect belonging to the peripheral condition and imbued with a vision of something that only becomes possible in some other territoriality.
Let us keep this kind of connection in mind when we read such statements as:
Between the Cartesian formulation of the cogito, the articulation of the meaning of Ich denke in the refutation of idealism in the first Critique, the Nietzschean demolition of that very cogito, the psychology of William James, and the “private language” argument, a whole history of categorial metamorphoses takes place.3
That this history of categorial metamorphoses should follow the ramifications of a history of different conceptions of the subject and their functions is no coincidence. For it is the concept of subject itself that allows for thought to be a history of categorial metamorphoses, a process of transformations that result from openness to and obligatory incorporation of the non-identical produced by reflection. This is why one must insist that the contemporary task of recovering the subject is symmetrical to the demand that we understand the systems of reflexive implication that tie it to what produces decentering, and that we understand how these systems insinuate themselves in discourses such as those of modern literature and psychoanalysis.
This decentering, in turn, is the result not just of a recognition by another consciousness, but of the emergence of a ground that does not allow itself to be thought as consciousness. We should note how this strategy led Bento Prado to operate a certain slippage, always present in his texts, which consisted in deliberately associating otherness (which could in principle be something recognizable within my system of rules or language game) and a-normativity (which indicates processes whose apprehension is not subjected to any system of rules). For the otherness that really matters is the one that continuously forces me to come face to face with the limit, to think at the limit, namely in that space where the guarantees of stable control and individuation falter. A thinking capable of being touched by
something like the absolute Other, the human whom I cannot, or no longer can, recognize as a human, the one who speaks a different language, who plays a different game. Or else, which is not too different, the un-world,4 a world not subject to rules, about which we cannot speak.5
The central tension of the project lies in the demand to speak of an absolute “Other” that is nevertheless constitutive of me—an “Other” that no longer has the form of another consciousness but is nevertheless still capable of contaminating reflection. This apparent paradox led Bento Prado, for instance, to try to discuss, all at the same time, subject, plane of immanence (in its Deleuzian version), transcendental field (in the Sartrean mould), and psychoanalytic unconscious.
In this tension we find what Bento Prado was trying to think through in the experience of ipseity, the theme of his last, posthumously published book.6 The word was chosen in order to avoid the notion of “subjectivity” and its polarity of origin, that between subject and object. But to avoid that polarity does not entail situating his philosophy on the horizon of an affirmation of immanence. Rather it means installing that polarity within the very space of the “oneself.” “What does it mean to be oneself?” is the question that opens the book. Now, whoever asks that question, or even admits that it is a question, that it may indeed be the philosophical question par excellence, will just as well concede that attempting to describe self-reference is far from a self-evident operation.
We know that self-reference requires a language and that this language establishes limits. “I cannot leave myself or my language,” Bento Prado will say. Yet such a proposition can carry the risk of a relativistic drift that would make the plurality of linguistically structured identities into a primordial, insurmountable soil: a multiplicity that is no more than a dispersion of differences across an indifferent exteriority.
Here arises the first of the fundamental questions for a reflection on ipseity— “What would a language of my own be?”—in which one cannot help but hear the echo of a kind of angst that speaks volumes about an intellectual experience situated in Brazil. What does “my own” mean in this case? A language of my own cannot be understood as a private language, a language that lacks a force of generic implication. But to entertain the thought of such a thing as a language of my own necessarily demands that I understand the ipseity presupposed by the possessive pronoun “mine.” Is this “my own” the expression of an ontological certainty about the conditions for elucidating the uses of language and the production of meaning? We should note that it is in fact the critique of this ontological certainty that leads Bento Prado to reject Roberto Schwarz’s belief in critique as a “description of the structures that define in the last instance the field of all possible signification.”7 These structures would in turn ensure the clear intellection of the production of literary signification by unveiling their mechanisms of production, since “the center of gravity of critical interest moves from the work’s manifest face, its visible side or use value, to its schemes of production, the invisible system of coercions that presided over its fabrication.”8
“What would a language of my own be?,” asks Bento Prado once again. For a critique of language (or a literary critique) that were the “knowledge of the social structures that make consciousness possible and effectively produce it” would still be no more than the movement of consciousness toward itself, a movement charted in the shadow of its ontological certainty. After all, it is not the structures that decenter consciousness, at least not if they appear as an expression of social consciousness. In this case, one is still operating under a fundamental presupposition: “the thesis regarding the continuity between consciousness and knowledge, lived experience and structural knowledge.”9
Against this view, Bento Prado will say that my own language ought necessarily to be one capable of showing that, as Whitehead put it, “the edges of nature are always ragged.”10 Indeed it is not possible for me ever to leave my language, but it is not necessary that I do so either, because it is always ragged at the edges. Yet what does this beautiful philosophical metaphor of “being ragged at the edges” really mean? First, it implies recognition of a discontinuous articulation between linguistically constituted experience and categorial description. Language touches the world through its groundless ground, in which categorial description discovers the momentum that pushes it to overcome its limits:
It is necessary to stop exactly at this limit where no ground is yet possible. When we believed that we were about to reach the assurance of rock and clay, of Grund, we found ourselves on the edge of the bottomless abyss, the Abgrund. It is not in the clarity of a categorial map (structure, a priori of reason, factual truth of common sense) that false problems can be dissipated and ataraxia attained.11
This is what the literature that interested Bento Prado talked about. Thus, on the importance of the marsh and the swamp in the fiction of João Guimarães Rosa, he would say:
The marsh is proof that everything is possible in this world, that the most unexpected metamorphoses can convert the good into bad and that each face can all of a sudden be corroded and disfigured by an uncontrollable leprosy. The structure falls apart and all forms change into one another, in unbearable promiscuity. (Living) things attach themselves to one another and contact leaves a definitive stamp on them.12
In other words, the swamp is like a literary image of the ground as the space in which structure falls apart, all forms change into one another, and what emerges is a background capable of corroding every form, of drowning it in a metamorphic rhythm. This swampy language is ultimately the only one that can be called my own. Thus “language figures here less as a system of signs that allows for communication among subjects than as an ‘element’ or medium, a horizon, the universal soil of all existence and destiny.”13
Note the decisive dichotomy. There is a language that does not recognize its communicational submission to the condition of being a system of signs. There is a language that, even if it does not communicate, is “the universal soil of all existence and destiny,” as if this were a matter of expressing the latency of a common that lacks a grammar of its own but is a common soil from which language itself and any oeuvre arise. Let us try to render explicit here a major tension at play. Let us remember something that Bento Prado wrote in his unpublished diaries: “poetry may not be fully translated, but Croce’s texts on untranslatability were translated and understood in at least twenty-four different languages.” No, poetry can never be entirely translated because, in its own way, it touches on a common that has no proper grammar and that, for this reason, does not travel from one language to another; it is not codifiable through the operations of translatability. But this impotence of language is not a weakness or a limitation. Rather it is its strength: the strength of a language that comes too close to that which can put it at risk, only so as to expose the possibility of a constant overcoming of limits. This explains perhaps why, according to Bento Prado, the one true error that a philosophy can produce is
The error of postulating (a devout vow) too much clarity or regularity in, let us say, souls and things, too much limpidness in language. The metaphor of a nature whose profile is ragged or badly drawn is set against the categories of the instant, of place and event, such as they were defined by classical thought.14
For what is at stake is understanding the event no longer as an element in the sense of a simple part or an indivisible atom, but as an element in the sense of an atmosphere or horizon: that is, in the sense of a field, a plane of implication that emerges beyond the therapeutic demands of a “readaptation to the world through the rediscovery, re-encounter or reconciliation with oneself, in the actuality of everyday life and its forms of expression.”15 This plane of implication will never become actualized as a logos capable of ensuring the ground of our processes of deliberation as a search for the best argument. Often, in fact, Bento Prado would describe it as the anchoring of language in phusis, as when he wrote about Guimarães Rosa’s capacity to “reveal a writing first sketched at the point zero of humanity and culture, in nature itself.”16 We will examine each of these points in time.
Before we do, however, let us remember that this nature with a ragged profile, traversed by zones of indeterminacy and inapprehension, is a way of philosophically integrating what could be understood as an originary phantasm that will haunt Brazilian national experience, namely the fantasy of a lack of fiber, of a decomposed and discontinuous reality—seen as the damning mark of a lack of foundation supposedly to be overcome. In Mário de Andrade’s words, Brazil would be a “muck of contrasts” without any logic.17 This is the narrative of a formless country, which believes at each moment that it must be refounded, severed from its dead zone of indeterminacy so that it may finally find its hour amid the developed world and its law, its supposedly clear distribution of places and firmly established individuations18—or else so that it may find its “formation,” this time in a register that is already critical of this notion of progress. It was against this originary phantasm that Bento Prado’s philosophy constituted itself.
Persuasion
Let us now turn to a central point in Error, Illusion, Madness in order to better understand the political consequences of a philosophical experience of this kind.
Habermas used to say:
No matter how consistent a dropout he may be, [the radical skeptic] cannot drop out of the communicative practice of everyday life, to the presuppositions of which he remains bound. And these in turn are at least partly identical with the presuppositions of argumentation as such.19
Even if we do not necessarily subscribe to a transcendental pragmatic standpoint, we could at least have a general grammar capable of regulating conflicts through the search for the best argument.
However, one of Bento Prado’s major critical strategies consisted in inquiring into the structure of subjectivity presupposed by philosophical positions that wished to salvage some form of normativity immediately accessible to the subject. Such deconstructions of normativity, which went as far as claiming that the common person is no more than a “pedagogical project,” were in fact initial moves in a redimensioning of experience, since the abandonment of a normative horizon led to the acknowledgment of the “unavoidable ambiguity of experience and the discursive anarchy that it opens.”20
But how are we to understand this “discursive anarchy”? Such a defense of the ambiguity of experience, of the search for an irreducible heterogeneity, a defense that supposes a discursive anarchy that resists conceptual unification, could seem at first to be merely a profession of irrationalistic—or at the very least relativistic—faith. The case supporting that accusation appears to grow when we take into account the way in which Bento Prado used to assert the impossibility of providing a positive foundation for the universalizing criteria of judgment. Seeking support in a reading of Wittgenstein’s notion of language games, Bento Prado insisted that the universalization of criteria and systems of rules was not exactly the object of a more or less transparent communicational understanding. Rather it was an object of persuasion, and whoever says “persuasion” says more than just recognition of a better argument—and, against the wishes of some “conversational” conceptions of philosophy, recognizes no neutral arena in which the claims to truth of metaphysical interpretations could be tested.
On the contrary, whoever says “persuasion” necessarily says conversion, constitution of a conflictual field in which processes of identification and circuits of affects, libidinal investment, constitution of authority criteria, and so on all come into play. The field of persuasion is a battlefield, Bento Prado would often insist, not a placid arena of communicational understanding. That led him to statements such as: “The basis of a language game is not constituted by propositions susceptible to truth or falsity but corresponds only to something like a choice without any rational foundation.”21 It corresponds to a “pathological” decision, in the sense not that it is distorted, but that it is affected by a pathos that refers us back to the sensible. In a country haunted by the state’s use of “pacts” and “conciliations” allegedly animated by communicative rationality (since that was the official state ideology under the “Brazilian enlightenment” of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administration),22 talk of “discursive anarchy” could not fail to have rather obvious critical resonances for the readers.
At any rate, we can see that this would be a risky philosophical operation for several reasons. First, to define rational argumentation as a conflictual field of persuasion implies, at least in this case, dismantling any strict dichotomies between the psychological and the transcendental, since it entails bringing seemingly psychological categories to bear on processes of rational argumentation. Ultimately, given that the transcendental guarantee itself is put at risk, it looks as though we will just end up dissociating matters of justification from matters of fact. After all, if the basis of a language game is made up of choices with no rational foundation, nothing can justify it except the objective existence of social practices that I take to be necessary.
To see how Bento Prado deals with this question, let us begin by paying attention to the construction of a crucial passage like this:
To persuade someone is to lead that person to admit precisely what has no basis, a “mythology,” something that lies far beyond, or below, the alternative between true and false, rational and irrational, or rather between reasonableness and madness, between cosmos and chaos.23
There would be a “Nietzschean” way of interpreting this statement. If to persuade is to lead someone to admit to what ranges below the alternative between true and false, perhaps this is because truth and falsity are not the best criteria for evaluating what has the power to elicit our assent. Perhaps there are kinds of value that pertain, not to the description of states of affairs, but to the ways in which forms of life are structured. What persuades is not exactly the truth of a proposition, but the correctness of a form of life that becomes embodied when I act according to certain criteria and admit the value of certain modes of conduct and judgment. In this sense, the criterion of what persuades is tied to a value judgment concerning forms of life that carry a normative weight.
Yet the problem, far from finding a solution, has only become more complex. If I am not to fall into a new version of relativism, I must make explicit the criteria that would allow me to evaluate forms of life, for example to say that some are mutilated and pathological—since at the end of the day Bento Prado’s real inversion consists in showing to what extent the regulative idea of normality that inhabits certain conceptions of subjectivity is pathological—while others are closer to a fundamental experience. Hence a central statement such as this one:
Since language games and forms of life are internally connected, linguistic misunderstandings refer back to a disorder in life itself. And [Wittgenstein] adds that, if a disease perverts [the] use [of language games], this perversion must be traceable back to a perversion at the heart of the form of life itself. For philosophy, we must free the flow of life and broaden its sphere.24
Phusis
At this point we could appeal to that notion of a life in disorder as the ground of the liberation of all its flows that is the highest expression of Bento Prato’s recovery of phusis. This places us before a strategy that would inevitably appear to retrieve some of the themes of Heidegger’s ontological project. There would be several entry points into this discussion, but I choose one that I believe would be to Bento Prado’s liking: a commentary on a poem. The poem in question is Paul Celan’s Todtnauberg, a tribute to Heidegger written after Celan visited him in the hut located in the village that gives the poem its name. If I refer to it, it is because it orients us once again toward that swampy language that meant so much to Bento Prado and pulled him apart from Heidegger and his land:
Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-die on top,
in the
Hütte,
written in the book
—whose name did it record
before mine?—,
in this book
the line about
a hope, today,
for a thinker’s
word
to come,
in the heart,
forest sward, unleveled,
orchis and orchis, singly,
raw exchanges, later, while driving,
clearly,
he who drives us, the mensch,
he also hears it,
the half-
trod log-
trails on the highmoor,
humidity,
much.25
It would be possible to give this poem an impoverished interpretation, treating it as a narrative or stylized account of an encounter that effectively took place between Celan and Heidegger. (They met at Heidegger’s hut, there really was a well by the entrance, there really was a book in which visitors wrote down their names …) Instead, we should view it as a clear reflection, by the poet Celan, on the philosopher Heidegger, whose thought he indeed knew well.
Celan’s poem begins by mobilizing figures of phusis, a phusis that, as Heidegger reminded us, “is a fundamental Greek word for Being.”26 It is no coincidence that the first verses refer to medicinal plants, arnica and eyebright (Augentrost, literally “solace of the eyes”). Phusis appears here as care, protection, and cure, the restoration of an original form after illness. Yet the poem closes with phusis decomposing in the swamp, in humidity, in dead tree-flanked half-trod log trails. This is the decomposition of that which no longer protects us but implicates us in its liminal existence and, precisely for that reason, appears as a path, even if only a half-path.
We could say that the whole poem is a description of the movement of emergence of an “unthought” whose name cannot be heard, as we are still waiting for the word to come. It starts by opposing well and stars: the well as an archetypical image of origin, the stars as guides to our travels (as when we look to the sky for orientation). To drink from the well is to “take in what rises and bring away what has been received.”27 Acting is undercut by figures of receiving, but of a receiving that places itself as a source. The received that unfolds here is the contingency that “destitutes” me, the accident that refers back to the fact that there is no destiny at the origin. Thus to drink from the well while having “dice stars” above us is to place the downward movement toward the source under the upward movement of the eyes, which discover chance in stellar constellations. These are two figures of phusis played against each other, two different images of what Heidegger describes so aptly as a “defenselessness [that] itself affords safebeing”28 because it is an opening to what is not human, to what is not a mere expression of the human will.
Well and stars as two distinct figures of destiny, of a destiny that haunts us when we open the book. What names before mine? What became of them, who are now only traces? Will I 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
[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
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
Bento Prado Jr.,
Ipseitas
(Belo Horizonte: Autêntica, 2017), p. 82.
4
[TN:
I-monde
in the original involves an untranslatable play on
monde
“world” and
immonde
“mucky.” See n. 17.]
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
Ipseitas
, published in 2017. [TN: See n. 3.]
7
Bento Prado Jr.,
Alguns ensaios: filosofia, literatura, psicanálise
(São Paulo: Paz e Terra, 2000), p. 210.
8
Prado Jr.,
Alguns ensaios
, p. 205.
9
Prado Jr.,
Alguns ensaios
., p. 210.
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
Prado Jr.,
Ipseitas
, p. 90.
12
Prado Jr.,
Ipseitas
, p. 181.
13
Prado Jr.,
Ipseitas
, p. 196.
14
Prado Jr.,
Ipseitas
, p. 86.
15
Prado Jr.,
Ipseitas
, p. 88.
16
Prado Jr.,
Alguns ensaios
, p. 187.
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
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
Jürgen Habermas,
Moral Consciousness and Communicative Action
, trans. Christian Lenhardt and Shierry Weber Nicholsen (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1990), pp. 100–1.
20
Prado Jr,
Alguns ensaios
, p. 96.
21
See page 63 in this volume.
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
See page 20 in this volume.
24
Prado Jr.,
Ipseitas
, p. 88.
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
Martin Heidegger,
Introduction to Metaphysics
, trans. Gregory Fried and Richard Polt (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2014), p. 224.
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
Heidegger, “Why Poets?,” p. 224.
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 the same arguments over and over again, each does so from a different perspective, which explains and justifies their joint publication.
If I am not the victim of a retrospective illusion, I could in fact claim to be resuming, in each and every one of them, an old obsession that had already surfaced in my first work in 1964: the question regarding the place of the subject, or rather the problem of ipseity and its forms of expression. When I recently presented that work—my thesis on Bergson—on the occasion of its recent French translation, this is how I described my subsequent itinerary:
To conclude, I should proceed a little further into the paradox of the distant that suddenly reveals itself to be close; and I should do this by describing the curve drawn by an itinerary that, starting from the reconstitution of the Bergsonian origin of subjectivity in the transcendental field of images, seems to return to him in two different stages.
I took a first step during my stay in France between 1969 and 1974 at the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, after being dismissed from the University of São Paulo, when I wrote a book (of which only a few chapters were published) on Rousseau and his essentially rhetorical concept of language—that is, on his conception of intersubjectivity or, in Jean Hyppolite’s excellent formulation, on Rousseau’s decision to instate language in the place that the metaphysical tradition reserves for God.1
I would go on to describe the second step, which culminates in this book, as the one that led me, back in Brazil, to dedicate “several essays to the analytical philosophy of mind, with the intention of showing how this tradition distances itself from Wittgenstein’s thought and betrays its deepest spirit by ignoring how the problem of subjectivity and transcendence remains regardless of its conception of philosophy as grammatical analysis.” That is how Ludwig Wittgenstein came to take center stage in this book: never as the object of a properly philological approach or as a pretext to penetrate, unarmed, the field of the philosophy of logic, both of which are tasks beyond my reach. My goal was rather to make an intuitive incursion, if I may use an expression frequently employed in a pejorative sense. Do not expect, dear reader, a technical or scholastic treatment of Wittgenstein’s texts, especially because I agree with my old friend Andrés Raggio2 (himself a notable logician of the highest creativity and technical skill), who liked to say that, in philosophy, technical skill is inversely proportional to the philosophical interest of a text.
Notes
1
Opening remarks at the debate promoted by the Collège International de Philosophie to celebrate the launch of
Présence et champ transcendantal: Conscience et négativité dans la philosophie de Bergson
(Hildesheim: Georg Olms, 2002). This brief presentation on the origin and structure of my thesis was translated and published in the
Mais!
supplement of
Folha de São Paulo
on March 29, 2002.
2
This is the same Raggio—an Argentinian logician of international prestige, who identified himself as a citizen of the world—who said that he saw greater philosophical interest in Herder than in the whole analytic tradition.
3
In a working note from January of 1959, Merleau-Ponty wrote: “Our state of non-philosophy—Never has the crisis been so radical.” In March 1960, describing this “malaise of culture” still further, he added: “There is a danger that a philosophy of speech would justify the indefinite proliferation of writings […]—the habit of speaking without knowing what one is saying, the confusion of style and of thought etc. Yet: (1) it has always been that way in fact—the works that escape this profusion are
academic
works (2) there is a remedy, which is not to return to the American analytic–academic method—which would be to retreat from the problem—but to proceed over and beyond by facing the things again.” See Maurice Merleau-Ponty,
The Visible and the Invisible
, trans. Alphonso Lingis (Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1968), pp. 165, 239. Perhaps Merleau-Ponty did not suspect, in his diagnosis of the state of non-philosophy, how much worse the crisis would become in the following decades, culminating in the misery of today’s absolute hegemony of university philosophy.
4
[Translators’ note: decentered, without a ruling principle.] Regarding this term, see Bento Prado Jr., “Os limites da
Aufklärung
” [“The Limits of
Aufklärung
”],
Estudos Cebrap
15, January–March 1976, p. 173.
5
Blaise Pascal,
Pensées
, ed. and trans. Roger Ariew (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2004), p. 208.
6
From Michael Armstrong Roche’s comment on the etching in the exhibition catalogue: Alfonso E. Perez and Eleanor A. Sayre, eds.,
Goya and the Spirit of Enlightenment
(Boston: Museum of Fine Arts, 1989), p. 351.
7
José Gallardo Blanco,
Diccionário crítico–burlesco
(Madrid: Repullés, 1812), p. 88.
8
Gallardo Blanco,
Diccionário crítico–burlesco
, p. 88.
9
[TN: In English in the original.]
10
A philosophy of ambiguity, as in Merleau-Ponty? Certainly, if we recall, with Heidegger, that
eidos
, before the great objectification performed by Plato, which made it synonymous with an eternally determined essence, meant no more than “visible aspect” or the variable shape in which things present themselves to us.
11
I am not thinking here of the aesthetics of reception currently being produced in Germany, but of older texts such as Malraux’s and Merleau-Ponty’s.
12
I am thinking of Kant’s ambiguous attitude toward Swedenborg as analysed by Monique David-Ménard,
La folie dans la raison pure: Kant lecteur de Swedenborg
(Paris: Vrin, 1990).
13
[TN: The reference here is to a collection, under this title, of Heidegger’s short texts; it was translated into English as
Off the Beaten Track
.]
14
See Ludwig Wittgenstein,
Remarks on the Foundations of Mathematics
, trans. G. E. M. Anscombe (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), §78.
15
See the analysis of the ekphrastic style in Barbara Cassin (in Portuguese translation),
Ensaios sofísticos
[
Sophistical Essays
] (São Paulo: Siciliano, 1990), pp. 244–8.
16
Let us be clear: the opposition between
entering
philosophy and
leaving
it is not simple. Even in the
Tractatus
, the dissolution of philosophy’s “false” problems did not entail merely dismissing them or replacing with some form of positive knowledge. On the contrary, it aspired to be the introduction of a new lifestyle, characterized by a good relationship with the ineffable through a silent, perspicuous, and synoptic view of the world, of language and its
limits
. Later on, Wittgenstein not only renounced the idea that philosophy may be “overcome” in a single stroke, but suggested that, if I eliminate an itch, this does not mean that it never existed. Furthermore, as per Antonia Soulez’ sharp suggestion, the “remedy” that cures us of philosophy is of the same nature as the disease it eliminates.
Similia similibus curantur
—“likes are cured by likes.” Maybe the ideas of
entering
philosophy and
leaving
it are internally connected in the form of a chiasma.
17
After writing this preface, I had access, courtesy of Roberto Schwarz’s kindness, to Fred Licht’s beautiful
Goya: The Origins of the Modern Temper in Art
(New York: Harper & Row, 1983), which provides solid support to what I had timidly defended. If we accept Licht’s analyses, I was not actually distancing myself from the author’s intentions when I changed the title of Goya’s painting from
They Do Not Know the Way
to
We Do Not Know the Way
, the painter’s ties to the spirit of the Enlightenment notwithstanding. By doing so, instead of retrospectively metamorphosing the work’s original meaning, as if in an imaginary museum, we can in fact discover the more remote roots of our contemporaneity. Thus, contrasting Goya with the learned satirists of the eighteenth century, Licht says: “Goya may pillory the waywardness of men and women, but he never assumes as the self-righteous Hogarth does that this waywardness is alien to
him
. Even in his broadest, most farcical satirizations, one always feels distinctly that Goya has direct personal experience of the error that is being satirized and that it is not just something he has observed from a detached vantage point” (p. 93). There is no step back here: to break with the theological, cosmological, ethical, and political optimism of the Baroque or the Enlightenment, or with David’s neoclassicism, means, on the contrary, making room for the
disconnection
of the estranged and alienated world that was made somewhat opaque in modern art. Without even commenting on
They Do Not Know the Way
, Fred Licht nonetheless points out that the same strange ambiguity of space (the suppression of the horizon and of perspective) that I have tried to point out in the etching under discussion can be found
throughout Goya’s work
. Commenting on the
Caprichos
, for example, Licht writes: “The ambiguity of setting and of lighting is what lends to the
Caprichos
