By FILIPE DE FREITAS GONÇALVES*
By radicalizing his critique of capitalism, Krenak forgets that what is leading the world to its end is the economic and social system in which we live and not our separation from nature.
Ailton Krenak has been a figure of national prominence since the day he stood on the Constituent Assembly's rostrum and, painting his face with black clay, gave a powerful speech about the rights of indigenous peoples. His production, however, gained another scope in recent years, when, now a completely consolidated social leader, he began to publish, through Companhia das Letras, a series of short essays with compelling titles and thought-provoking content.
So far there are three: Ideas for postponing the end of the world, from 2019 (with a second edition from 2020); life is not useful, 2020; and Ancestral future, from 2022. His publications are not restricted to these three titles and his participation in Brazilian life goes far beyond what can be quantified by the list of his works, but I think it is fair to say that it is these three publications that will guarantee his permanence in national culture.
I classify his interventions as essays because they seem to me to be a powerful experiment in the genre. Always the result of his speeches, the written texts are highly impactful textualizations of his ideas. The consequence of his belonging to the genre seems to come, precisely, from the novelty of his belonging to orality: his ideas flow from one side to the other, which guarantees a scope to his thinking that we are no longer accustomed to in an era of hyper-specialization.
The other side of the coin is that his thought, due to the fluidity that guarantees his reflective and stylistic effectiveness, does not have a systematic form or even terminological rigor. For the horizon of his production, this does not constitute a problem, but it has consequences when trying to put together his ideas into a cohesive whole that can be discussed. Perhaps this is a defect not only of his books, but of the genre to which they belong: the essay implies an identification between thought and enunciation that makes thought hostage to the reader's connection with the subject implied by the enunciation of ideas and not with the ideas themselves. This is because, in the case of the essay, the subject who enunciates is the most important constitutive part of the idea that is enunciated.
Hence the much-commented intersection between literature and philosophy in this type of text. The problem, obviously, is on my side, as I intend to take his ideas as a cohesive set with which I can open disagreement, and not the genre itself, which in this indeterminacy holds perhaps the most interesting part of its effectiveness.
Be that as it may, it is difficult to even synthesize the ideas that the author defends in order to distance himself from them. An example to avoid being accused of abstractionism: the notion of humanity, which is the most important in his thinking, appears at different times with different connotations. Sometimes humanity is the West, sometimes it is something denied to excluded populations.
Em Ideas for postponing the end of the world, he tells us that “humanity” was something invented by the West to justify the colonization process (p. 11); Still in the same book he offers the most controversial definition saying the notion of humanity is a Western invention that is based on the ontological differentiation between man and nature. The two definitions are not completely identical, but they can dialogue.
But the surprise comes when, in the first sentence of the next book, life is not useful, he tells us: “When I talk about humanity I’m not just talking about Homo sapiens, I am referring to an immensity of beings that we have always excluded (…)”.[I] From a negative use of the term that permeates his entire production, he jumps to a positive one, seeming to claim the need to include non-human beings in our notion of humanity, now transformed into something good. The example is simple, but it illustrates well both the type of thinking the author practices and the difficulty of transforming it into a system.
I don't say any of this to demand systematicity from a thought that purports to be purposefully essayistic, but to highlight the difficulty of what to do with such a thought. Regrets aside, I would like to argue that the ideas presented by the author, even with their degree of indeterminacy, have an anti-capitalist and reactionary character. Simply put, it is the following. Ailton Krenak is someone who knows the devastating consequences of what we call capitalism like no one else and, therefore, his thinking is inveterately anti-capitalist.
But he doesn't stop there. He understands the philosophical assumptions of the West like no one else, not because he has studied them, but because he has experienced them in his daily life as a catastrophe – and, precisely for this reason, he denies them from beginning to end. And here we find the reactionism of his response to the devastating action of capital. Ailton Krenak confuses capitalism with technical and technological development, and even with scientific activity, which he seems to understand so little. Reading his books, we still feel that the author confuses capitalism with modernity, and denies everything as if all cats were gray.
At a certain point, talking about the discredit of biodiversity scholars in the mid-20th century, he drops a pearl: “Anyone who has heard the voice of mountains, rivers and forests does not need a theory about this: every theory is an effort to explain to hard-headed people the reality that they cannot see”.[ii] Here the two visions that he ended up conflicting in all his work are contrasted. On one side, those who hear the voices of the mountain and, on the other, the hardheaded ones. In his view, reality is transparent and does not need investigation to be deciphered: hard-headed people are left with the need to develop a theory to explain something that is evident to those who establish a mystical relationship with nature.
In the end, this is exactly what it is about: in a systematic way, Ailton Krenak will throw the baby out with the water in the bucket and pretend that the solution to the problems of our world will be found in the return to a relationship with the environment based on mysticism , avoiding the hard work of science. Isaac Newton's law of gravitation and all its mechanics, obviously, were evident to anyone who wanted to hear the voice of the rivers and all that mathematics is just an exercise to convince the blockheads who did not see, as an obvious fact that the voice of the rivers reveals to us that in the denominator the distance between the bodies must be squared.
Let's look at what is its fundamental idea, that the West is based on a false notion of distinction between man – transformed into humanity – and nature. He tells us: “Meanwhile – while the wolf doesn’t come – we have been alienating ourselves from this organism of which we are part, the Earth, and we have started to think that it is one thing and we are another: the Earth and humanity. I don't understand where there is anything other than nature. Everything is nature. The cosmos is nature. All I can think about is nature.”[iii].
Further on he says: “Meanwhile, humanity is being detached in such an absolute way from this organism that is the Earth. The only centers that still consider that they need to stay attached to this land are those that have been somewhat forgotten on the edges of the planet, on the banks of rivers, on the edges of the oceans, in Africa, Asia or Latin America. They are caiçaras, Indians, quilombolas, aborigines – sub-humanity. Because it has, let's say, cool humanity. And there is a more brutal, rustic, organic layer, a sub-humanity, people who cling to the earth, it seems that they want to eat the earth, suckle from the earth, sleep lying on the earth, wrapped in the earth. The organicity of these people is something that bothers us, so much so that corporations have created more and more mechanisms to separate these babies from their mother's land: “Let's separate this thing, people and land, this mess. It is better to place treatments or extracts on the ground. No people, people are a mess. And, above all, people are not trained to dominate this natural resource that is the earth.” Natural resource for whom? Sustainable development for what? What do we need to sustain?”[iv]
The two quotes clearly show the radicality of his anti-capitalism and the accurate diagnosis of what sustains the West: the strengthening of a distinction between man and nature. This is not just a criticism of capitalism, but a criticism of this potential that long precedes it and that will probably far surpass it. The point is fundamental, because an understanding of the true radicality of Ailton Krenak's thought depends on it.
He does not simply criticize a mode of production, but the perspective of enhancing man's intervention capacity in nature. This first confusion is important, because it will have consequences. It is not only capitalist society that operates on the basis of a distinction between man and nature, but, strictly speaking, every form of civilization, which implies every organization of work and every language. In other words, in any use of language and in any organization of work, the distinction between man and nature is placed at the center of the problems in order to create an environment more favorable to human existence.
Every way of working and using linguistic capacity therefore implies our separation from the Earth. Transforming the nature that surrounds us into the object of our investigation and into a resource for building a life that overcomes the limitations that the natural environment imposes is a general anthropological fact, inscribed in the very act of naming.
In fact, language itself seems like a primitive tool with complex functioning to take possession of nature and intervene in it according to our interests. The domestication of plants is also a tool for this fundamental distinction between man and nature for the construction of what, if I am not mistaken in 19th century sociology, came to be called second nature, in reference to this world built by men to its own survival.
What transforms his criticism of capitalism into a radical positioning seems to be, therefore, the confusion between this general anthropological fact and the most recent form of its potentialization. The problem is that the potentialization of what distinguishes us from nature is also a constitutive anthropological fact. Said in economic language, productivity gains – transformed into the extraction of relative surplus value – are also a constant that long predates capitalism and, God willing, will long follow it. Seeking simpler ways to find the fulfillment of our needs – both real and fantasy, the wool coat and Marx's Bible – is a fixation that precedes capitalist competition and means, in the end, freedom.
This could still be said another way. The capitalist West is also a child of the Earth, since the rational capacity to understand the natural world and instrumentalize it for our subsistence is an endowment of nature itself. Nothing indicates that our ability to differentiate ourselves from the natural environment by constituting an artificial environment, created by taking organic and inorganic nature as a resource, is not a fact of nature itself, since we are also part of it.
Simply put, reason is an endowment of nature itself and the Western awareness of this endowment is also part of nature itself. A Metaphysics of Aristotle and Phenomenology of Spirit of Hegel are part of nature just like the Hopi Indian who talks to her mountain. Different results are obtained from these two distinct relationships with the environment, but they are two ways of being nature.
Ailton Krenak is right: everything is nature. However, this implies that the chemical mining at the beginning of the 20th century that destroyed the Doce River is also part of nature, as a result of an action that is implied by its own capacity to enhance the transformation of what is natural into a resource. The fundamental issue, therefore, is not the distinction between humanity and nature, but the specific relationship that is established between the two terms. Here we are all in agreement: capitalism has established a relationship with nature that seems to lead us towards mutual destruction and the course needs to be corrected as soon as possible, but from there jumping to a critique of modern science as the origin of the catastrophe is too big a leap. and, as we will see, dangerous.
Ailton Krenak's view of the natural world seems reduced not only in this more abstract sense, but also in its own generalization capacity. The description of the Earth as our mother only works in two cases. The first, which appears to be that of the Brazilian Indians, is when the natural environment easily offers resources for subsistence. It is unlikely that any aboriginal people living in desert regions will have such a positive view of nature as our mother. In fact, the Christian tradition itself originates from a people who would have lived in such a situation.
Humanity figured in Genesis It is not the one who lives at her mother's breast, but the one who was expelled from paradise, where she could live without working. The nature that Adam and Eve face after the fall is far from being the generous mother supposed by Ailton Krenak. The second case is exactly the “second nature” created by man for his own survival. It is the technique and its fruits that allow our life on earth to have not only spread and prolonged so much but also transformed into something less painful and terrible. It is civilization that guarantees such a situation in less fortunate cases than those in which the surrounding environment naturally offers few resources. We, the puppies, are the ones who invented our mother.
The problem then configures itself as follows: what Ailton Krenak is practicing is not simply a critique of capitalism, but the transformation of the critique of capitalism into a denial of the rational relationship enhanced by technology with the natural world. To replace this relationship, he proposes another, originating from what he calls “sub-humanity”, those who hear the voice of the river.
The story he tells of the Hopi Indian who talks to the mountains seems paradigmatic: “I read a story about a European researcher from the beginning of the 20th century who was in the United States and arrived in Hopi territory. He had asked someone from that village to facilitate his meeting with an elderly woman he wanted to interview. When he went to find her, she was standing near a rock. The researcher waited, until he said: “She’s not going to talk to me, is she?” To which his facilitator replied: “She is talking to her sister”. “But it’s a stone.” And the guy said, “What’s the matter?”[v].
Entrecho has exemplary value in his thinking, because it exemplifies a relationship different from that assumed by the Western world. Now, instead of seeing nature as a resource, we will seek to understand it as part of our own family. Instead of a rational and cold relationship with the natural world, let's establish an affective relationship with it. What is described in the excerpt, after all, is a mystical relationship. It is understood as an alternative epistemology, guarded by sub-humanity, and as a solution, in this moment of bankruptcy of the Western epistemological regime.
This, after all, is the author's big idea to postpone the end of the world. Or in other words: let the Western world end so that we can return to religious relationships with the environment. Here is reactionaryism, hidden behind such blunt criticisms of the irrational accumulation of our mode of production: it is better if it ends because, in this way, we will all be able to hear the voice of the mountains again and understand nature without resorting to rational exercise, because at that moment it will reveal itself to us as transparent.
Here it is worth reevaluating what we said based on a response that Ailton Krenak himself seems to offer in his books in defense of the rational enhancement of the man-nature relationship, which is what we did. He would certainly tell us that, very well, that may be so, but this relationship that you are defending is leading to the end of the world. The infinite enhancement of human capacity to intervene in nature and transform it for its survival will lead to a definitive environmental cataclysm, because nature is not infinite as your model assumes.
It is this answer that makes his thinking so interesting, because it reveals a kind of contemporary crossroads. In truth, no one is willing, at these points in history, to leave Western civilization. On the contrary, what everyone seems to be wanting to do is get into it. But this development model is unsustainable and will lead us to an unprecedented disaster. The dilemma is frighteningly current, but the answer it offers us is, at the very least, questionable, because it does not simply imply a change of mentality.
The West that needs to be abandoned is not a way of thinking or seeing the world, but a way of being in the world. The solution presented, due to the radicality of the critique of capitalism, is to abandon the relationship with nature that sustains our way of being.
When I'm teaching Ailton Krenak's books, I usually give a cartoonish example to my students. 1 gram of dipyrone does not grow on trees. It is the result of a relationship that man establishes with nature to manipulate available resources and transform them into goods with certain purposes. The worldview proposed by Ailton Krenak as a solution to our problems is the abandonment of dipyrone as a result of this relationship. The students agree with me that no one would be willing to give up dipyrone and end up with headaches and fever. To which I respond: but, if we don't abandon dipyrone, the world will end.
The relationship we establish with nature is leading the world to the apocalypse. The dilemma seems insoluble in their minds, because it is in fact a problem of huge proportions. The answer that Ailton Krenak offers, however, does not answer the real question: how to prevent the world from ending without abandoning the one-gram dipyrone? The question is ridiculous, because someone can always stand up and say that there are other ways to get rid of headaches other than dipyrone, and even more: the headaches we have been having are all generated by the capitalist system that consumes us. more and more.
We all agree on the second part, but the solution does not seem to be to abandon dipyrone, but to find an economic system in which we have less headaches and in which we still have the possibility of dipyrone at our disposal. Regarding the first, just rework the metaphor a little. Chemotherapy doesn't grow on trees and the whispering of rivers through rocks doesn't reveal radiotherapy to us in a transparent way. None of us are willing to abandon cancer treatments, but that is exactly what Ailton Krenak's proposal leaves us as a legacy, and what the contemporary mentality has not understood so well. Leaving the epistemological regime of the West and modern science is not changing a way of thinking and seeing the world, but changing our way of being, with all the resulting consequences.
By radicalizing his critique of capitalism, Ailton Krenak forgets that what is leading the world to its end is the economic and social system in which we live and not our separation from nature, which, apparently, has always been a dream civilization. I said above, in a controversial tone, that the death of the Doce River is also a fact of nature implicated in technical rationality, but the statement is only a half-truth, because what causes the disaster is not the separation of man and nature and or the constitution of an erroneous notion of humanity, but capitalism.
This is a less than nuanced view of the real problems we have to face, because it reduces them to what they are not: questions of epistemology. It is not about reconstituting a mystical emotional relationship with the natural world, but reorganizing the way we relate to our productive life so that it better meets the needs that arise. And amazingly: only the intensification of the transformation of nature into the object of our analysis and intervention will be able to indicate the paths to follow. Including the transformation of man into the object of our rational analysis.
In other words, it is only within Western rationality that we have any chance of surviving. We are already inside a colorful parachute. Let's put it another way: the functioning of capitalism is not revealed by the buzz of the mountains, but is only achieved through the activity of the hardheaded people who insist on trying to understand the way reality works. The human world is not at all transparent and here is perhaps the greatest danger in this reactionary proposal: abandoning the perspective of science is also leaving on the way the possibility of actually understanding the functioning of the economic system that is taking us down the cliff.
The worst thing, in the end, is that the reactionary criticism of capitalism deprives us of the only possibility we have of criticizing it in an incisive and transformative way, of assuming a triumphant stance towards it. And that is exactly why he can be so successful: his radical criticism will result in absolutely nothing, since it dismantles the possibility of criticism and, at the end of the round, reinforces the instruments of capital's domination.
But Ailton Krenak could still say something else in response to everything we said. 1 gram dipyrone is not available to everyone. Herein lies his idea of sub-humanity. The West, in the process of building the most transformative potentialization of our relationship with nature – capitalism –, established a sub-humanity that does not have access to the goods produced by itself when it is transformed into flesh in the mill of slavery and industrial work. .
It is important to note that this is not the fundamental issue of his position. He is not interested in the universalization of the supposed achievements of the Western world, because, first, he does not consider them as achievements, and, second, because he does not intend to be part of that world. You want it to end. It is this radicality that makes him interesting and that marks his reactionaryism. Even though it is not fundamental, the question is there in some way, and therefore deserves an answer. In fact, the West cannot universalize its achievements, and most likely will never achieve it under capitalism, but the very perspective that achievements must be universalized arises within the development process of this disastrous world in which we have been living.
There is a memorable excerpt from O capital, by Marx that I never forgot after the first reading: “But the force of the facts finally forced us to recognize that large industry dissolved, along with the economic basis of the old family system and the family work corresponding to it, also the companies themselves. old family relationships. It was necessary to proclaim the rights of children. (…) It was not, however, the abuse of paternal authority that created the direct or indirect exploitation of immature labor forces by capital, but, on the contrary, it was the capitalist mode of exploitation that, by suppressing the economic basis corresponding to paternal authority , converted the latter into abuse. But however terrible and repugnant the solution of the old family system within the capitalist system may seem, it remains true that large industry, by giving women, adolescents and children of both sexes a decisive role in socially organized processes of production situated outside the domestic sphere, creates the new economic foundation for a higher form of the family and the relationship between the sexes. (…) It is also evident that the composition of the working staff by individuals of both sexes and of the most diverse age groups, which in its capitalist form, natural-spontaneous and brutal – in which the worker exists for the production process, and not the production process for the worker – is a pestiferous source of degeneration and slavery, it can be converted, under the right conditions, into a source of human development.”[vi]
The excerpt is within the chapter on machinery and large industry, one of those long historical chapters in which Marx pores over extensive documentation and seeks to show the factual validity of what he was saying in an abstract key. The excerpt is memorable for several reasons, but I think the main thing here is to point out that, if all progress is a form of barbarism, all barbarism is also a form of progress. It is not the abuse of paternal authority that creates the exploitation of child labor, but the capitalist transformation of production relations that highlights paternal authority as an abuse.
Children's rights only arise from the moment the capitalist regime transforms production relations. The reasoning is similar to what I would like to show: it is the brutal radicalization of inequality by capitalism that makes the proclamation of the egalitarian universalization of goods necessary and possible.
The example of the family is interesting, because Ailton Krenak would tell us – in the imaginary dialogue we are having – that he does not see the constitution of the modern form of family as an advance, because his vision of family includes not only children and women, but also the very nature that surrounds us. The mountain, after all, is his grandfather. The stone is the sister with whom the Hopi Indian talks. It does not occur to the author, however, that the Indian woman talks to herself, since talking to stones is an impossibility as far as we know. It doesn't occur to him that this mystical conception of family did not produce the way of life in which he himself lives, because, apparently, he is also part of the Western world.
It doesn't occur to him that this form of family is outdated, not because of a blind belief in progress, but because of the discovery, at some point in human history, that stones don't talk. And it is precisely with this response that we capture the reactionary nature of his thinking. Ailton Krenak denounces barbarism without noting what it means of advancement, which implies, in other words, his inability to see advancement as barbarism.
These ideas that he shares with us are so successful because, in some way, they are part of the general ideological framework of the world we live in. These are the ideas of deconstruction, decolonial thinking, post-modernity, etc. But, truth be told, Ailton Krenak has a real advantage over his fellow Europeans and Americans: what he says is based on his experience, not only as an individual, but also as an indigenous collective.
At a certain point, still in Ideas for postponing the end of the world, he constructs a revealing opposition of expressions: “in all these places our families are going through a moment of tension in the political relations between the Brazilian State and indigenous societies”.[vii].
On one side is the Brazilian State and, on the other, indigenous families who will be characterized as societies and, in the following pages, as communities. With an accurate historical awareness, Ailton Krenak knows that this history of the State is an invention of Western civilizations and that, for their communities, which do not share the Western worldview, it is never about talking about the State, but about families, societies and communities.
This opposition has a tragic form: “the state machine acts to undo the forms of organization of our societies, seeking integration between these populations and the whole of Brazilian society”.[viii]
He is right. The idea that Indians will integrate into Brazilian society has always implied, for these communities, death. This in two senses. The first is physical death, the result of first contacts or slavery of Indians during the colonial period. When they die, they are finally part of Brazilian society. The second is death which he refers to as the destruction of his social organization. To become Brazilian, an Indian necessarily needs to stop being an Indian, since he becomes a citizen of a certain State – identified as a member of the restricted club of humanity – and no longer a member of his community of origin. His second death is cultural.
I usually read Ailton Krenak's book with my students after reading Macunaima, by Mário de Andrade. At that moment I talk to them about the transformation of this observation of facts, by Mário de Andrade, into literary material. It's simple, but also complicated. At the end of the book, after Macunaíma dies, comes that famous “Epilogue” in which the figure of the story's narrator appears, who receives it from a parrot, after not only the character's physical death, but also his cultural death, represented by the end of the language (hence the “silence of Uraricoera”).
After listening to the parrot's story, the man begins to write the book about Macunaíma, “the hero of our people”. At this point I ask the students who our people are. Who does the first person pronoun refer to? They normally talk about Brazilians, but then I present another possibility: that Macunaíma is the hero of the indigenous peoples that Mário met through Koch-Grünberg's book. That indigenous Macunaíma, hero of his indigenous people, only becomes Macunaíma, hero of our Brazilian people through the act of Mário de Andrade's own writing of history.
The person who transforms him from an indigenous hero into a Brazilian hero is Mário de Andrade himself, but this depends on the death not only of the hero, but also of his language. It is death that makes him Brazilian, because the Indian only becomes part of Brazil when he dies. Then I remind my students of another text, which I usually read with them the previous year, the I-Juca Pirama, by Gonçalves Dias. There something similar happens at the end, because the “unhappy Indian” mentioned in the poem becomes, after his death, an object of collective memory.
But he is only a collective memory, that is, he is only a national hero after his death. While he is alive, he cannot be Brazilian. Someone will still write a text doing justice to Gonçalves Dias and showing, in the light of contemporary indigenous literature, that his elocubrations about the shaman who dreams of the end of the world, or the patenan curse in the same I-Juca Pirama They are not as idealized as some critics have suggested. Premonitory, perhaps.
This idea that I try to explain to my students through the analysis of these two works that I am struggling to enter into their repertoire about the country Alfredo Bosi gave the elegant name of “sacrificial myth of Indianism”, when commenting on José de Alencar. My interest is to show them that these authors, however, no matter how much they produce works that seek to identify with the indigenous people, they always identify with them as members of a political, cultural and ideological structure into which they only enter dead and, therefore, , which they don't want to be part of.
Ailton Krenak is the other side of the coin. If, in the canon of our literary formation, the main identification is with Brazil as a country and nation project (and, therefore, with the death of the Indians), in Ailton Krenak it is about the abandonment of Brazil in the name of its communities. This is the real and material basis that gives strength to your worldview. Their abandonment of the West, although it seems like a mistake to me, is justified by what that same West represents for their specific communities.
Perhaps this is precisely why his main idea for postponing the end of the world is to hasten the end of the Western world. What seems to escape him is that, for better or for worse, the Western world has simply become the world. It became universal. When I hear people ask why European authors became universal if they start from a specific reality, I tend to think that it is because of airplanes and sea navigation.
Industry and colonial expansion universalized the European world, granting global validity to the cultural production they made. That form of sociability, due to its technological capacity, became a paradigm for the whole world. Of course, the rest will see this process as negative, because it entailed the destruction of their traditional ways of life. Negative or positive, this process is a fact. It is in this sense that Ailton Krenak's authority once again makes itself felt: he talks about the end of the world because his world of community, in fact, has ended. The world of indigenous peoples ended and was replaced by this strange thing we call Brazil, within which they occupied, throughout history, different positions. The most recent was given by the 1988 Constitution.
What he presents to us, therefore, is the possibility of replacing our Western worldview with the worldview of a world that has already ended. This is exactly why he is a reactionary, and just because he is reactionary his thoughts have so much repercussion. The only viable idea to postpone the end of the world is to end capitalism, but we all know that it will not be replaced by traditional indigenous communities (Brazilian or anywhere else in the world), and it is only because this idea is known to be harmless to reproduction. of capital itself in its neoliberal phase that it could transform into hegemony. In other words: it is only because Ailton Krenak's presence at the Brazilian Academy of Letters does not alter the conservative character of the institution in any way that he was accepted among its members.
It is also necessary to indicate an aspect to avoid confusion. The thing is, although reactionary, he remains an anti-capitalist. If reactionism makes its anti-capitalism harmless, it remains anti-capitalist. Therein lies the fundamental contribution he has to Brazilian culture. His little books add something to our culture, something latent that takes shape with him. Here we are back to the essay problem. As a thought, it seems to never stop standing, but as an enunciation it is an important move in Brazilian culture. It is a voice that announces the possibility of thinking more freely, of reintegrating orality and writing and finding a broader, more forceful meaning for what has been thought in the country.
This is the great benefit of her work: she is a voice and, as such, has a prominent place in national culture, but it is important that we always remember that it is the voice of a dead person, of someone who has no one to offer us. viable future, but only an impossible return. Because he is so radically opposed to the Western world, which has nothing to offer him other than the suffering of remembering his exterminated people, his thinking reaches the heart of the problems, although he is unable to indicate a viable solution for them.
*Filipe de Freitas Gonçalves is a PhD student in Literary Studies at UFMG.
Notes
[I] Krenak, life is not useful (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020), p. 9.
[ii] Krenak, life is not useful, cit., p. 20.
[iii] Krenak, Ideas for postponing the end of the world (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2020), p. 16.
[iv] Ibidem, P. 21-22. These ideas return at other moments in his work, sometimes with more virulence: “Many people claim that what distinguishes us from other beings is language; the fact that we speak, have discernment and create social relationships. Now, if the main mark of humans is to distinguish themselves from the rest of terrestrial life, this brings us closer to science fiction that argues that the humans who are inhabiting the earth are not from here. (…) This made me think that the Greeks, at some point, began to perceive the Earth as a mechanism, and I found it terrifying. (…). (Krenak, life is not useful, cit., p. 55-56).
[v] Krenak, Ideas for postponing the end of the world, P. 17.
[vi] Marx, The capital (São Paulo: Boitempo, 2013), p. 559-560.
[vii] Ibidem, p, 37.
[viii] Ibidem, P. 39.
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