By FLÁVIO R. KOTHE*
From Dante to Danton and Danto
Anacoluthon is a figure of speech in which there is a break in the discourse, a syntactical leap, in which there is a kind of disconnection in what is being said. He doesn't say he's doing it. He just does it. This gap can be within a complex sentence, but also within the discourse, when there is a kind of parenthesis in the meaning. There is, however, another type of “gap”: it can occur between the meaning of words and what they refer to. There is a disconnection, but pretending that it does not exist.
When a person lies blatantly, he wants what he says to be assumed to be true. At first, he may be the only one who knows that what he said is not true, but in general he already believes his own lie. The recipient of the speech has the dual task of understanding what is said and understanding why it was said, and deciphering what is not said, in order to then translate what was said into what should have been said but was not.
A title is expected to be a summary of the text: the key that opens it and resolves it. Like the newspaper headline. In the era of electronic newspapers, the so-called mainstream press and its marginal tributaries, the morning reader on a cell phone tends to skim headlines to discard what he doesn't need to read, since it's already resolved in the title. There's little left.
Then, catchy headlines are created that promise things that are not fulfilled, as if they were traps to attract and hold the reader. Since what is said in the headline and in the text has little to do with the facts and much more to do with the stance of the media owners, there is a worse type of anacoluthon: that which hides the facts under qualifiers.
No matter the country or language of the media, as long as it belongs to Otanistan and is not an alternative group, Hamas will always be a terrorist, as will its allies. Benjamin Netanyahu will not be classified as a genocidal or criminal, but Vladimir Putin and Nicolás Maduro will be dictators and condemned, while the American president will be a democrat with a pure outlook, not a warmonger, genocidal, imperialist.
It seems then that what is pointed out in the title, in the newspaper headline, forgot to establish a bridge with the facts themselves. It is a kind of absolute anacoluthon, which classical rhetoric forgot to record. It not only suspends a topic for a while with the introduction of others, but forgets to return to it. This anacoluthon without a bridge pretends not to be an anacoluthon because it would be saying how things really are. The less close it is, the more often it is repeated, echoed by analogous organs in different languages and media.
When I was an undergraduate, a wealthy, left-wing Jewish student leader caused a stir when he called Israel “the armed wing of the United States.” The outrage came mainly from the strong Jewish community in Porto Alegre, as if he had betrayed the cause (this accusation was, in fact, made publicly). What neither side discussed was whether the relationship between Israel and the United States was that of the tail and the dog, since, given the size of the relationship, it seemed obvious that Israel would be the tail.
This avoided the issue of Zionism, which is a major theme in American politics and the media. With the events of the past few months, it seems that Israel is the dog, with the United States merely the tail wagging its approval (and providing weapons). A goyim cannot talk about this as if it were an issue of interest. Today, it seems that only a Jew can criticize Zionist racism.
It is therefore suggested that a title be given that which has little to do with the text, as if it were an anacoluthon, forgotten along the way, denying itself as an insertion because it lacks continuity. It is a more radical form of dissolution: what is said and what the facts are undergo a disjunction, as if they were terms without dialogue, although they seem to be one. It is enough to forget testimonies that have no longer been recorded.
This whole thing, where the critical mind is banished and stifled, is nothing new. In a way, it has always been this way. In Old testment, for example, Joshua only had to ask Jehovah for the Sun to stand still in the sky, so that the Jews would have time to finish off their “enemies” (local residents, attacked by Jewish troops under Egyptian command to take “The Promised Land”). In the Italian Renaissance painting, angels appear in prison to free Peter, as if this had been a fact, literally occurring as painted.
Of the arts, literature is the most important, as it encompasses so-called “sacred” texts that determine the worldview and political forces prevailing among believers. Sacred texts are not studied in Brazilian literature courses. When I sat down in class to examine the structure of the story of Joseph and his brothers, I could sense the unease hanging in the air, so thick that it could be cut with a knife. When I raised the question of whether a Renaissance painting by a famous painter lost its quality because it was not true, the scandal became even greater.
Language is intended to be a point of union and encounter, a dialogue between those who wish to cultivate literary art. Each person is responsible for what they write and publish. In electronic magazines, the editorial team generally does not cut or add anything. They merely adjust formal parameters. However, this is not the case in the mainstream media: everything goes through filters, the deception begins in the titles, passes through the qualifiers and does not end at the end of the article, because there is a disjunction between the facts and what was narrated about them.
This language merely reiterates the same thing, it adds nothing. However, it reinforces faith in the same thing. Like the celebrant of the divine office who awaits the response of hosannas in the highest and amens. Thus, everyone is mistaken, thinking that they are on the path to salvation. Anyone who claims to exercise critical reason is expelled in the name of faith, of absolute truth. The mainstream media of Otanistan prays like a mass and abdicates reason.
Not to lose the anacoluthon: Dante is obviously the author of the Divine Comedy, whose best part is Hell, full of gossip about popes, but which, by remaining stuck in a Catholic worldview, raises the question of how to evaluate works whose assumptions one no longer believes in. Danton was a leader of the French Revolution, he wanted politics to be sensible, but he ended up losing his head on the guillotine. Danto is a New York theorist who died a few years ago and is followed by many professors of aesthetics: his basic thesis, an inversion of Hippias' thesis that gold is beautiful, is that the more the work is recycled trash, the more contemporary it will be, but he did not mean by this that our world only produces trash.
The association of the three proper names is inappropriate, but it plays with Jakobson's notion that poetry is the projection of the principle of equivalence of the paradigmatic axis onto the syntagmatic axis (which defines a dictionary, not the poetic one, although it is a resource widely used in its language).
* Flavio R. Kothe is a retired full professor of aesthetics at the University of Brasília (UnB). Author, among other books, of Allegory, aura and fetish (Cajuína Publisher). [https://amzn.to/4bw2sGc]
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