Antonio Cicero (1945-2024) -

Antonio Cicero (1945-2024)

24/10/2024

Culture • Philosophy • Literature

By JALDES MENESES*

Antonio Cicero, a delicate and thoughtful poet and philosopher, leaves behind memories, but he will not die, because his earthly work will last as long as human existence itself, not as long as the transcendent and ineffable cosmos, but as long as culture

“To keep something is to look at it, to stare at it, to gaze at it/ To admire it, that is, to illuminate it or to be illuminated by it”
(Antonio Cicero, Save).

Antonio Cicero, the great artist and intellectual who left us this week, was a polymath of his time, an ancient Greek in a state of catharsis, or a Cartesian and Enlightenment rationalist. In an agonistic physical struggle, he made a point of separating the contradictory garments of the philosopher and the poet in the unity of his body and intellect. In this living incarnation of contradiction, a special case of fusion of the finest erudition with popular music also shone through in his beautiful lifetime. Thus, Antonio Cicero was the sophisticated lyrical partner of the singer Marina Lima, his sister, and of composers such as João Bosco, Lulu Santos and Adriana Calcanhoto and, at the same time, in the other guise, a philosopher.

In turn, on the other hand, there are two major themes linked in Antonio Cicero's philosophical work: the concept of modernity and, by extension, aesthetics or, better said, the presumed configurations of an aesthetics of modernity. Regarding modernity, he attempted to formulate a rigorous, trans-historical, theoretical concept, going beyond the merely descriptive, which is not exactly a novelty, because in doing so, in fact, he was trying to rescue the best enlightened traditions of the eighteenth-century Enlightenment. The work in which he dedicates himself to modernity is called The world since the end.[I]

Some people think that modernity as a concept means the cult of the new – this definition would be better applied to the concept of avant-garde. Modernity came to constitute a historical period that incorporated, by making cuts and updates (we incorporated the tragic spirit, but gave up the sacred rituals of sacrifice), archaic elements and the Western classical canon, without problems or prejudices, like a large suction valve.

We want to be modern and Hellenic, not anachronistically Hellenic. It is known that Homer's poetics or Saint Augustine's theory of grace can contain elements of modernity and, through a healthy historical revisionism, be brought to the terrain of the contemporary and valued as creations of a universal spirit.

The central question, with regard to modernity, for Antonio Cicero, was far from residing in a cult of the new, it was raised, in Kant's words, in his final essays on the Enlightenment[ii]: modernity establishes a horizontal, sagittal, arrow-shaped relationship between time and culture, whereas in other historical times the time-cultural relationship was hierarchically vertical, in the past-present sense. The truly new fact of modernity would consist, based on Kant's lesson, in no longer conceiving the relationship to the present in terms of a relationship of value (we are in a period of “decadence” or “prosperity”, as in the authors of the crisis of civilizations, such as A. Toynbee), not longitudinally, but as a sagittal relationship to the present itself. In this way, the originality of the spirit of time would be in the recognition of modernity as a permanent now, that is, a ethos based on the transience of things as the essence of the world.

This is why, in fact, the first Enlightenment named itself, more than a historical event, as an event in the history of thought. It is no coincidence that the new philosophy book in the press, according to the editor Luiz Schwarcz, is called “The eternal now”. Antonio Cicero even coined an expression to designate this “time of eternal now” – “agorality”.

Regarding a gloss on the specificity of modern times, in Hegel's conceptualization, Jürgen Habermas states that “modernity cannot and does not want to take its criteria for orientation from the models of another era; it has to extract its normativity from itself.”[iii] It is true that we are faced with a paradox – ephemerality as the absolute. To be modern would be to admit a priori the transience of things and the subjectivity of interpretations, the awareness of the subjective and negative character of society. Strictly speaking, modernity is always an open process, a process of becoming.

Antonio Cicero uses a similar foundation to Habermas’s to investigate what he calls the “worldview” of modernity. Seeking support from Hegel, and going against the prevailing common sense of the 21st century, he states that the foundations of worldviews prior to modernity were external and positive objects, such as nation, race, and God, internalized in the process of socialization from the outside to the inside of the individual. In short, objects of domination instead of objects of freedom. In the author’s worldview, there should no longer be room, in the worldview of modernity, for “positive utopias” – in the sense of objects external to the individual.

Now, by admitting the absolute, even in the form of the transitory, the philosopher escapes the relativist and nominalist temptations of the postmodernists, who adopt the position of the now, but – and this difference is fundamental, dividing fields – as the absence of the absolute. Nothing of the sort: in Antonio Cicero, the absolute is transitoriness. An operation that demarcates fields, as we can see: conceptualizing modernity as the foundation of an absolute glimpses the possibility of thinking about an ethics of modernity, including its normative aspects.

In this respect, by postulating in the continuity of rationality (in Kant's sense), reason at the beginning of time revealed itself to be private, as, let's say, a (proto)modernity, and then the trans-historical character of modernity spread to public life, Antonio Cicero aims the target against the various relativisms and historicisms. I recall, here, Thomas Paine's polemic (the rights of man)[iv] against Edmund Burke (Reflections on the revolution in France),[v] at the dawn of the French Revolution of 1789, in the manifesto the rights of man, in which the first states, against the second, that the basis of law is not custom or the past history of the nation, but the absolute.

According to the philosopher from Piauí and Rio de Janeiro, historicist concepts such as nation, race, customs – or even the ancestral idea of God –, although current, should not be accepted as modern, since they displace the formation of subjectivity from self-awareness (Hegel) or, paradoxically, related self-care (Foucault), from self-control, from autonomy, to external and positive objects, fixed in the oppressive force of the past and the imposed norm.

On the other hand, since the now is an absolute, this perception has not only manifested itself in modern times, hence Antonio Cicero's trans-historical postulation: elements of modernity can be found in remote times. For him, in some way, modernity means a process of rationalization (Max Weber and Jürgen Habermas, among many, also thought of modernity as rationalization), authorizing the broader meaning given to the term, since rationalization, ultimately, constitutes an ontopsychic characteristic of man. Hence the distinction, made famous by Max Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno, in a pessimistic note (different from the tragic optimism that we attribute to gait by Antonio Cicero), between enlightenment (general process of rationalization) and enlightenment (intellectual movement of the 18th century).[vi]

Magical thinking rationalizes; within the myth there is a rational hard core, which is the dialectic of enlightenment. The unveiling of the “hard core” of the myth does not always occur, a historical phenomenon that only occurred in societies that managed to have what I am calling, at this point, an open relationship with the myth. The Greeks had this type of relationship, which is why philosophy and history emerged from there, discourses that, in general terms, dealt with the same themes as the myth – nature and the epic.

The fundamental difference between myth, philosophy and history, however, concerned the recording of the true as opposed to the pure and simple speculative, or the expressive symbolic, only. Take the example of Herodotus, the so-called “father of history”: concerned with the truth, dissatisfied with the heroic partiality of the epics, he went to verify the cultural residues of the Greeks’ adversaries in the Persian wars (the Persians) and also to value an adversary worthy of the Greeks. In other words, to the extent that he sought to narrate the true, the blind encountered the possibility of recognition of the other. Thus, there was certainly a “Greek modernity”, expressed in the really existing history of facts,[vii] and not of Dionysian disorder, as in Birth of Tragedy by Friedrich Nietzsche.[viii]

Certainly, only the current historical phase is truly modern, meaning the historical time in which the perception of the now became generalized. Obviously, it can be deduced that Antonio Cicero, although we give him credit for his originality, is not the first to think in these terms, although he has the virtue of establishing in the contemporary Brazilian debate, in times of rising conservative tide (even disguised, in some cases, in leftist garb) a critical rationalism inherited from the best traditions of the Enlightenment, remembering that critical reason is not anachronistic, nor right-wing, and far above a mere rationalization of the (historical and epistemological) dominance of the Capitalist West or Collective Imperialism against cultures that were the target of slavery, genocide or dependent subordination practices.

In the unfolding of seeking a rigorous concept of modernity, there are the aesthetic concerns of our author, privileged in the second book of essays Endless purposes. The title refers to Kantian aesthetics, expressed in the classic of the third of the three critiques, the famous Critique of the faculty of judgment.[ix] Kant stated that aesthetic-expressive judgment disconnects itself, for a moment, from any prior determination of utility or morality, establishing a particular sphere of judgment, and seeks to subjectively apprehend beauty.

Antonio Cicero writes, summarizing Kant and the motivation for the book's title: "Now, in order to consider a flower beautiful, we do not know nor do we need to know what kind of thing it must be objectively, so that we do not judge it according to its relative approximation to any given end: we do not consider it as a technique. Although, when we judge it beautiful, the flower seems to us to have the form of purpose, or, in other words, it seems to us to have been made on purpose, such purpose or purpose has nothing to do with any end extrinsic to the aesthetic judgment itself: it is precisely for this reason a purpose without end.".[X]

In other words, the capacity of a work of art to communicate without relying on concepts because it constitutes a singular judgment. Rivers of ink have been spilled about Kantian aesthetics, which is still very influential, for example, in Jürgen Habermas's social theory of communicative action, and it is not worth going into his commentary, which ranges from the expansion of the aesthetics of beauty to other elements, such as ugliness, to the criticism of the emphasis of aesthetics on the sphere of the spectator, instead of the artistic object. Few of the problems unraveled by Kantian aesthetics are addressed by Antonio Cicero – he already describes it and takes it into account in the examination of his objects of study, leaving a specific essay on the subject and, mainly, the evolution of its critical fortune, impasses, problems and solutions, at least throughout the 20th century, to be written.

A conscientious reader, the author had the erudition for a work of this scope. It is interesting to note, in passing, that although one of his main concerns is the relationship between philosophy and poetry, he suggests a strict demarcation of fields between the two forms of knowledge. In essence, the author takes the Kantian side in a classic debate in German philosophy: Kant's side versus that of romantic figures such as Schelling and Schlegel, philosophers who proposed a “new mythology” that introduced poetry as a new educator of humanity, in contrast to philosophy. None of that, to philosophy what belongs to philosophy; to poetry what belongs to poetry.

Endless purposes consists of multiple essays, maintaining a conceptual unity. The opening essay, Urban landscapes, and or other of the core, Poetry and philosophy, mainly discuss the relationship between poetry and philosophy (and the tangle of questions that arise from this). Perhaps this is the theoretical core of the book, together with the essay on the American art critic, well-known in the field, Clement Greenberg (The Age of Criticism: Kant, Greenberg, and Modernism).

Three poets are dissected in specific essays: Waly Salomão (Waly Salomão's phalanx of masks), Carlos Drummond de Andrade and João Cabral de Melo Neto (Drummond and modernity). There is also an important essay on tropicalism (Tropicalism and MPB) and a critical note on the (paradoxically and Brazilianly anti-modern) concept of modernity in Mário de Andrade. Finally, two essays on Greek poetics (Proteus and Epos and mythos in Homer, respectively).

Before becoming a poet, Antonio Cicero was a keen reader of poetry. It is always a risk to write about renowned authors such as Drummond and João Cabral, who have enjoyed great critical acclaim. However, Cicero did a very good job of approaching the universe of these three great poets. It is important to note that, in Drummond, Cabral and Salomão, the privileged theme of the essays is that of modernity.

It is almost a truism to say that Carlos Drummond de Andrade is the most modern of our great poets, the creator of a simple character of the world (the poet himself) grappling with contemporary dilemmas. The choice of Antonio Cicero is curious: one of the poems from what is known, by certain critical consensus, as Drummond's “second phase”, considered more mystical, introspective, and less engaged in participation – A máquina do mundo, 32 triplets in decasyllables (96 lines) – which already reveals a formal difference with modernist free verse.[xi]

The following visionary narrative occurs in the poem: a “world machine” appears before the poet, promising a kind of nirvana, in the enjoyment of a “sublime and formidable, but hermetic science”, the “total explanation of life”, the “first and singular nexus” of things. The poet refuses. The analysis of the poet from Rio de Janeiro about the man from Minas Gerais begins: “What the world machine offered the poet was the modern equivalent of what was offered to Dante, in the ‘Dark Jungle’: ‘this total explanation of life’ (…) The poet refuses this gift and continues, as he said at the beginning of the poem, in the darkness of his own disillusioned being. Disillusioned, of course, because without further deception (…) Only pre-modern worlds could claim a ‘total explanation of life’”.[xii]

This clarifies Drummond’s refusal to accept the gifts of the “world machine”. But Antonio Cicero also criticizes Carlos Drummond, condemning the tone of “resignation and mourning” with which the poet accepts the modern world, seeing an attitude similar to Max Weber’s stoicism, in the passage in which he said that one must be “virile” to be able to withstand modernity. Finally, Antonio Cicero confronts Drummond against Drummond, revealing other verses that are more active and less resigned. In any case, the author dismantles some misunderstandings in reading Drummond’s so-called “second phase”: there is no “mysticism” there, there may be disbelief and only, as a residue, a discreet nostalgia for mystical times.

Immersed in the body of the essay on Drummond through a quick commentary, it is worth giving credit to Antonio Cicero's digressions regarding João Cabral de Melo Neto, among other reasons, because it reveals elements of the author's thinking. Endless purposes, regarding the artistic avant-gardes of the 20th century. According to him, the work of the avant-gardes was to achieve artistic modernity, to demystify the conventional, academic places and forms in which common sense expects to find works of art. However, the program has already been completed. There has always been an inherent contradiction in the work of the avant-gardes: it was beneficial when it opened the range of formal possibilities and harmful when it closed them, dogmatizing the program of the incessant search for the new.

Now, since the avant-garde program has already been fulfilled, the question today is no longer precisely that of novelty, but that of permanence. In short, regarding João Cabral's poetics, especially the theoretical-analytical testimony text of the poet from Pernambuco, the well-known Cabral essay, called Poetry and composition.[xiii]

Antonio Cicero writes: “the same thing applies to Cabral’s theses as can be said about the theses of the avant-garde in general: that they are true to the extent that they open paths, and false to the extent that they close them. Thus, he considers inferior ‘poetry that speaks of things that are already poetic’, because he believes that poetry should seek to ‘raise the non-poetic to the category of the poetic’. These theses became dogmas among many young poets. Now, in limine, It is questionable to attempt to take the theme of a work of art as a basis for making aesthetic judgments about it. It is therefore evident that such theses are only half true, that is, that they are true to the extent that they mean that poetry does not need to speak of things that are already poetic; on the other hand, to the extent that they imply prohibiting poetry from speaking of things that are already poetic, they are false (…) And why could a poet not make excellent poetry by speaking of something that many other poets have already spoken about?[xiv]

Evidently, Antonio Cicero's batteries are not addressed to the poet of Dog without feathers, but to the innovative generalization of a certain Cabral diction, to an equivocal reception, on the part of many, of internal questions of poetry and the poetic conjuncture that João Cabral de Melo Neto lived, representing an avant-garde without balance.

In turn, the challenge of confronting the poetry of Waly Salomão, a recently deceased contemporary Brazilian poet (1943-2003), is completely different from that of consecrated poets. It involves covering almost virgin ground, establishing critical guidelines for the future. Antonio Cicero, in my opinion, carries out a symptomatic, almost genealogical critique, through the margins, of Salomão's text, aiming to make explicit the bundle of his encrypted intentions (the phalanx of masks), from which he concludes that the writing of the old tropicalist from Bahia is complex, for me the owner of some of the most beautiful and sonorous verses in contemporary Portuguese (an example, in Honey: “I taste your honeycomb/ I dig the direct clarity of the sky”).

There is a lot of mythology and little criticism surrounding the controversial figure of Waly Salomão. Cicero immediately refutes stereotypical versions, which were also not to the liking of the criticized poet, such as “marginal poet” and “carnivalization”. None of this, Waly Salomão’s poetry was very thought out, elaborate, resulting in intensive rewriting, in fact, standing out from the prosaic improvisation of the so-called marginals; and as for “carnivalization” (Bakthin), this does not apply either, because the late poet from Bahia denied aiming for the grotesque or the parodic, or even bringing the record of the popular to the erudite, attributes of “carnivalization”.

The essayist from Rio de Janeiro, in contrast, suggests a movement of “theatricalization” in Waly Salomão’s poetry. What does this mean? The simple social fact that we are all, in some way, theater. The author explains: “if everything is already theater, if even the fact is theater, what is the point of theatricalization? It is because the social ‘fact’ is the theater that ignores its social character”.[xv]

The poet and essayist observes that Waly Salomão was obsessed with the principles of identity and contradiction, in the figures of a fixed identity, which leads only to the self, which does not change. In turn, the radicalization of the idea of fixed identity results, as a consequence, in the denial of contradiction. I think that, by questioning the principles of identity and contradiction, Waly Salomão may have come closer to negative dialectics, in the sense of seeking a, let's say, non-identity. However, of course, the search for non-identity was more intuitive in the poet from Bahia, configuring a more viable project, since it took place in the terrain of poetic language, while Theodor Adorno's negative dialectics aimed to surprise non-identity through identity itself, through patient work within reason.

I would also like to comment on one of Waly Salomão's best-known verses, analyzed by the Rio de Janeiro essayist: “memory is an island of editing” (Open letter to John Ashbery).[xvi] Although the analysis does not mention it, I believe that Antonio Cicero should not disagree that we find ourselves before a poet, in this case, also close, perhaps involuntarily (poetry is not required to think theoretically about its intuitions), to the Benjaminian matrix: memory is not a simply unilinear and pacified process of bringing the past to light, but a complex work of selection and assembly, appearance and disappearance.

Antonio Cicero, a delicate and thoughtful poet and philosopher, is missed, but he will not die, because his earthly work will last as long as human existence itself, not as long as the transcendent and ineffable cosmos, but as long as culture. He is not enchanted, nor does he become a star, although this is a beautiful metaphor. He has become history in the incessant vertigo of the present.

*Jaldes Meneses He is a professor at the Department of History at UFPB..

Notes

[I] CICERO, Antonio. The world since the end. Lisbon: Quasi (2nd ed.), 2009.

[ii] KANT, Immanuel. Selected texts. Petrópolis: Voices, 1974.

[iii] HABERMAS, Jürgen. The philosophical discourse of modernity. São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2002, p. 12.

[iv] PAINE, Thomas. the rights of man. Petrópolis: Voices, 1989.

[v] BURKE, Edmund. Reflections on the revolution in France. Brasilia: UnB, 1997.

[vi] HORKHEIMER, Max and ADORNO, Theodor. Dialectic of Enlightenment. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1986

[vii] HEDODOTUS. History. New York: Routledge, 2001.

[viii] NIETZSCHE, Friedrich. The birth of tragedy. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2006.

[ix] KANT, Immanuel. Criticism of the faculty of judgment. Rio de Janeiro: University Forensics, 1998.

[X] CICERO, Antonio. Endless purposes. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2005, p. 198.