By ANDRÉ RICARDO DIAS*
In his farewell letter: life at hand; in an embrace, a country
In the work of Antônio Cícero, philosophy and its study gained their own space through cinema, literature and music. In the book Poetry and philosophy (2012), says: “Poetry is in the poem; philosophy is in the ideas”. There, he discusses the materiality of poetry and the dispensable nature of writing for philosophy. He supports this argument by using the examples of Socrates and Pythagoras. While with them philosophy is inscribed in the soul, it is a means, according to the quote from W. H. Auden, the poet is not someone who has something important to say, but someone who likes words – enjoys them. Or even with Mallarmé, for whom “a poem is not written with ideas, but with words”.
However, its point of contact between philosophy and poetry occurs in various ways, among other aspects, structurally, in rationality – metric –, in logic – precision – and in the coherence of ideas – concatenation.
His generation, in the continuation of post-tropicalism, went from the sobriety and fear that characterized this tropicalist influx in the lead years, to the disdainful disdain of structures; people of the counterculture, of the nocturnal, of the marginal, of the trash. The work of Antônio Cícero, perhaps, makes a deviation from the vulgar form of the marginal counterculture, maintaining a link to this movement through the gloomy, disenchanted aspects and themes; as later, in Virgin, are the lights that come on, but not because of you – they don’t even need you.
Poetry
There is something of concrete poetry in the artful handling of the verb to keep in his homonymous poem, here, taken as “to aim, to watch”, the antithesis of that which is “lost sight of”: “That is why the poem is so about: To keep what one wants to keep”.
Still in Virgin, philosophy and poetry in straight verse: “Things don’t need you”.
Em Fullgas, creates a “supermodern” neologism that moves between the fleetingness of the moment and a pop rhythm full throttle full steam ahead.
The archetype of the sober and pleasurable life as a mirror of his work made him a singular figure of our intellectuality, moving between the average comfort provided by our petty-bourgeois life and the attentive look at pop hit of the moment not only in the recording industry, but as a metaphor for the unbridled insanity of our time. We find the same conjugation since the nocturnal Winter, in which, “shortly before the West became astonished” there was a surge of romanticism replaced by a melancholic disenchanted world, with a light French frivolity: “happy moments are not hidden, neither in the past nor in the future”.
The “agoral”
In the book "The world since the end” (1995), a collection of essays of a philosophical nature, the search for a meaning and a core of modernity, namely, negative,[I] makes him transit, in his terms, between Descartes (“My thought”) and Heidegger (“the Incipient Apocrisis”), passing, as usual, through Kant (“Abstract Apperception”), Hegel (“the Abstract Absolute and the Concrete Absolute) and Marx (“Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft”).
In the continuation of these lines, philosophy becomes, if not a key to interpretation, a means for the exercise of understanding Brazilian cultural formation. If the breaking of historical absolutisms is characteristic of the modern, our culture is modern, because the modern is negativity par excellence made contemporary.
Anticipating our own, we find in his thought the cleavage between modernity (the moment in which it falls into the positive, or normative) and the noun modern erected as a concept. At that point where culture bears the burden of the contemporary – positivity – which constitutes itself as accident and contingency, space opens up for rupture; in one of his subtitles, the synthesis: the modern is “The Agoral”.
In effect, each era would have its own “supermodernity”: “the modern can only be surpassed by another modern (…) the term “postmodern” cannot be consistently used here or in any other context”. Incidentally, the good times of the avant-garde are when it reaches its conclusion. There is a philosopher to keep in mind.
Antônio Cícero says that “the artist is strange”, adding to our current meaning of the term the Latin “exquisite, of exquisiteness”. And as the “negative center of the world”, our artist gave himself a eudaimonic finitude, which would require little more than lucidity and sobriety. To this, the poet adds friendship. In his farewell letter: life at hand; in an embrace, a country.
* André Ricardo Dias is a psychoanalyst and professor of philosophy at Federal Rural University of Pernambuco (UFRPE).
Note
[I] “The modern conception of the world is insurmountable, since it is not conceivable to go “beyond” the negating negation or the apocrisis” (p. 164).
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