Brazil, what time is it?

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By VITOR MORAIS GRAZIANI*

The clock in Brazil points out that the time is for barbarism, consent or revolution

 

“Brazil will succeed because I want it to” (Caetano Veloso).

 

1.

Last year, while the inhabitants of this Brazilian land were dying in fits and starts and we found ourselves trapped in the face of the need to demand tougher restriction measures for the epidemic we were facing, as well as a vaccine, which could lessen the agony, the bubble left wing of Twitter decided to revive (without ever having died) a key figure in our history. I speak of Maria da Conceição Tavares. For months at a time, when rolling through the feed From that social network, I would come across short videos of interviews and classes by the Portuguese economist who fled Salazarism and settled in Brazil since the 1950s.[I]

For a long time I tried to think about the meaning behind it, after all, it was a phenomenon beyond intellectual networks, since in other networks: social networks, among people my age who seemed to dream in times of nihilism. In the midst of the “neoliberal revolution”, which instituted, in the terms of Pierre Dardot and Christian Laval, a shift in mentalities,[ii] expanded in the Brazilian case with the rise of the spirit of entrepreneurship during the Lulista years, turned against the sorcerer in the form of “Bolsonarism”,[iii] what is the meaning of claiming Maria da Conceição Tavares, one of the top names of national-developmentalism hit by 1964?

I believe that there are two more immediate factors: the first, a future on the part of the new generations around the ideas crystallized in actions to overcome underdevelopment, a debate that has been closed for decades among most economists; the second, a drive for heated discussion (I try to avoid the idea of ​​“radicalization”, but if the reader prefers it that way, let’s stick with it), a key feature of the economist’s statements and of a time when the emancipation of the people was dreamed of Brazilian.

 

2.

I do not intend, with this essay, to analyze the years of acute systemic crisis that Brazil has faced (at least since 2013? At least since 2016? At least since 2018? At least since 2020?). What I want, above all, is to establish an analysis of the relationship, which is dialectical in our case, about past and future, in order to try to explain this echo of a developmentalist past precisely at the moment of its ultra-twentieth day mass. Broadly speaking, how can our past influence our future? After all, it has been known for a long time that the country of the future, alluded to by Stefan Zweig in a book-manifesto – for the country and for life, after all, it was his life that was at risk when he wrote it, with the possibility of extradition to Germany Nazi –, not only did it not succeed, but it fulfilled its ideal in an opposite key: in fact, we are at the forefront of the world, but in what concerns its destruction (“Brazilianitazion").[iv]

So, how not to make a blank slate of the past? The official political culture now established, based on considering the opponent as an enemy (any echo with the theory of the internal enemy will not be a mere coincidence), and in turn on the consequent moral demobilization of the latter, leaves no doubt on this point. The developmentalist past no longer makes sense in the present. If so, then where to draw inspiration from? Francisco Alambert, in an essay in which he analyzes what he called “the reinvention of the Modern Art Week” of 1922 each decade, reminds us of something that Luiz Recamán had already pointed out in 2001 and which should be remembered: “without a classic history – which revived in Europe a classicizing fascist style nostalgic for the great empires – we were the very raw material of modernity”.[v]

Once again, the notion of the country as the world's unique vanguard appears here; however, let's see: it is precisely our absence of a “classic” past that impels us to the urgency of modernity, something completely opposite to what is there today. What we see, disguised by an ideological comedy of reappropriation of the slave-owning, colonial, and even imperial, but above all slave-owning (read: violent and modern) past, is much more a drive to annul developmentalist illusions than to reconstruct of that past. After all, history does not repeat itself as a tragedy.

Returning to the question, what can our past teach us? And here I am referring, it is necessary to say, to a specific past: that of the insertion of modern, developed Brazil in the concert of nations – read in chronological terms: 1930 to 1964, plus the survival, on the right, of the Civil-Miliary Dictatorship. Well then. In a 2020 interview with the program Live Wheel, Caetano Veloso, a key figure in understanding the mess now established, commented that this period would be the result of the “meeting of three sad races” (the reference, in turn, is to the sad tropics, by Lévi-Strauss).[vi]

Caetano's position is curious and at the same time important, because it brings to light a certain disbelief – a key characteristic of the work of the Santamarense – in relation to the country's emancipation potential in those golden years of Brazilian-style capitalism. Although it is difficult to accept that whiteness has some sadness in its exploitative actions, it is undeniable that its fusion with blackness and the indigenous people, who were destroyed by them and almost erased from the map by the darkest thing in our past, is loaded with of sorrows.

It turns out that this process, which characterized a good part of our history, was full of its subtleties. A good example of this can be identified in the music of Heitor Villa-Lobos, especially in his Choros nº 10 – “Rasga o Coração”, 1926: there, the three constituent races of the country meet and the outcome could not be less interesting. The white composer and the European symphonic structure with a sound learned from the chorões of the 1910s are joined by indigenous melodies of the Pareci (“Jakatá kamarajá / Tayapó kamarajá…”) to the choro “Iara”, by Anacleto de Medeiros, lyrics by Catulo da Cearense Passion with the title “Rasga o Coração”, representative of the fusion of races in a single redemptive sign to flow into a syncopated form, heir to modern samba (representative of Afro-descendant populations) and… authoritarian[vii]!

And here, a little excursion. Modern samba, also the result of the “mixing” between the three constituent races of the country, but exercised by agents excluded from society[viii], at least in his production (often collective), found himself in shock with what José Miguel Wisnik called a certain “authoritarian pedagogy” in the work of modern classical composers, whose prime example would be precisely Villa-Lobos (who, it should be remembered, participated in the Week of 22)[ix]: a drive by parts of these to protect popular culture, which would come against the Varguista State, also authoritarian.

In other words, after all, “the fraternization zone” between the mythological three constituent races of the country, an idea advocated by Gilberto Freyre,[X] would be, deep down and for the sake of truth, based on the removal of structuring characteristics of each one (especially the black-African and the indigenous) to give way to something new, essentially Brazilian, at the expense of the civilizing effect of the white man, something openly exemplified in the aforementioned work by Villa-Lobos.

Excluding modernity? Unify to be able to continue existing? The fact is that these are questions that are completely opposite to what is there today: this past, the past of authoritarian modernity, but which is also the past of Maria da Conceição Tavares, Vargas, Juscelino and Jango, would make little sense. How to fraternize differences, a crucial characteristic of that Brazil, if today the imperative is, essentially, destructive, heading towards a civil war, to return to Dardot and Laval[xi]? As the sociologist Rafael Carneiro Vasques predicted to me in the light of recent events: “Gilberto Freyre's Brazil is dead”.[xii] It ended, it became a putrefying corpse.

 

3.

Returning to the question that moves us here, why, after all, return to Maria da Conceição Tavares at this moment? And, nevertheless, what does the Brazilian past (and here again I repeat that I deal with the period 1930 – 1964) have to offer us as an entity that mobilizes hearts and minds with a view to transforming the future? Well, Conceição Tavares is known, as already mentioned, for having believed, up to a certain point, in the possibility of inserting Brazil in the procession of developed countries. It turns out that “it was a country, underdeveloped, underdeveloped” (the reference is to the Song of Underdevelopment, by Carlos Lyra) and the desire stayed along the way.

It is true, however, that this did not prevent it from proposing solutions to the situation that, even if they no longer involved developmentalism, stricto sensu, could promote social justice, such as the taxation of large fortunes, an unthinkable measure in any government that has former toucan governor Geraldo Alckmin in the running. So, after all, what can Maria da Conceição Tavares, a reformist par excellence, help us with in relation to our question?

I think that to answer the question, an excursion into the meaning of the idea of ​​history is necessary. In a seminal and already widespread text, “On the Concept of History”, Walter Benjamin shares an eloquent revolutionary pessimism. Without wanting to comment part by part on a text as well known as this one, I content myself with pointing to two elements: the idea of ​​the vanquished and the way in which death, and the dead, appear in his writing. Having come to light posthumously, after his suicide in the Pyrenees, fearing possible extradition to Nazi Germany, “On the Concept of History” functions, according to Michel Löwy, as Benjamin’s “testament”.[xiii], which is why a certain apocalyptic and millenarian air hovers under the writing, as well as a manifesto.

The best known passages of the Theses, those numbered six, seven, eight and nine, present a complex relationship between past and future. By presenting the idea of ​​“History of the winners” in thesis seven, Benjamin points to the fact, which he inescapable, that the past known by historiography averse to historical materialism is identified with the spirit of the winners, an idea under which it is built. the magnificent metaphor of the “triumphal procession” of the winners (Paulo Freire's trawler?).

It is interesting to note the fact that, there, and also in the other theses of this set, Benjamin offers us clues to the question: what can the past offer as an agent of transformation of the future? The idea of ​​“brushing history against the grain” can be a good way to understand the author’s answer to the question proposed here, so that it is necessary to invert the key: to focus on the construction of a true “state of exception” (Paulo Arantes has read this notion as a “state of emergency”) from the spoils of a past, more than fragmentary, erased by the procession of the winners.

But, after all, in the Brazilian experience, where does this come from? Again thinking about the period 1930-1964, it seems to me that there is a clear confusion between losers and winners, in an attempt at effective reconciliation, perhaps even thinking in terms of the emergence of a “class consciousness”, deeper than in the years of the pax lulista. A good example of this, a classic of the Varguista State, would be the solution given by Getúlio to the crisis established when the then Minister of Labor João Goulart announced a 100% increase in the minimum wage, causing an uproar among the udenista elite: Jango out fired, pleasing the winners; it turns out that the promised increase was also granted to the vanquished.

Going back to Luiz Recamán's aforementioned idea, without a classical past, we were modernity itself in its raw state. That Benjamin sees this modernity with concern, as it is synonymous with the evolution of capitalism, leaves us in no doubt: in the balance between benefiting the winners or the losers, the former would always benefit from the greater trifle of the thing. So what's left? Hence, it is important to remember another essay by the author that is now glossed over, namely, “Experience and Poverty”, written in 1933, the year of enthronement of Nazism in Germany.

There, Benjamin proposes the opposition between two barbarities: certainly, barbarism as we know it in its original meaning, that is, negative, the result of a continuous poverty of experience, a product precisely of the unfolding of this modernity; but also the “new barbarians” (Brecht, Klee, etc): those who “aspire to a world in which they can display their external and internal poverty so purely and so clearly that something decent can result from it”[xiv].

Here, as in the idea of ​​the “angel of history” of Theses, the past of the victors is almost made a clean slate in the name of another becoming, which breaks with this secular spoliation. The new barbarians would seek in the urgency of the present to build a possibility of radical change with the established order, so that this past of the winners would not serve them. Now, it seems to me that the answer to the question that mobilizes us here would be, in other words, to reinvent the past to invent the future. But be careful: it is not about reinventing any past, but the one that has always been erased by the procession of winners. To the losers, the empowerment of their bodies and minds in order to defeat the winners.

Primo Levi, a victim of Nazi-fascism, a central figure to help us face the now established negative barbarism, in his poem Song of the dead in vain, has two illuminating verses about this idea of ​​the past. Referring to those killed in the concentration camps, he predicts: “We are invincible because we are defeated / Invulnerable because we are already extinct”.[xv] If anything can be said to comment on this excerpt from Levi, I believe it is the intrinsic disconnect between them and Benjamin's prophetic statement that not even the dead will be safe if the enemy - at that time Nazi-fascism - remains victorious[xvi].

Hence the urgency of summoning the dead to messianically build the future, given that precisely because they won, they would possess the power of redemption in the Last Judgment, when they would re-emerge and, empowered, would be the only ones capable of defeating the weapons of the winners.[xvii] Benjamin's story would be, in other words, the story of those who fell on the battlefield; the history of those who, defeated, persist, through us, alive, in not realizing this condition of losers and remain present, permeating and haunting the imagination of the winners, so that, if the official past only remains the tabula rasa, to this past, remains the drive for its transformation into the future.

But let's go back to Brazil and the confusion between losers and winners in the period 1930-1964, the time of the spirit of Maria da Conceição Tavares. In the 1990s, outlining a brief genealogy of the century, Roberto Schwarz in his essay “End of Century” attested to the bankruptcy of the national-developmentalist ideals of those golden Brazilian years: development would have become an idea for which there was no more money; Brazil was left with the condition of minor partner, that is, underdeveloped, in the concert of nations.[xviii] It was the periphery condition of capitalism that reaffirmed itself. So how can we not understand the period 1930 – 1964 as a period in which, deluded, the future seemed to materialize among us, the certainty of the beauty of this future? Hence, it is no coincidence that, today, Maria da Conceição Tavares is claimed: it is this temporal spirit knocking at the door again, invincible because defeated, stubbornly not leaving the scene even today, when this set of ideas is considered antiquarian.

So, after all, what is the meaning of history in Brazil? A Cuban decided to give his opinion, thinking about the idea of ​​Latin America. And a Brazilian – and not just any Brazilian – decided to translate. And another Brazilian – with a unique voice – decided to sing. I speak of Song for the Latin American unity, by Pablo Milanés, which Chico Buarque adapted into Portuguese and Milton Nascimento recorded in Clube da Esquina 2 (1978). In fact, I am talking about the following verses from this song, which went viral in 2018, when an audio attributed to journalist Chico Pinheiro commenting on the arrest of former president Luiz Inácio Lula da Silva was leaked: “History is a happy car / Full of people happy / Who tramples indifferently / Anyone who denies it”.

Quite the opposite of what has been discussed here about the concept of history in Walter Benjamin. The concept of history presented in the song is not cynical either, it is not about inventing a non-existent history, even though dreaming, as expressed in its title, of Latin American integration. The story presented here is, broadly speaking, a story that does not allow itself to be weakened by the reason to which Latin Americans are accustomed.

Of course, it can be questioned that History is in fact a happy car, full of happy people. Even more, that these people manage to deny those who deny them. But within the MPB utopia[xx], the equation seemed to work. Our redemptive present (neither past nor future) would exist in the constant action of this “happy people” to assert themselves in the world – once again the losers and winners. It turns out that many years before a certain poet named Carlos, surnamed Andrade, already said “Minas no more”[xx] to refer to the utopian space under which the work of Milton Nascimento resides, who recorded the song. Does the real resist?

 

4.

In 2019, when we were still feeling the first effects of the Bolsonarist hecatomb, Arnaldo Antunes launched the single “The real resists”, in which he refused to accept the established barbarism because, after all, the real resisted and all that could only be a nightmare that would later pass. A nightmare that won't go away, by the way, which is the title of a book by the duo Dardot and Laval about the global mess that has prevailed, at least since the collapse of the Leman Brothers in 2008.[xxx] Turns out the pandemic came and the nightmare didn't pass. It's already been nine, six, four, two, who knows how many, years of despair in Brazil and, in light of the results of the first round of the election since 2022, the nightmare will continue. Our dreamed past, as seen, seems increasingly distant and fearful. The old recipes no longer work and the avant-garde has long since passed to the extreme right.[xxiii]. What to do?

Much has been discussed about the real possibility, in fact, that a certain past is re-emerging in this dramatic hour. With herculean strength, not the civil-military dictatorship that buried any horizon of popular emancipation in Brazil, but another past: the fascist one. That the same pact inaugurated in 1930 that produced Villa-Lobos and Drummond also produced Integralists and even Nazi parties is nothing new. But how to think about their return to power, even more so if history does not repeat itself as a tragedy? My intuition is that we do not need the characteristic “fascism” to describe our process, simply because what is happening today predates its emergence.

Since Caio Prado Jr. it is already known, for example, that we are born modern, as a minor partner of capitalism reinvented in the tropics to allow the modern slavery of black Africans[xxiii]. Built on the basis of violence, Brazil from 1930 to 1964 (and perhaps even from 1994 to 2016) was, notably, not just a deviation from the course of our vocation, but an attempt, under a high horizon of expectations, to reinvent the very notion of Brazil. Once again, the idea of ​​a tabula rasa of the present past at that moment, albeit under conservative tutelage. Why then need the idea of ​​fascism to describe us if the practices of violence, eugenics, etc., already existed here long before internationally (and maybe even nationally) earned this name?

This does not, however, negate the relevance of the fascist question. As early as 1994, a mainstream as Edward Luttwak put the question: would fascism be the wave of the future[xxv] because the victorious form of neoliberal capitalism would lead to the construction of a new and powerful fascist party, the result of a void caused by the republican right/Tory and by the welfare of the “moderate left”. Prophecies aside, there are two paths to the fascist question today and, especially, in Brazil. One of them is offered by Boaventura de Sousa Santos when he proposes in Southern epistemologies, the idea of ​​a certain “social fascism”, which could coexist with liberal political democracy[xxiv].

“Social fascism” would be something unprecedented because it would trivialize democracy for the full development of capitalism, so that democratic values ​​would be left aside in the name of a fascist social hierarchy. There are undeniably similarities with what we are experiencing, but I think Boaventura forgets that, at some point, “social fascism” would take the reins of democracy to destroy it (if, of course, we consider that what is really there is fascism).

The second path is given again by Dardot and Laval when they point out that in 2016, with the Brexit and the election of Trump, would have been inaugurating a new neoliberalism, more radical than the previous one, without explicit commitments to democracy and which would have civil war as a meta-synthesis[xxv]. More neoliberalism, and less fascism, therefore. Hence, I believe that the current situation at the time allows us to attribute precisely to the plundering of the State by the old neoliberals a reason for opening up the structuring practices of violence in peripheral countries such as Brazil: the new neoliberalism would thus also be something unprecedented, and radically more violent than the first.

Any resemblance to a colonial and slave-owning past will not be unfortunate.[xxviii]. Anyway, in the Brazilian case, what seems interesting is precisely this historical idiosyncrasy, which made our Tupiniquim fascism (I refer to Integralism) to have occurred precisely in our golden years. And that, accommodated in the Vargas State, it was able to adapt over time until it lost strength, so that the authoritarian and supremacist emergencies that we witness are much more linked to pre-1930 than post-1930 experiences.

It is no coincidence that this practice of violence has been associated with a certain “jagunço system” that now, empowered, has renounced the condition of a mere servant to become an agent (“Cheap steam / A mere servant / Of drug trafficking / Was found in the ruin / From a school under construction” – “Fora da Ordem”, Caetano Veloso). The idea, developed, among others, by Antonio Prata, reveals that the jagunçada, ubiquitous throughout our history, was also there between 1930 and 1964, doing the dirty work of expropriating to develop.[xxviii]. He gave what he gave.

But not only the jagunço typology explains this new Brazilian-style neoliberalism: there are also those who voted for the Captain for what Francisco Alambert called “complex of anything”: Hitler, but not the PT; anything but PT[xxix]! - it's about the minions. For the minion, heir to the engaged middle class of the 1960s, what matters is the discipline of the orders coming from the Bolsonarist HQ, however irrational these may be. collective cognitive dissonance[xxx]? Now, a question of the utmost importance in a world in which Satanism and Freemasonry become decisive elements in deciding who will govern the country (any connection with the episode in which, running for mayor of São Paulo in 1985, FHC was asked if he was a theist , is still valid, especially since at that time these morbid symptoms of this phenomenon were thought to be anesthetized).

 

5.

Therefore, by way of unfinished conclusion, I would like to evoke Nuno Ramos, who, when introducing his last book of essays[xxxii], he said he was writing about a Brazil he was saying goodbye to (the exact time reference is slightly more expanded than the one I adopt here: for Nuno, the Era of Moebius would go from 1881, with the publication of the The Posthumous Memoirs of Bras Cubas until the edition, in 1973, of João Gilberto's white album). I believe that's where it is: the Brazil that we, white urban middle-class intellectuals, know, dream of, and, not without doses of utopia, we believe, is over. He died. Any prospect of uplifting the country after the defeat is fragile precisely because of this, because, after all, it is impossible to defeat the defeat, given how big it is. Any alternative for social transformation in the future, as Walter Benjamin has already taught us, will come from a presentism with a view to destructive emancipation.

It is no coincidence that, precisely at the time of our reunion with democracy, when we thought we would finally defeat the defeat of 1964, Roberto Schwarz, in a book that asks precisely what time it was in Brazil in the 1980s, when commenting on the famous film Goat marked for death, by Eduardo Coutinho, wrote “It is as if at the very moment when the best and most acceptable part of the Brazilian bourgeoisie takes charge of the country – a moment to be saluted! – the best film of recent years would say, by its own aesthetic constitution and without any deliberation, that in a serious universe this class has no place”.[xxxi]

Therefore, it is not by chance that Caetano Veloso, who on so many occasions clashed with Schwarz, bets on seeing a clear path for the country, despite the pain, simply because he wants to (the reference is to “Nude with my music”) – Caetano who is also a middle-class intellectual. Reason? Because he still believes that the country he evokes in his dramatic hour of agony, none other than Maria da Conceição Tavares as his savior from the catastrophe, can succeed simply because Tavares is there, alive, having his legacy echoed among new generations , stubbornly not giving up, despite.

Now, how to make it work? Ultimately, the answer to the question will be another: the clock in Brazil indicates that the time is one of barbarism, consent or revolution, what does each of these things mean? (Whoever finds the answer wins, of course, fries, because the evolution of capitalism also updates the metaphor.)[xxxii]

*Vitor Morais Graziani is majoring in History at USP.

Notes


[I] BARROS, William. Economist Maria da Conceição Tavares becomes a “pop diva” and “enviable intellectual” for young people on the internet. Folha de S. Paul, 29.Oct.2021. Available online at: https://hashtag.blogfolha.uol.com.br/2021/10/29/economista-maria-da-conceicao-tavares-vira-diva-pop-e-intelectual-invejavel-para-jovens-na-internet/?utm_source=twitter&utm_medium=social&utm_campaign=twfolha. Accessed on: 22.10.2022

[ii] DARDOT, Pierre/LAVAL, Christian. The new reason of the world: essay on neoliberal society. São Paulo: Boitempo editorial, 2016.

[iii] NUNES, Rodrigo. Little fascisms, big business. Piaui, Oct.2021.

[iv] Among the many writings that aimed to point out this fact, two are prophetic for the moment of their writings: NOVAIS, Fernando Antonio/MELLO, João Manuel Cardoso de. Late capitalism and modern sociability. In: SCHWARCZ, Lilia KM History of private life in Brazil, volume 04. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1998; and ARANTES, Paulo Eduardo. The Brazilian fracture of the world: visions of the Brazilian laboratory of globalization. In: ___________. Zero left. São Paulo: Conrad, 2004.

[v] RECAMAN, Luiz. Neither architecture nor cities. Afterword to ARANTES, Otília. End-of-line urbanism. São Paulo: Edusp, 2001, p. 220 apoud ALAMBERT, Francis. The reinvention of the Week. In: __________. History, art and culture: essays. São Paulo: Intermeios, 2020, p. 15

[vi] Interview by Caetano Veloso to the program Live Wheel, TV Cultural, Dec.2020. Available in: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=onKg_-7rCQ0&t=2701s. Accessed on: 22.10.2022.

[vii] WISNIK, Jose Miguel. Getúlio da Paixão Cearense (Villa-Lobos and the Estado Novo). In: ________/SQUEFF, Ênio. Music. The national and the popular in Brazilian culture. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1982.

[viii] It is true that modern samba often also reinforced social exclusion: works by mestizos, blacks, etc., who aimed at their emancipation, were not recorded by them and had, in some cases, their authorship expropriated (such as “Se você jurar ”, attributed to Francisco Alves, but authored by Ismael Silva). I tried to better develop these ideas in GRAZIANI, Vitor Morais. Dilemmas of Carioca samba. the earth is round, 08.07.2022.

[ix] WISNIK, Jose Miguel. Getúlio da Paixão Cearense (Villa-Lobos and the Estado Novo). In: ________/SQUEFF, Ênio. Music. The national and the popular in Brazilian culture. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1982.

[X] FREYRE, Gilberto. Casa Grande & Senzala: formation of the Brazilian family under the patriarchal economy regime. So Paulo: Global, 2006.

[xi] DARDOT, Pierre/LAVAL, Christian. Anatomy of the new neoliberalism. Online IHU Magazine, 25.07.2019.

[xii] Personal communication, 02.10.2022.

[xiii] LÖWY, Michel. Walter Benjamin: fire warning – A reading of theses on the concept of History. São Paulo: Boitempo editorial, 2005.

[xiv] BENJAMIN, Walter. Experience and poverty. In: ________. Selected works volume 01: Magic and technique, art and politics. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1985, p. 118. I owe Francisco Alambert the reference to this basic essay by Walter Benjamin.

[xv] LEVI, Cousin. A thousand suns. São Paulo: however, 2019 apoud RAMOS, Nuno. The Fiscal Island dance. In: Fooquedeu. São Paulo: however, 2022.

[xvi] The analysis of the comparison between the two is much more Jorge Grespan's than mine, for which I am grateful.

[xvii] Vladimir Safatle also thought something similar to what I put here. For him, in the Brazilian election of 2022, it would be necessary to vote for the dead, either because of an urgency that they are not erased by the triumphal procession of the winners, or because of their invincible power, since they were defeated. See SAFATLE, Vladimir. Let the dead have the right to vote. n-1 editions, 28.10.2022. Available in: https://www.n-1edicoes.org/que-os-mortos-tenham-direito-a-votar. Accessed on: 29.10.2022.

[xviii] SCHWARZ, Robert. End of century. In: Brazilian sequences🇧🇷 São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 1999.

[xx] I understand, in the key of Marcos Napolitano, that MPB (Brazilian Popular Music) became, still in the 1960s, but already after 1964, a sociocultural institution that dreamed of conciliation of classes (mestizo, in the case of Caetano Veloso) as a solution -enigma for a country cut off by the 1964 coup. See NAPOLITANO, Marcos. following the song: political engagement and cultural industry in MPB (1959 – 1969). São Paulo: AnnaBlume/Fapesp, 2001.

[xx] ANDRADE, Carlos Drummond de. Joseph. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012.

[xxx] DARDOT, Pierre/LAVAL, Christian. Ce cauchemar qui n'en finit pas: comment le néolibéralisme défait la democracie. Paris: La Découverte, 2016.

[xxiii] The formulation of the extreme right as vanguard, which could go back to the classic essay by CLARK, TJ “The state of the spectacle”. Modernisms. São Paulo: Cosac Naify, 2007, but I owe it to Francisco Alambert's intervention in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2brMWGacaI&t=4177s. Accessed on: 29.10.2022.

[xxiii] PRADO JR., Caio. Formation of Contemporary Brazil: Colony. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2011.

[xxv] LUTTWAK, Edward. Why fascism is the wave of the future. New CEBRAP Studies, no. 40, Nov. 1994, pp. 145 – 151. Rafael Carneiro Vasques, between the first and second rounds of the 2018 election, had already warned me about this article, also quoted by Paulo Arantes in the masterful ARANTES, Paulo Eduardo. Why philosopher today? Conference held on the occasion of the Philosophy and National Life seminar: 25 years of “A French overseas department”. São Paulo: FFLCH/USP, 2019. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=miZ_1r-smuM&t=8828s. Accessed on: 23.10.2022.

[xxiv] SANTOS, Boaventura Sousa. Southern epistemologies. São Paulo: Cortez, 2010, p. 47.

[xxv] DARDOT, Pierre/LAVAL, Christian. Anatomy of the new neoliberalism. Online IHU Magazine, 25.07.2019.

[xxviii] It is worth remembering, however, that this view is not shared by authors such as Wendy Brown. For Brown, what we are facing would be the ruins of neoliberalism, which in crisis since 2008 would have died once and for all in 2016. See BROWN: Wendy. In the ruins of neoliberalism. Porto Alegre: Politeia, 2019.

[xxviii] SILVER, Antonio. #myweaponmyrules. Folha de S. Paul, 10.Nov.2019.

[xxix] ALAMBERT, Francis. Brasil diarrhea 2020. In: RAGO, Margareth/TVARDOVSKAS, Luana S./PELEGRINI, Maurício. Rise & fall of tropical paradise. São Paulo: Intermeios, 2021, pp. 61 – 71.

[xxx] ROCHA, Joao Cesar de Castro. Collective delirium led to 51 million votes for Bolsonaro. Folha de São Paulo, 07.Oct.2022.

[xxxii] RAMOS, Nuno. Make sure the same. São Paulo: however, 2019.

[xxxi] SCHWARZ, Robert. The thread of the skein. In: What time is it? São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2006, p. 77.

[xxxii] Julio d'Ávila read, annotated and commented on the essay, without your help, it would not have come to light, for which I am grateful.

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