By MARILDO MENEGAT*

Foreword to Felipe Catalani's newly released book

Essays against horror

1.

According to Primo Levi, only those who did not go to the depths of that experience survived the concentration camps, in the same way that, for Adorno, after that horror, “writing a poem is a barbaric act” that “erodes even the knowledge of why it has become impossible to write poems today”.[I]

I always think about these limits when I come across the need and urgency of radical criticism of modern society in this time of widespread collapse. There is a point at which one can only return from the darkness, as happened to Perseus, if one uses something like the shield that Athena gave him, which caused the monsters to reflect themselves in it and, in effect, had their paralyzing power nullified.

However, it is not enough to simply look away from Gorgon to prevent the petrification of the senses – which have long been subject to the process of reification that the commodification of life produces. The shield, in fact, should correspond to a more essential aspect, which is the development of critical categories that allow us to understand where the horror emanating from those eyes comes from.

Horror is not the omnipotent product of an individual, as Medusa's resentment would be in ancient myth, but the result of a society that, in crisis with its foundations, begins to produce it “almost automatically”, which ends up protecting it from its essential transformation.

This seems to be a relevant role of theory in the face of barbarity, that of not being a mere descriptive exercise of the existing that, when faced with the new, often paralyzes reflection. Since all thought is always also a way of going beyond, critical theory achieves its purpose, contrary to what common sense imagines, by showing itself to be intransigent and committed to preserving the lives of those who are threatened with succumbing and, through the search for the deepest possible understanding of this threatening reality, it provides the elements for an essential state of lucidity.

Therefore, it is driven by a desperation that does not abandon the life drive, but is driven by it. Since the years of the great crisis of capitalism in the 1914th century (1945-XNUMX), understanding the ways in which experience develops seems to have become a lost cause. Even so, critical thinking cannot give up on interpreting what has happened and continues to act.

The issue is that reality in capitalism is produced and reproduced without individuals knowing exactly why they do what they do and, however, despite the absurdity of such a situation, it is not enough for them to simply become aware of it for them to stop doing what they do, even when they realize that their actions are creating an extension of the destructive agony of the whole.

Thus, unlike what happened to Perseus, the invisibility that his helmet conferred on him can no longer be claimed in order to escape the labyrinth of modern society, because it is through the social relations that individuals themselves constitute that this unconscious mastery is effected. In other words, the matter of horror is not external to the telos and dynamics of these relations in which everyone participates. Interpreting this paradox is a condition for its transformation.

2.

Franz Kafka wrote his work between the outbreak of the First World War (1914-1924) and the early years of the rise of fascism. This period was the hard rock in which the monsters of modern society began to be regularly carved. A previously unknown laboratory of new figures and moments of horror came to light, putting ancient mythologies to shame with such shamelessness. From that moment on, the idea dear to German idealism of the formation of the individual capable of understanding the world and acting autonomously in it failed.

It would be better to be an oddball and outcast among the wreckage and ruins than to be a subject adapted to this failure of society. But even that cannot be of any consolation. The lives burned in the death camps are worth nothing more than the denunciation of the unspeakable that this act itself represents. This search for a new framework of realistic representation in literature, which brought these impasses to the center, was one of the lessons left by Franz Kafka. His characters are not struggling with promising situations in history. Everything that in his literature seems to make no sense is precisely the result of progress, hence the folly of those who expect it to correct and save the torturous course of the world.

The problem of understanding the dynamics of the reality of modern society in the philosophy of our time has not gone down better paths either. It is impossible to forget the case of Martin Heidegger who, just to give one example, in the opposite direction to Franz Kafka,[ii] embraced with enthusiasm and bad faith the diabolical mills in which modernizing illusions were remade amidst the apocalyptic rehearsal of the two great total wars.

Understanding the world began to demand enormous changes in the positions of the enlightened tradition.[iii] But not all changes confronted the horror head on. Some were simply a form of conformity. In a bad reality, where barbarity runs rampant, if philosophy intends to be relevant and current it must assume unambiguous positions. That is why, when Antonio Candido said that Brazilian literature was a late branch of European literature, he was affirming the need to give substance to an experience on the periphery of the system whose consciousness was no less catastrophic and traumatic than its course in the center.

Perhaps it is necessary to add – because there are always those who are distracted – that it is an intrinsic part of this course. In a certain way, the critical activity developed by him already bore the mark of Athena's shield. This activity sought to consolidate a field of radical thought capable of nullifying the paralyzing power of the monstrosities of daily life in a former slave colony.

3.

Paulo Arantes, in one of those zero-left conversations,[iv] mentioned that the very recent acclimatization of academic philosophy to our cultural circuit, a product of the post-Second World War, was fraught with tensions between a certain adaptation to the French canon, a typical training path of the scholar, and the great rejection of all this. He himself lived this dilemma of choice in his career, which began with an admirable thesis on Hegel written at a prestigious university in Paris.

This case is interesting not only because of the stature of the character in question, but mainly because it was common practice in those years of developmentalism to place great value on the advances in productive forces that certain methodological achievements brought, imagining that this would produce a broadening of the provincial and narrow cultural environment.

Against the barbarity of a military coup that took power in 1964, nothing could be better opposed in this field than the mastery of certain classical territories of philosophy (a Fichte perhaps!) to root production routines and consolidate the treatment of this intellectual work by these sides.

If I understand this crossroads correctly, we owe a lot to Marilena Chauí, who had the audacity to politicize philosophy, explicitly bringing the great questions of the present time into the body of theory. This turnaround, according to her, has its strength drawn from two essays by Merleau-Ponty: “The War Happened” and “Notes on Machiavelli.”[v]

The first is interesting, in which the French philosopher, desolate, observed a mechanism of overwhelming repetition among his peers, this after the blunder of Henri Bergson who, judging the occurrence of the First World War to be impossible, could only accept in astonishment its inevitability, when the bodies were already piling up for a retrospective count of the dead. Such alienation of philosophers from the world in which they live and suffer would be repeated in the Second World War.

The reason for this, it seems, was due to the very nature of the reflection of professional (academic) philosophy, which treated concepts and their authors as closed and coherent systems. Thus, Marilena Chauí continued, explaining Merleau-Ponty's positions, the philosophy that survived the post-war period needed to bring the experience of resistance to Nazi-fascism as a milestone for a new baptism; that is, either it was capable of taking risks or it represented nothing.

In this same zero-to-the-left conversation, while situating the reform of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy, Paulo Arantes makes a curious confession, to say the least: “if I became a specialist in Hegel […] what could I be? At most, a good professor of classical German philosophy”.[vi] This would imply giving away a strange relationship with Brazilian culture and an accommodation with the impossibility of “describing the real experience of what ambition was like in the Hegelian Era”.[vii]

I reconstruct these steps because it is more or less here that we can pull the thread that will help to explain in part the essays and occasional interventions published in Every man for himself and Brazil against all. I believe that the subject matter of the first three essays is fundamental to understanding the others. It is made up of a set of concerns that, at the time they arose, the vertigo they produced prevented us from thinking too far from the ground.

Any movement that was made was a constant reminder that an avalanche was underway and was getting closer by the minute. However, as in the famous waiting poem by Konstantinos Cavafis, no one knew for sure what (or who) the avalanche was. It is not difficult to recall the astonishment at the successive events that unfolded in 2018, as if they were planned by an evil spirit, given the mockery and contempt for the suffering of its test subjects. Turning this astonishment into a force capable of understanding that subject, it seems to me, is one of the many assets that these essays now collected produce.

Returning to the theme of Paulo Arantes' crossroads, captivated by Marilena Chauí's antics, 2018 can be noted as the year in which the influence that the reform of philosophy advocated by Merleau-Ponty produced was completely exhausted. The problem of the rise of new right cannot be framed in the chapter of political defeats. The philosophy politically dedicated to understanding the class struggle as the central contradiction of modern society has no way of deciphering what is happening.

What is precipitating, everything indicates, is a collapse of civilization of gigantic proportions. Faced with the horror that this produces, there were many who vehemently wished that the old society would be restored and that the rules of the game and good customs could finally be respected. This horror, however, was deeply engraved in the opaque gaze of all who tried to use these political categories to cross the dense darkness that has since formed. The shield of Athena, translated in this way, became nothing more than a dead weight.

Felipe Catalani was among a handful of authors who realized that the expected avalanche had arrived long ago, causing the mud it dragged along to prevent anyone from thinking clearly about the scope of an end that had been so often announced and, perhaps for that reason, always ignored. His characterization of Bolsonarism, for these reasons, has conceptual precision.

At one end, it aligns elaborations that range from Theodor Adorno – whose essays considered the return of right-wing radicalism in the 1960s – to Günther Anders – who despaired over the collective blindness to the meaning of the atomic age –, passing through Robert Kurz’s theory of collapse. The mix is ​​original and is far from being an impoverished eclecticism, since it involves “authors linked by the reflection that the end of the world is not a religious reverie”, but a real possibility that the development of capital to its ultimate limits is producing.

On the other hand, this matter would not be decipherable without a thorough knowledge of the work of Paulo Arantes, who completes it and gives it the strength, in partnership with Roberto Schwarz, to think about this end from the periphery. The key to these authors' reflection is not politics, but rather the irrelevance of a mere spectacle that it becomes in this context. With this, the treatment of the matter that makes up this present time is devoid of escape routes, just as it does not create illusory perspectives, forcing us to think about the most difficult thing: the possible end not only of civilization, but of the objectivity of the world that sustains it.

In this sense, both the authors who influence the reflection and the result that Felipe Catalani arrives at are descendants of the form of representation that Franz Kafka began to outline in the first half of the 20th century.[viii] The poetry of the text is difficult, its beauty has already been suppressed and replaced by a dry prose that has taken its place, and even when something shines, it only does so because the razor's edge of this reality has lodged itself there. In what is most important in these essays, this matter that he elaborates and contours in its edges is omnipresent.

It repeats itself in every line, but the layers of analysis that are added at each step, sometimes staggering, form a whole, even when the topic seems distant. But that doesn't stop Felipe Catalani's writing from being elegant – he has the style of someone who pays attention to everything, but only takes into account the details, so that from his exhumation he can understand what no one else is seeing. From what I can tell, this is the debut of someone who could make a big difference in the years to come (if we are lucky enough). In it, theory and fine perception come together to reflect on the monstrosities that have transformed Brazil into a dark society with no way out.

4.

The lack of a way out, in fact, also changes the character of the myth of Perseus. If horror is produced as part of the crisis of the foundations of society, then there will be no heroism that can save it. The very reference to a crisis, without qualifying it, could produce a misleading accommodation, that the way out is on the way, as a logical unfolding of the contradictions. However, the exact opposite is what horror in broad daylight shows. Interestingly, this can be seen in a detail of the book. The title – Every man for himself and Brazil against all – takes advantage of and distorts the wave of the title of Werner Herzog’s memoirs, Every man for himself and God against all.

This title, in turn, was stolen from a phrase said by Macunaima in the film by Joaquim Pedro de Andrade.[ix] In the film it appears, but in Mário de Andrade's book it is different. Werner Herzog forgets to give credit for this fate of the aforementioned. In Felipe Catalani's book, with a providential change, which is possibly due to a materialistic impulse to actualize God, the aforementioned phrase takes on an air of objective irony.

If we remember that the campaign slogan of Jair Bolsonaro – a man who, due to his lack of character, has become the essence of the banalization of evil – was “Brazil above all, God above all”, the irony comes to the fore, as we quickly realize that the exchange is the basis of a line of reasoning that does not need to be expressed. What is worth noting, however, is that the “every man for himself” remains untouched, both in the mouth of Joaquim Pedro de Andrade’s Macunaíma and in the title copied from Werner Herzog and modified by Felipe Catalani.

The interesting thing is that this part of the title does not appear in the chatter of Bolsonarism, but it is what they are thinking about when they evoke the homeland and God. After all, what sense does a sentimental appeal to God and the homeland have at this point in the disaster? The only one, perhaps, would be to affirm that the current ties that unite individuals socially (this is the meaning of the re-ligare present in the origin of every religion) are only sustained by means of a rogue faith, dominated by exchange relations, mediated by militia pastors and other figures of everyday violence.

In the title, therefore, Felipe Catalani is already warning (I don't know if he knows) that he is talking about a society and a country that have died. From the myth of Perseus, the part that is still relevant today is Athena's shield. Recognizing that the horror is the whole and that this whole is fragmented can encourage the search for solutions. Perhaps the turning point has not yet been crossed and there would still be something to do.

*Marildo Menegat is a professor at the Center for Studies of Public Policies in Human Rights at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ). Author, among other books, of Critique of Capitalism In Times of Catastrophe (Consequence, 2019). [https://amzn.to/3RF3Pee]

Reference

Felipe Catalani. Every man for himself and Brazil against all: essays and interventions. Sao Paulo, e-galaxy publisher, 2025. [https://amzn.to/3Egt03E]

The launch in São Paulo will be this Saturday, April 12th at 15 pm at Rua Capri, 50 (Pinheiros)

Notes

[I] ADORNO, TH. “Cultural criticism and society”, in: Prisms – cultural criticism and society. São Paulo: Attica, 1998, p. 26.

[ii] The importance of Kafka for the development of realistic representation in capitalism at the time of its catastrophic transition to a mature phase, between 1914 and 1945, for philosophy, can be assessed by the critical reception given to him ANDERS, G. Kafka: pro and con. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1969, and ADORNO, Th. “Notes on Kafka”, in: Cousins ​​– cultural criticism and society, New York: Routledge, 1998, pp. 239-270.

[iii] “And it is certainly no coincidence that it was two Jews who formulated this estrangement most strongly: Marx, in his analysis of the fetishistic character of commodities, and Kafka, in his description of the world as Beyond.” ANDERS, op. cit., p. 26.

[iv] ARANTES, PE “Conversation with a zero-left philosopher”, in: zero left. New York: Oxford University Press, 2004, pp. 257-298.

[v] CHAUÍ, M. “Merleau-Ponty, from 'The War Happened' to 'Note on Machiavelli'”, in: Discurso – Journal of the Philosophy Department of USP; v. 51, n. 1 (2021), pp. 59–69.

[vi] ARANTES, idem, p. 271.

[vii] Ditto, p. 275.

[viii] ADORNO says in the aforementioned essay on Kafka: “because in Kafka ambiguity and incomprehension are never attributed to the other as such (…), but also to men and social relations. (…). Kafka’s method was confirmed when the obsolete liberal traits of the anarchy of commodity production, which he so emphasizes, returned in the form of the political organization of the deregulated economy”. Op. cit., p. 256.

[ix] Cf. ESCOREL, E. “Werner Herzog relapses”, in: Magazine Piauí, June 5, 2024. https://piaui.folha.uol.com.br/werner-herzog-autobiografia-livro-macunaima/

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