By VINICIUS DE OLIVEIRA PRUSCH*

Considerations on Antonio Candido's essay

“The true is thus the Bacchic delirium in which there is no member that is not intoxicated, and because each member, insofar as it separates, immediately dissolves, it is also the translucent and simple repose” (Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, phenomenology of the spirit).

“The Utopian form is itself a representational reflection on radical difference” (Fredric Jameson, Archeologies of the Future: The Desire Called Utopia and Other Science Fictions).

1.

The canonization of a text, whether literary or critical, has multiple consequences. On the one hand, that object is studied more, and thus tends to understand it better. On the other hand, however, biased readings are also created, which harm the understanding of those who are just coming to the text.

The most paradigmatic case is perhaps Hegel, whose dialectic is often simplified with the formula “thesis x antithesis → synthesis”. The point is that Hegel was averse to formulas and simplistic definitions. Furthermore, reading his Phenomenology of Spirit, we notice that this triad is almost not there – it is much more in Fichte.

I personally prefer Adorno's (2022) definition of dialectics: it is a thought organized in contradictions, but which should only be organized this way because reality also operates this way. It is even simpler than simplification. Complexities arise in practice, with each dialectical reading.

In the case of the essay “Dialética da Malandragem” by Antonio Candido (1993), we also have both fruitful readings and simplifications. On the former side, I highlight the great essays by Roberto Schwarz (1987), Edu Teruki Otsuka (2007) and André Bueno (2008). On the simplifications side, we tend to read malandragem as a mere Brazilian way of being, like the famous “jeitinho”, when the thing is much more interesting than that. An example is the reading by João Cesar de Castro Rocha (2006), correctly criticized by Rodrigo Mendes (2025).

Despite the fruitful readings, I believe that there is still a lack of analysis that positions Antonio Candido’s essay, “the first properly dialectical literary study” (Schwarz, 1987, p. 129) of Brazil, in the context of dialectical criticism in a more general way. How does Antonio Candido fit into the tradition of Hegel, Marx, and Adorno? This is the central movement of this essay. Based on it, I intend to postulate some new things about the critical movement constructed by the Brazilian author.

I had already mentioned, with Theodor Adorno, that dialectics is about contradictions. The problem is that these contradictions are not always as clear as “such and such is opposed to such and such”. There is already a basic dialectic that is always there if the critical gesture is correct, the dialectic between subject and object. It is up to the subject to pursue the movement of the object as much as possible, even if he can never completely capture it (here being more Adornian than Hegelian).

In the case of literary criticism, there is also another basic dialectic: that between aesthetic form and social form. There is, however, an internal tradition to dialectics in which it is precisely “such and such thing is opposed to such and such thing” that we have. The first example is in Hegel himself (1997), more specifically in the dialectic of master and slave. Let us see how it works.

2.

On one side, we have the master. He is, in principle, free, recognizes himself as master and is recognized as such by the slave. On the other side, we have the slave. He is not free. If that were all, we would have contradiction, but not exactly dialectics, since dialectics also presupposes movement within the contradiction. Hegel's trick is this: firstly, recognition by the slave does not serve the master, since he is not, let's say, properly a person in his view.

The master would need to be recognized by an equal to feel fully master. Secondly, the slave modifies nature with his work, the master does not. The slave serves as a mediator between the master and the object. The conclusion is the following: the true master is the slave, and he is not completely free, because he depends on the slave to dominate the object. Only the slave can be truly free, if he frees himself.

The next dialectical formulation I would like to briefly revisit is the one that exists, for Marx in the first chapter of Capital (2013), between use value and value. Use value, the author states, is something natural and pre-capitalist. It has to do with the general utility of a thing. Air, for example, has use value. This use value, however, serves as the basis for value, which is not natural, but an invention of capitalism.

Value equalizes commodities, and thus also equalizes different types of labor. It makes everything “abstract,” that is the word Marx uses. Money is the form of manifestation of value. What is the possible resolution to this dialectic? The overcoming of the capitalist system, and with it, the extinction of value. (Note that, once again, this is not a middle ground between two ideas, as the notion of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis would lead one to believe.)

Finally, I would like to recover a dialectical formulation by Theodor Adorno (2015). It concerns the tension between (capitalist) society and the individual. “As much as individuals are products of the social totality, the more they, as such products, necessarily enter into contradiction with the whole”, says the author (Adorno, 2015, p. 80).

At the first level, the subject is a reflection of the whole. It was formed around exchange, around value, after all. There is another level, however, in which the subject is not identical to itself, in which something escapes instrumental reason. As long as capitalist society is not completely authoritarian, as long as subjectivation is not total (if it can be), this contradiction will exist. What is the way out – I ask again – for this dialectic? The same as Karl Marx: the dissolution of capitalist society and the creation of a “humanized” social totality. The difference is that Theodor Adorno has fewer reasons to believe that this will happen in the near future.

What else can we learn from these three formulations? I think the most important thing is that these are bad situations. Contradiction is a problem that must be solved. These are dead ends, but there always seems to be the possibility of taking a shortcut through the woods, of creating a path. And this has been the case since Hegel. The difference is that, for materialists, the shortcut through the woods is called communism.

3.

What happens with the dialectic of malandragem, in this sense, is quite curious. The contradiction, in this case, is between order and disorder. Order is understood as something that comes from above, from institutions, from property owners. Disorder is something that comes from the lower classes, from the enslaved. There is a group in the middle, however, of free men, who are not property owners and who live off favors. This group moves between order and disorder. More than that, disorder reaches the members of the ruling class themselves. It is “an order communicating with a disorder that surrounds it on all sides” (Candido, 1993, p. 36).

We have some new things with respect to tradition. To begin with, we have three terms instead of two. At first there are two, order and disorder, but then we have three, because in the middle there is the class of free men who are not property owners. (Of course, there is another possible reading: there would be two terms, and free men would be the very personification of the dialectical movement. In any case, there is some freedom with respect to the dialectical tradition.)

Secondly, and more importantly, this is not a bad situation. It is, in fact, an advantage of the peripheral society. Our society, free from guilt, would, after all, bring us closer to an “eventually open world” (Candido, 1993, p. 53) (note that Antonio Candido avoids the word “communism”).

Still thinking about how Antonio Candido dialogues, consciously or unconsciously, with the dialectical tradition, it is worth saying (which is perhaps somewhat obvious) that, in this context of Memorias de um sargento de milicias, value in its classical guise does not yet prevail. We do not have widespread wage labor, and the commodity is not exactly at the center of the social process – I recall, here, the work of Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco (1997).

This curiously helps Antonio Candido avoid falling into one of the traps that Marxists sometimes fall into: the idealization of work. As Robert Kurz (2020) demonstrates, work is a capitalist abstraction. Before value, there was no reason to call such diverse activities by the same name.

Antonio Candido seems to suggest that, in a society like Brazil, the revolution should perhaps involve less the organization of labor and more the disorganization of bums, pickpockets and the unemployed. But would these people organize themselves politically at some point? And, if the contradictory logic is fine as it is (for whom?), would there be a reason for a revolution?

Contrasting Antonio Candido with Theodor Adorno, we also have things of interest. Instead of an order – let us use this term for Adorno as well – that encompasses individuals, who, in turn, contradict this order at some level, we have an order surrounded by the disorder of individuals on all sides. It is almost as if Theodor Adorno's game were reversed. A society paradoxically (because it is slave-owning) humanized.

4.

Finally, I would like to comment on the issue of the supposed culturalism in the final part of Antonio Candido's essay. I repeat that Roberto Schwarz's essay is not only correct, but also inescapable. I disagree, however, on this point. To begin with, it is difficult to separate the final part, where culturalism would be, from the rest of the text. Antonio Candido had been drawing this reading for a long time.

Furthermore, what is the difference between this reading of a Brazilian logic in general and a capitalist logic in general in Marx and a Western logic in general in Adorno and Horkheimer? Why don't we say that they operate with generalizations? Perhaps what Antonio Candido is pointing out is that, in a society of semi-formed institutions (taking the liberty of using Theodor Adorno's term in another context), the modus operandi those below have more room to rule – despite the horror of slavery, which keeps those below in fact under control.

Isn't this a very interesting dialectic? It's as if popular sociability became autonomous from enslaved individuals, without their condition improving because of it. It's a reading with strong explanatory power.

I think, however, that there is a worse generalization in Antonio Candido’s text. It concerns the idea of ​​“disorder,” which seems to me to be a very vague term. Because all disorder comes from below? Isn’t it possible for disorder to come from the ruling classes themselves? My answer would be: without a doubt. This disorder has to do with arbitrariness and class violence. In this sense, perhaps there are two forms of disorder in the novel, not one. And Antonio Candido erases one of them. We must ask why this erasure, precisely in the years of lead, which, as Schwarz (1987, p. 154) has already noted, had something of a dialectic of order and disorder in a dark version.

The only answer I can find is that this could be a utopian bet by Antonio Candido. He wants his reader to believe in the power of modus operandi popular. Thus, it focuses on the strength that this modus operandi seems to have indeed – at this point in time, at least, the time of Memoirs –, or on the other hand, a force that he would like to be present in his historical time, even if, in the process, he erases the disorder of the leaders, or rather, transforms it into another type of disorder, discursively.

Can we allow ideology to operate in our dialectic in the name of utopia? Can we see a capitalist contradiction as positive? As long as we accept that it will be contradictory in itself, a rogue dialectic like Antonio Candido's might be able to.

*Vinicius de Oliveira Prusch He is a PhD candidate in literature at the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul (UFRGS).

Reference

Antonio Candido. Dialectics of trickery. In: The speech and the city. New York, 1993, p. 19-54.https://amzn.to/3TBXMIi]

REFERENCES

ADORNO, Theodor. Essays on Social Psychology and Psychoanalysis. Translated by Verlaine Freitas. New York: Routledge, 2015.

ADORNO, Theodor. Introduction to dialectics. Translated by Erick Calheiros de Lima. New York: Routledge, 2022.

BUENO, André. Dialectics and trickery. In: Letras Magazine, no. 74, UFPR Publishing House: Curitiba, 2008.

FRANCO, Maria Sylvia de Carvalho. Free men in the slave order. São Paulo: UNESP Publishing Foundation, 1997.

HEGEL, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich. Phenomenology of Spirit. Petrópolis: Voices, 1997.

MARX, Carl. Capital: Critique of political economy. Book I: The Process of Production of Capital. Translated by Rubens Enderle. São Paulo: Boitempo, 2013.

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OTSUKA, Edu Teruki. Quarrelsome spirit: towards a reinterpretation of Memorias de um sargento de milicias, In: Magazine of the Institute of Brazilian Studies, 44, pp. 105-124.

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SCHWARZ, Roberto. Assumptions, if I am not mistaken, of “Dialectics of Roguery”. In: What time is it? Essays. New York: Routledge, 1987.

SINGER, A. The meanings of Lulismo: gradual reform and conservative pact. São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2012. KURZ, Robert. The dictatorship of abstract time: work as a maladjustment of the modern era. In: Left bank – Boitempo magazine, No. 35, 2

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