By WILLIAM DIAZ*
Presentation of the book recently launched in Colombia, by Fabio Akcelrud Durão
1.
It is not surprising that some readers may be impatient with this book, not knowing which shelf in their imaginary library to place it on. In a society that confuses uses and values, the question about the genre of the fragments collected by Fabio Akcelrud Durão – professor of Literary Theory at the University of Campinas, Brazil – is only understandable. From the point of view of the areas of intellectual activity (philosophy, literature, history, sociology, natural sciences…), this volume seems unclassifiable.
Fragments constitute, one might suppose, a genre halfway between philosophy and literature: sometimes they are expository, sometimes they are narrative, dramatic or lyrical, or all at once. For this reason, they also lack a fixed place among the forms of discourse: they are too long to be aphorisms, maxims or sentences, and too short to be essays. Worse still, they resemble both: they seek the concreteness and precision of the language of the former, and follow the undulations of thought with the rigor of the latter.
The only thing that is evident about fragments as a genre is that nothing about them is evident. Yet the passion for defining a genre is an understandable impulse, for it implicitly points to the formulation of an instruction manual: it indicates how a given text should be read, and it is reassuring to know this sort of thing.
As a starting point, it is worth stating the obvious: the fundamental quality of fragments, as a genre, lies in what their name designates. Like the remains of ancient statues or the bare and broken pillars of a destroyed temple, fragments are pieces of something else. A fragment points to something that is not fully realized, or that perhaps was realized once, but which reaches us only as a mutilated and incomplete testimony.
“I remember the first time I held an art book in my hands and the disappointment I felt when I saw all those sculptures, in pieces or not,” writes Fabio Durão, echoing (completely involuntarily) the anguish of an impatient reader when faced with his own book. “What kind of monument is this that has no arms or head? How can it show me what does not exist?” Each fragment is like a ruin of an absent world. Articulated in a book like this, they resemble a series of pieces of sculpture arranged in a museum room for an exhibition. Each piece has its own place in the general arrangement, but it needs the others to illuminate the meanings that are latent in it.
And the total meaning, broad, rich and contradictory, is formed by the gradual accumulation of what is repeated with slight variations: the same arrangement of a hand, the similar shape of a head, the repeated representation of the torso point to a totality that does not follow a systematic plan, but rather a kind of general orientation. In the words of Fabio Durão, in the fragments “the punctuation, the synonyms, the inversions of meaning at the end, the lists” respond to a logic that “is not that of the system, nor that of delirium, but that of sedimentation.”
The similarity of the pieces in the museum obliquely explains another crucial aspect of the fragments that make up this volume: they are products of what could be called an archaeology of trivial experience. This archaeology is rigorous not because of the depth of the experiences or their ability to reveal the dark mysteries of an unconscious self – as is the case, for example, with the archaeology of experience in Proust or Freud – but because of the attitude of those who investigate them. The trivial images of the past, ranging from the disillusioned teenager faced with the images in a book to a narrative structure that is repeated in Hollywood films, are caught in the air and contemplated with strangeness by the subject who lived them. When they are thus displaced, they become catalytic substances: they not only attract new reflections, but also transform them when they come into contact with them.
The image of the art book with mutilated pieces, for example, leads Fabio Durão to imagine that all the flaws are “the wounds that time produces in the marble, and it is precisely this struggle with the years that points to something different.” And this, in turn, leads him to the current academic passion for demolishing canonical authors because they align themselves with patriarchal, Eurocentric, racist or xenophobic values. These values, he concludes, are like the scars left by the wounds of the participation of works of the past in the forms of domination that were contemporary to them. In this fragment, as in many others in the book, the beginning and the end are linked by a central motif, but what matters in the reading experience is the journey, with its digressions, deviations and paradoxes, which, seen from afar, seem to draw a closed circle.
The most direct antecedents of this book are one way street by Walter Benjamin and Minima Morality by Theodor Adorno. Adorno described the fragments of the latter as “images of thought”: more than mental representations, ideas appear in them as “things in themselves that we can contemplate, even spiritually.” In other words, the fragments give objectivity to “experiences that, from a superficial point of view, are considered subjective and contingent,” while “the subjective is only a manifestation of the objective.”[I]
This description can also be applied to Fabio Durão’s general intention. In one fragment, for example, he reflects on the implications of having received as a gift “a terrible book from a nice colleague.” What should he do with it? The resistance he feels, in any case, when faced with the possibility of simply throwing it away “bears witness to the value we insist on attaching to the idea of the book as a vehicle of knowledge and a repository of knowledge; in short, as something more than paper and ink.” Adorno says that Benjamin’s fragments—like Fabio Durão’s, it should be added—seek to set in motion thought that, in its conventional expression, has become rigid, conventional, and old-fashioned. “What cannot be tested in the usual style, and yet subdues, must incite the spontaneity and energy of thought.” Thus, through “intellectual short-circuits,” the fragments make “sparks fly that suddenly illuminate the familiar, if not set it ablaze.”[ii]
2.
The book is divided into three parts and an epilogue. Each of them forms an autonomous and independent whole; however, its initial impulse came in the writing of the first part, when Fabio Durão, then a Brazilian doctoral student at the University Duke, began writing what he called a “diary of ideas” while enjoying a year of exchange at the Free University of Berlin. “I wanted to find out what would happen if every day, or almost every day, I forced myself to write something […], avoiding reading what had already been written before”. And what he discovered was “what I already knew all along”: “that ideas possess us and not we them; that repetition is not a problem, because it makes the structure (which also ages) sediment; that delirium is not our enemy; that things are worthy; that disorder can be productive”.
This opened the door to new notes: anodyne scenes from academic life illuminating vast regions of political, economic and cultural contradictions, notes on the empire of literary theory in the field of letters, or impressions of a visiting university professor in New Delhi. And the book continues to grow in size: between the last Brazilian edition (2015) and the present translation, there are several dozen new fragments. The project, in the long term, is a perpetual Work in progress – to use the expression with which James Joyce, one of Fabio Durão's favorite authors, referred to his Finnegans Wake: the fragments will continue to grow, because that is how intellectual experience is constituted.
The author's obsessions, like those of any other person, can be counted on the fingers of one hand: capitalism, art, politics and academia. Especially the latter, since Durão is, above all, a researcher and university professor. This is evident, on the one hand, in the themes and situations of the fragments: the empirical experience is dominated by congresses and conferences, or by dialogues between professors – even when Durão visits a city like New Delhi, he does so accompanied by colleagues and young researchers, rarely by people outside the university world.
But, even more importantly, academia constitutes, in this book, an attitude towards the materials with which the author has to deal. A healthily ironic attitude – healthy because professors and researchers are, in general, not very likely to view with irony what they themselves do and think. Fabio Durão does not stick to the protocols and forms of standard academic exposition. Quite the contrary, in his fragments, academic reflection permanently doubles back on itself. Some people call this procedure “dialectics”; Fabio Durão would say that dialectics cannot be defined, only seen in its movement, or that the term dialectics, like many others, has ended up hardening itself in academic jargon, and he is right.
In any case, the general attitude of these fragments is that of a critique that constructs its own theory through its encounter with objects, but this theory is placed under the microscope of reflection to be examined closely, to see its limits and to reveal its inescapable paradoxes. As Marcos Siscar states, “in order to be consistent with its critical spirit, the book’s greatest ambition is to think for itself, in the singularity of its situation.”[iii] His method is, therefore, “a dialectic that involves its own reasons for doubt, that designates and even respects the irreducibility of objects, to such an extent and with such intensity that it can hear the 'clamor of things', letting them actively participate in the constitution of knowledge and attribute full meaning to the naming, in the first person, of a subject that is not anonymous, without therefore being individual”.[iv]
3.
The book also constructs an intellectual, social and cultural geography whose foundation is biographical. The first part, in fact, makes this explicit in its title. Durham and Berlin are the synecdoche of two different and more or less homogeneous ways of life. “In the United States…” and “in Germany…” are expressions that are repeated frequently throughout the book and are generally associated with an anecdote, an idiosyncratic custom, an architectural detail or a particular academic practice. “The world of respect for privacy is also the world of coldness and indifference (in Germany), or of panic in the face of the other (in the United States),” writes, for example, Fabio Durão.
There is something apodictic in these harsh and severe contrasts that, on the other hand, also harden two different national realities. But it is from this hardening that part of the book’s strength comes: the schematization serves to fix a facet of the object of reflection, and to construct, through the confrontation between different faces, a prismatic vision of the same phenomenon. Respect for privacy is not a univocal principle that can be observed in the same way in all cultures, but depends on precise geographical and cultural variables; in this way, a phenomenon that is apparently natural (or naturalized by certain customs and forms of discourse) appears globalized in an emphatic sense. Globalization implies communicating vessels and a standardization of experience, but at the same time it presupposes differences that must be recognized.
If the geographical scheme that supports the book is an imaginary arc between Durham and Berlin, the point of the compass is always fixed on Rio de Janeiro, Durão's hometown. Durham, where Duke University is located, only appears in the title of the first part, while Berlin is an almost ghostly presence, without architecture, without prominent places, serving only as a general landmark for some personal story or desire. Rio de Janeiro, on the other hand, is always clearly defined: the beaches of Copacabana, the character of the cariocas, the Fluminense or the Teatro Municipal exist as concrete entities, much richer and more differentiated than the bars of Berlin or the campus in the United States. In this way, the book ironizes traditional academic geography.
Fabio Durão often presents Brazil as a peripheral country, condemned to ignorance, to a subordinate position in global economic and political relations, to the consumption and application of second-hand ideas. However, the center of gravity of the book, which determines what is important and what is secondary in the author's reflections, is Brazil, with everything it contains, everything it means and everything it represents in the field of his affection: its playboys and its modernist literature, its hunger, its misery and its deficient education, its intellectuals, its teachers and its literary critics, its religiosity and its football, its arriviste middle class and its imaginary exceptionality, in short, with its people from Rio, São Paulo and the Northeast.
For the Colombian reader, and for the Spanish-speaking reader in general, Durão’s Brazil tends to become, almost automatically, the synecdoche of all of Latin America. This tendency for identification justifies, in fact, the present translation into Spanish. In one excerpt, Fabio Durão tells how he lost his umbrella in a bar in Berlin, and his joyful surprise when he found it the next day in the same place, intact. “My attachment to the umbrella ended up becoming a symptom of our underdevelopment,” he writes, and the Latin American reader cannot help but think that, in the same situation, he would have felt the same attachment. And then, undoubtedly overcome by nostalgia, Durão describes an image that could be situated in Bogotá, Lima or Mexico City: “Then I remembered Rio de Janeiro, the way the beggars surround themselves with objects that are nothing more than trash and give them value. These things become pillars of their imaginary empires, the last vestige of human dignity that allows the beggars to forget that they are of the same social substance as the rubbish they dignify.”
But it is not only because of these similar experiences that the Latin American reader can somehow appropriate Fabio Durão's book. If it were just a matter of sharing some idiosyncratic qualities, the book would be nothing more than an entertaining collection of usual scenes sprinkled with brilliant observations. After all, it must be acknowledged that there are also fragments that should produce a necessary distance, such as the one in which he reflects on Brazilian exceptionality.
Beyond all this, the author's great concern, the one that unites this entire quilt of fragments like a long thread, is the same one that has hovered like a fixed idea in American thought since its origins until today: the need for utopia. “Messianism is the child of despair,” says Durão, and rightly so. “But go ahead and try to repress all the utopian impulses that permeate our lives, all those representations or flashes that catch us by surprise, the wanderings in lines, the daydreams while we walk or eat, or even the painful passions that plague us, promising us redemption”.
These impulses are, in fact, the driving force behind the thinking of our continent, from the imagination of the conquistadors to the work of Antonio Candido or Roberto Schwarz, to whom Fabio Durão owes so much. They arise from the need to break with a reality made “of the pure sedimentation of pain, of suffering not only written on people’s skin, but rooted in things, as if the chair we sit on remembered the groan it gave when it was a tree.”
*William Diaz is a professor in the Department of Literature at the National University of Colombia.
Translation: Fernando Lima das Neves.
Reference

Fabio Akcelrud Tough. Theory in fragments. Snapshots of academic life. Bogotá, Editora Tierra Firme, 2024, 238 pages. [https://abrir.link/dfvKm]
Notes
[I] Adorno, TW “Benjamins one way street”. In: Noten zur Literature, 680-85. Frankfurt: Suhrkamp, 1981. p. 681.
[ii] Ibidp. 681.
[iii] Siscar, Marcos. “Presentation: The noise that cannot stop”. In: Fragments gathered, by Fabio Akcelrud Durão. New York: Routledge, 2015. p. 10.
[iv] Ibibp. 11.
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