Error, Illusion, Madness. Bento Prado, Jr.

place of thought is the collapse of place, if its geography is the abolishment of spatial limits, this is because every true exercise of thought allows itself to be carried along by an experience that is common, yet has no language of its own: a common background that is Grund as much as it is Abgrund (abyss). This reverses the poles on the horizon that seemed to furnish the normative conditions of our thought. There is no common grammar that could turn all traditions into an emulation of the same set of problems, a sort of philosophical Esperanto. Nevertheless, every specific grammar is traversed by that which it cannot fully apprehend and which produces experiences that lead to categorial metamorphoses. Bento Prado’s wager was that thinking should start from this movement of traversal, of facing up to this common that does not have its proper language but reveals itself in the chiasma between things that could be considered incompatible (just as Deleuze and Wittgenstein could be judged incompatible). At the end of the day, however improbable that may seem, this was the best possible answer to the question of what it means to do philosophy in Brazil. It was this answer that Bento Prado transmitted to us.

A common place without a proper grammar

      Perhaps this can help us understand why one of the fundamental axes of Bento Prado Jr.’s intellectual trajectory was the philosophical decision not to suspend the essential ties connecting subject and reason, even after all the critiques of the subject that twentieth-century philosophy rehearsed. This decision is one of the main reasons for the originality of his approach, as it runs against the grain of the most important trends in contemporary critical thought; and its consequences remain unexplored. Ultimately, Bento Prado Jr. took his place alongside those minoritarian currents within contemporary philosophy that tried at once to produce a reflection on the subject that staved off any kind of return to a metaphysics of identity and to resist conceiving of difference as an irreducible dispersion in which no kind of mutual implication could exist—in which subjects would never know any kind of “transformation through contagion” and would never undergo change under the effect of events external to them.

Thus, far from a constitutive subjectivity that constructed the world from within representative thought, far from a self-identical substance that would ground its normativity on processes of self-legislation and self-jurisdiction, the subject is, for these minoritarian currents to which Bento Prado belonged, a system of reflexive implication in otherness or in what decenters it. In other words, there is in the category of subject a constitutive reflexivity, but it is not a simple expression of my possession of objects, or a categorial projection of my understanding onto the world. Reflection must be freed from the figures of proprietary consciousness. Instead, one must conceive of it as a form of contagion that connects us to what resists subjection to the subject as a center. It is as if this were a matter of drawing the broader philosophical conclusions from an observation on Brazilian culture made by one of its sharpest interpreters, Paulo Emílio Salles Gomes: “We are neither Europeans nor North Americans. Lacking an original culture, nothing is foreign to us because everything is. The painful construction of ourselves develops within the rarified [sic] dialectic of not being and being someone else.”² Where we thought we were dealing with matters quite free of cultural context, we suddenly discover questions that are profoundly rooted in an indirect belonging to the peripheral condition and imbued with a vision of something that only becomes possible in some other territoriality.

      Let us keep this kind of connection in mind when we read such statements as:

      Between the Cartesian formulation of the cogito, the articulation of the meaning of Ich denke in the refutation of idealism in the first Critique, the Nietzschean demolition of that very cogito, the psychology of William James, and the “private language” argument, a whole history of categorial metamorphoses takes place.³

      That this history of categorial metamorphoses should follow the ramifications of a history of different conceptions of the subject and their functions is no coincidence. For it is the concept of subject itself that allows for thought to be a history of categorial metamorphoses, a process of transformations that result from openness to and obligatory incorporation of the non-identical produced by reflection. This is why one must insist that the contemporary task of recovering the subject is symmetrical to the demand that we understand the systems of reflexive implication that tie it to what produces decentering, and that we understand how these systems insinuate themselves in discourses such as those of modern literature and psychoanalysis.

This decentering, in turn, is the result not just of a recognition by another consciousness, but of the emergence of a ground that does not allow itself to be thought as consciousness. We should note how this strategy led Bento Prado to operate a certain slippage, always present in his texts, which consisted in deliberately associating otherness (which could in principle be something recognizable within my system of rules or language game) and a-normativity (which indicates processes whose apprehension is not subjected to any system of rules). For the otherness that really matters is the one that continuously forces me to come face to face with the limit, to think at the limit, namely in that space where the guarantees of stable control and individuation falter. A thinking capable of being touched by

      something like the absolute Other, the human whom I cannot, or no longer can, recognize as a human, the one who speaks a different language, who plays a different game. Or else, which is not too different, the un-world,⁴ a world not subject to rules, about which we cannot speak.⁵

      The central tension of the project lies in the demand to speak of an absolute “Other” that is nevertheless constitutive of me—an “Other” that no longer has the form of another consciousness but is nevertheless still capable of contaminating reflection. This apparent paradox led Bento Prado, for instance, to try to discuss, all at the same time, subject, plane of immanence (in its Deleuzian version), transcendental field (in the Sartrean mould), and psychoanalytic unconscious.

      In this tension we find what Bento Prado was trying to think through in the experience of ipseity, the theme of his last, posthumously published book.⁶ The word was chosen in order to avoid the notion of “subjectivity” and its polarity of origin, that between subject and object. But to avoid that polarity does not entail situating his philosophy on the horizon of an affirmation of immanence. Rather it means installing that polarity within the very space of the “oneself.” “What does it mean to be oneself?” is the question that opens the book. Now, whoever asks that question, or even admits that it is a question, that it may indeed be the philosophical question par excellence, will just as well concede that attempting to describe self-reference is far from a self-evident operation.

      We know that self-reference requires a language and that this language establishes limits. “I cannot leave myself or my language,” Bento Prado will say. Yet such a proposition can carry the risk of a relativistic drift that would make the plurality of linguistically structured identities into a primordial, insurmountable soil: a multiplicity that is no more than a dispersion of differences across an indifferent exteriority.

Here arises the first of the fundamental questions for a reflection on ipseity— “What would a language of my own be?”—in which one cannot help but hear the echo of a kind of angst that speaks volumes about an intellectual experience situated in Brazil. What does “my own” mean in this case? A language of my own cannot be understood as a private language, a language that lacks a force of generic implication. But to entertain the thought of such a thing as a language of my own necessarily demands that I understand the ipseity presupposed by the possessive pronoun “mine.” Is this “my own” the expression of an ontological certainty about the conditions for elucidating the uses of language and the production of meaning? We should note that it is in fact the critique of this ontological certainty that leads Bento Prado to reject Roberto Schwarz’s belief in critique as a “description of the structures that define in the last instance the field of all possible signification.”⁷ These structures would in turn ensure the clear intellection of the production of literary signification by unveiling their mechanisms of production, since “the center of gravity of critical interest moves from the work’s manifest face, its visible side or use value, to its schemes of production, the invisible