On the contrary, whoever says “persuasion” necessarily says conversion, constitution of a conflictual field in which processes of identification and circuits of affects, libidinal investment, constitution of authority criteria, and so on all come into play. The field of persuasion is a battlefield, Bento Prado would often insist, not a placid arena of communicational understanding. That led him to statements such as: “The basis of a language game is not constituted by propositions susceptible to truth or falsity but corresponds only to something like a choice without any rational foundation.”21 It corresponds to a “pathological” decision, in the sense not that it is distorted, but that it is affected by a pathos that refers us back to the sensible. In a country haunted by the state’s use of “pacts” and “conciliations” allegedly animated by communicative rationality (since that was the official state ideology under the “Brazilian enlightenment” of Fernando Henrique Cardoso’s administration),22 talk of “discursive anarchy” could not fail to have rather obvious critical resonances for the readers.
At any rate, we can see that this would be a risky philosophical operation for several reasons. First, to define rational argumentation as a conflictual field of persuasion implies, at least in this case, dismantling any strict dichotomies between the psychological and the transcendental, since it entails bringing seemingly psychological categories to bear on processes of rational argumentation. Ultimately, given that the transcendental guarantee itself is put at risk, it looks as though we will just end up dissociating matters of justification from matters of fact. After all, if the basis of a language game is made up of choices with no rational foundation, nothing can justify it except the objective existence of social practices that I take to be necessary.
To see how Bento Prado deals with this question, let us begin by paying attention to the construction of a crucial passage like this:
To persuade someone is to lead that person to admit precisely what has no basis, a “mythology,” something that lies far beyond, or below, the alternative between true and false, rational and irrational, or rather between reasonableness and madness, between cosmos and chaos.23
There would be a “Nietzschean” way of interpreting this statement. If to persuade is to lead someone to admit to what ranges below the alternative between true and false, perhaps this is because truth and falsity are not the best criteria for evaluating what has the power to elicit our assent. Perhaps there are kinds of value that pertain, not to the description of states of affairs, but to the ways in which forms of life are structured. What persuades is not exactly the truth of a proposition, but the correctness of a form of life that becomes embodied when I act according to certain criteria and admit the value of certain modes of conduct and judgment. In this sense, the criterion of what persuades is tied to a value judgment concerning forms of life that carry a normative weight.
Yet the problem, far from finding a solution, has only become more complex. If I am not to fall into a new version of relativism, I must make explicit the criteria that would allow me to evaluate forms of life, for example to say that some are mutilated and pathological—since at the end of the day Bento Prado’s real inversion consists in showing to what extent the regulative idea of normality that inhabits certain conceptions of subjectivity is pathological—while others are closer to a fundamental experience. Hence a central statement such as this one:
Since language games and forms of life are internally connected, linguistic misunderstandings refer back to a disorder in life itself. And [Wittgenstein] adds that, if a disease perverts [the] use [of language games], this perversion must be traceable back to a perversion at the heart of the form of life itself. For philosophy, we must free the flow of life and broaden its sphere.24
Phusis
At this point we could appeal to that notion of a life in disorder as the ground of the liberation of all its flows that is the highest expression of Bento Prato’s recovery of phusis. This places us before a strategy that would inevitably appear to retrieve some of the themes of Heidegger’s ontological project. There would be several entry points into this discussion, but I choose one that I believe would be to Bento Prado’s liking: a commentary on a poem. The poem in question is Paul Celan’s Todtnauberg, a tribute to Heidegger written after Celan visited him in the hut located in the village that gives the poem its name. If I refer to it, it is because it orients us once again toward that swampy language that meant so much to Bento Prado and pulled him apart from Heidegger and his land:
Arnica, eyebright, the
draft from the well with the
star-die on top,
in the
Hütte,
written in the book
—whose name did it record
before mine?—,
in this book
the line about
a hope, today,
for a thinker’s
word
to come,
in the heart,
forest sward, unleveled,
orchis and orchis, singly,
raw exchanges, later, while driving,
clearly,
he who drives us, the mensch,
he also hears it,
the half-
trod log-
trails on the highmoor,
humidity,
much.25
It would be possible to give this poem an impoverished interpretation, treating it as a narrative or stylized account of an encounter that effectively took place between Celan and Heidegger. (They met at Heidegger’s hut, there really was a well by the entrance, there really was a book in which visitors wrote down their names …) Instead, we should view it as a clear reflection, by the poet Celan, on the philosopher Heidegger, whose thought he indeed knew well.
Celan’s poem begins by mobilizing figures of phusis, a phusis that, as Heidegger reminded us, “is a fundamental Greek word for Being.”26 It is no coincidence that the first verses refer to medicinal plants, arnica and eyebright (Augentrost, literally “solace of the eyes”). Phusis appears here as care, protection, and cure, the restoration of an original form after illness. Yet the poem closes with phusis decomposing in the swamp, in humidity, in dead tree-flanked half-trod log trails. This is the decomposition of that which no longer protects us but implicates us in its liminal existence and, precisely for that reason, appears as a path, even if only a half-path.
We could say that the whole poem is a description of the movement of emergence of an “unthought” whose name cannot be heard, as we are still waiting for the word to come. It starts by opposing well and stars: the well as an archetypical image of origin, the stars as guides to our travels (as when we look to the sky for orientation). To drink from the well is to “take in what rises and bring away what has been received.”27 Acting is undercut by figures of receiving, but of a receiving that places itself as a source. The received that unfolds here is the contingency that “destitutes” me, the accident that refers back to the fact that there is no destiny at the origin. Thus to drink from the well while having “dice stars” above us is to place the downward movement toward the source under the upward movement of the eyes, which discover chance in stellar constellations. These are two figures of phusis played against each other, two different images of what Heidegger describes so aptly as a “defenselessness [that] itself affords safebeing”28 because it is an opening to what is not human, to what is not a mere expression of the human will.
Well