Error, Illusion, Madness. Bento Prado, Jr.

would a language of my own be?,” asks Bento Prado once again. For a critique of language (or a literary critique) that were the “knowledge of the social structures that make consciousness possible and effectively produce it” would still be no more than the movement of consciousness toward itself, a movement charted in the shadow of its ontological certainty. After all, it is not the structures that decenter consciousness, at least not if they appear as an expression of social consciousness. In this case, one is still operating under a fundamental presupposition: “the thesis regarding the continuity between consciousness and knowledge, lived experience and structural knowledge.”⁹

Against this view, Bento Prado will say that my own language ought necessarily to be one capable of showing that, as Whitehead put it, “the edges of nature are always ragged.”¹⁰ Indeed it is not possible for me ever to leave my language, but it is not necessary that I do so either, because it is always ragged at the edges. Yet what does this beautiful philosophical metaphor of “being ragged at the edges” really mean? First, it implies recognition of a discontinuous articulation between linguistically constituted experience and categorial description. Language touches the world through its groundless ground, in which categorial description discovers the momentum that pushes it to overcome its limits:

      It is necessary to stop exactly at this limit where no ground is yet possible. When we believed that we were about to reach the assurance of rock and clay, of Grund, we found ourselves on the edge of the bottomless abyss, the Abgrund. It is not in the clarity of a categorial map (structure, a priori of reason, factual truth of common sense) that false problems can be dissipated and ataraxia attained.¹¹

      This is what the literature that interested Bento Prado talked about. Thus, on the importance of the marsh and the swamp in the fiction of João Guimarães Rosa, he would say:

      The marsh is proof that everything is possible in this world, that the most unexpected metamorphoses can convert the good into bad and that each face can all of a sudden be corroded and disfigured by an uncontrollable leprosy. The structure falls apart and all forms change into one another, in unbearable promiscuity. (Living) things attach themselves to one another and contact leaves a definitive stamp on them.¹²

      In other words, the swamp is like a literary image of the ground as the space in which structure falls apart, all forms change into one another, and what emerges is a background capable of corroding every form, of drowning it in a metamorphic rhythm. This swampy language is ultimately the only one that can be called my own. Thus “language figures here less as a system of signs that allows for communication among subjects than as an ‘element’ or medium, a horizon, the universal soil of all existence and destiny.”¹³

Note the decisive dichotomy. There is a language that does not recognize its communicational submission to the condition of being a system of signs. There is a language that, even if it does not communicate, is “the universal soil of all existence and destiny,” as if this were a matter of expressing the latency of a common that lacks a grammar of its own but is a common soil from which language itself and any oeuvre arise. Let us try to render explicit here a major tension at play. Let us remember something that Bento Prado wrote in his unpublished diaries: “poetry may not be fully translated, but Croce’s texts on untranslatability were translated and understood in at least twenty-four different languages.” No, poetry can never be entirely translated because, in its own way, it touches on a common that has no proper grammar and that, for this reason, does not travel from one language to another; it is not codifiable through the operations of translatability. But this impotence of language is not a weakness or a limitation. Rather it is its strength: the strength of a language that comes too close to that which can put it at risk, only so as to expose the possibility of a constant overcoming of limits. This explains perhaps why, according to Bento Prado, the one true error that a philosophy can produce is

      The error of postulating (a devout vow) too much clarity or regularity in, let us say, souls and things, too much limpidness in language. The metaphor of a nature whose profile is ragged or badly drawn is set against the categories of the instant, of place and event, such as they were defined by classical thought.¹⁴

      For what is at stake is understanding the event no longer as an element in the sense of a simple part or an indivisible atom, but as an element in the sense of an atmosphere or horizon: that is, in the sense of a field, a plane of implication that emerges beyond the therapeutic demands of a “readaptation to the world through the rediscovery, re-encounter or reconciliation with oneself, in the actuality of everyday life and its forms of expression.”¹⁵ This plane of implication will never become actualized as a logos capable of ensuring the ground of our processes of deliberation as a search for the best argument. Often, in fact, Bento Prado would describe it as the anchoring of language in phusis, as when he wrote about Guimarães Rosa’s capacity to “reveal a writing first sketched at the point zero of humanity and culture, in nature itself.”¹⁶ We will examine each of these points in time.

Before we do, however, let us remember that this nature with a ragged profile, traversed by zones of indeterminacy and inapprehension, is a way of philosophically integrating what could be understood as an originary phantasm that will haunt Brazilian national experience, namely the fantasy of a lack of fiber, of a decomposed and discontinuous reality—seen as the damning mark of a lack of foundation supposedly to be overcome. In Mário de Andrade’s words, Brazil would be a “muck of contrasts” without any logic.¹⁷ This is the narrative of a formless country, which believes at each moment that it must be refounded, severed from its dead zone of indeterminacy so that it may finally find its hour amid the developed world and its law, its supposedly clear distribution of places and firmly established individuations¹⁸—or else so that it may find its “formation,” this time in a register that is already critical of this notion of progress. It was against this originary phantasm that Bento Prado’s philosophy constituted itself.

Persuasion

      Let us now turn to a central point in Error, Illusion, Madness in order to better understand the political consequences of a philosophical experience of this kind.

      Habermas used to say:

      No matter how consistent a dropout he may be, [the radical skeptic] cannot drop out of the communicative practice of everyday life, to the presuppositions of which he remains bound. And these in turn are at least partly identical with the presuppositions of argumentation as such.¹⁹

      Even if we do not necessarily subscribe to a transcendental pragmatic standpoint, we could at least have a general grammar capable of regulating conflicts through the search for the best argument.

      However, one of Bento Prado’s major critical strategies consisted in inquiring into the structure of subjectivity presupposed by philosophical positions that wished to salvage some form of normativity immediately accessible to the subject. Such deconstructions of normativity, which went as far as claiming that the common person is no more than a “pedagogical project,” were in fact initial moves in a redimensioning of experience, since the abandonment of a normative horizon led to the acknowledgment of the “unavoidable ambiguity of experience and the discursive anarchy that it opens.”²⁰

But how are we to understand this “discursive anarchy”? Such a defense of the ambiguity of experience, of the search for an irreducible heterogeneity, a defense that supposes a discursive anarchy that resists conceptual unification, could seem at first to be merely a profession of irrationalistic—or at the very least relativistic—faith. The case supporting that accusation appears to grow when we take into account the way in which Bento Prado used to assert the impossibility of providing a positive foundation for the universalizing criteria of judgment. Seeking support in a reading of Wittgenstein’s notion of language games, Bento Prado insisted that the universalization of criteria and systems of rules was not exactly the object of a more or less transparent communicational understanding. Rather it was an object of persuasion, and whoever says “persuasion” says more than just recognition of a better argument—and, against the wishes of some