Abstract
The introduction explores Saramago’s explicit and implicit relationship with philosophy, construing thereby a sort of framework that contextualizes the philosophical readings to be found in the chapters. It presents the few explicit references to philosophers or philosophies to be found in his writings, diaries, conferences and interviews, to show how his fictional writing rests on constant and firm philosophical foundations. More importantly, however, it shows how this “penchant” for philosophy also affects Saramago’s writing itself, the very “form” of his fiction, with what he himself calls the “essayistic temptation” of his novels: this “temptation” dissolves the divisions and separations between literary genres and transforms the novel into a “literary space,” which, as such, admits everything into his realm: essay, science, historiography, poetry—and also philosophy.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution.
Buying options
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Learn about institutional subscriptionsNotes
- 1.
On the back of Žižek’s (mis)reading of Seeing in Violence, Saul Newman has similarly mis-reinterpreted Saramago’s novel (Newman 2010: pp. 180–81). Newman, however, adds a more personal note to this shared misreading when he interestingly continues his discussion of Seeing by referring to La Boétie’s treatise Discourse on Voluntary Servitude. According to Newman, La Boétie’s “pamphlet” can be seen as a theoretical anticipation and elaboration of Saramago’s fictional realization proposed in Seeing . Still more recently Daniele Giglioli, a new upcoming voice in Italian critical theory, has taken a closer look at Seeing in his Stato di minorità (State of Minority) while making, according to us, a similar misreading. For Giglioli, who claims, as we will also do in what follows, to find in Seeing a roman philosophique containing a political allegory, Saramago’s essay is the quintessential story of impotence (Giglioli 2015, pp. 26, 24).
- 2.
More recently, Žižek has referred to Saramago once more with a different interpretation still; cf. Žižek 2016.
- 3.
It would have been interesting to discover what Zygmunt Bauman might have done with Saramago in a more structured and elaborated way. Alas, as he wrote in his diary/non-diary, Saramago has only been a late discovery, when he had already observed and accepted the fact that “a full-length study [of whatever] hoping to do justice to its object, is no longer on my cards” (Bauman 2012, p. 3). And so some, still quite cunning but small comments in his recent publications such as This is not a Diary or On Education, where a small chapter is dedicated to Saramago (Bauman and Mazzeo 2012, pp. 7–10), are, unfortunately, all we have.
- 4.
Silvia Amorim (2010) uses Camus’ thesis as an epigraph for her book on Saramago, which, in the first part, emphasizes precisely the philosophical scope of Saramago’s narrative. And she adds another, very fitting quote by Milan Kundera: “The novelist is neither historian nor prophet: he is an explorer of existence” (Kundera 2005, p. 44).
- 5.
In a 2005 interview, Saramago affirmed, in fact, the following: “Literature shouldn’t be philosophical, just like philosophy shouldn’t be literary” (Saramago 2005).
- 6.
Among the romanciers philosophes mentioned by Camus —Balzac , Sade , Melville , Stendhal , Dostoyevsky , Proust , Malraux and Kafka (Camus 1991, p. 101)—the latter takes here a particular relevance, both because Saramago himself always lists him among the great influences of his personal literary-philosophical lineage (together with Montaigne and Pessoa ; Gómez Aguilera 2010, p. 223) and because of Kafka’s philosophical relevance for many philosophers and philosophical interpretations, comparable for us to that of Saramago. In an interview, Saramago refers to Kafka when speaking about “art’s mission in society”: as for Kafka , for Saramago, too, art should be “the ax for the frozen sea within us” (Gómez Aguilera 2010, pp. 198–99; the Kafka quotation comes from a 1904 letter to Oskar Pollak, in Kafka 1977, p. 28).
- 7.
Responding to a question by his friend Armando Baptista-Bastos, Saramago even affirmed that “in a broad sense all novels are political ” (Baptista-Bastos 1996, p. 42).
- 8.
We believe it is necessary to stress our phrasing of “rendering explicit” the paradoxical relationship between Saramago the author and Saramago the politically involved individual. We have no intention, nor believe it is necessary, to “resolve” this paradoxical relationship.
- 9.
It might be interesting to underscore (and hope that someone will once dedicate himself to studying) the highly provocative (and/or fictive but for this reason not less real) similarity between José Saramago and Michel Houellebecq. Both authors, for one reason or another, experienced or decided to live in exile, and both authors situated, in reality or fiction, in Lanzarote a place of (ir)real repose.
- 10.
An “evental site,” as Badiou writes, is “[t]he site is only ever a condition of being for the event.” The site “merely opens up the possibility of an event. It is always possible that no event actually occurs. Strictly speaking, a site is only ‘evental’ insofar as it is retroactively qualified as such by the occurrence of an event… there is no event save relative to a historical situation, even if a historical situation does not necessarily produce events” (Badiou 2005, p. 179; italics in original).
- 11.
Saramago will repeatedly discuss and explain his “allegorical turn,” for example, in another, still unpublished conference at the Université Charles de Gaulle—Lille-3 (delivered when he was awarded an Honoris Causa degree on November 5, 2004), titled De l’allégorie en tant que genre à l’allégorie en tant que nécessité (From Allegory as a Genre to Allegory as a Necessity), (qtd. in Amorim 2010, p. 23).
- 12.
Paulo de Medeiros and José N. Ornelas titled their collection of essays on Saramago precisely Da Possibilidade do Impossível (On the Possibility of the Impossible, 2007).
- 13.
That “thinking the impossible” is not only a “French connection” but relates in fact to a mark of philosophical inquiry—mainly typical of what is defined as the continental tradition of philosophy—can be evinced by mentioning another couple of titles. A first one comes from an edited volume in the honor of “one of the most exciting and controversial American Continental philosophers” (Dooley 2003, p. xi), namely, John D. Caputo; the title is A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus (Dooley 2003). A second one relates to a more recent volume by the Slovenian philosopher/psychoanalyst Slavoj Žižek entitled Demanding the Impossible (Žižek 2013). Furthermore, it should not go unmentioned that already Martin Heidegger admits that his (later) philosophy, for example, his considerations on Gelassenheit (serenity), brought him and made him think the unthinkable—that which is überhaupt nicht zu denken (Heidegger 1960, p. 64).
- 14.
It seems appropriate to add, in this context, that also the religious phenomenology—or simply religious philosophy—of Jean-Luc Marion can be situated here. In a round-table discussion on the gift and the given, Marion affirmed that, just like Derrida , his point in his book Étant donné (Marion 1997) was “to think impossibility, the impossible as such” (Caputo and Scanlon 1999, p. 72).
- 15.
Before Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (1977), Saramago had not only published three volumes of poetry and various books of chronicles but had kept experimenting with writing for most of his life: in 1947, at the age of 24, he had published a first novel, Terra do Pecado (Land of Sin) and had later proposed to a publisher another novel, Claraboia (Skylight ), rejected and published only posthumously in 2011. Moreover, in researching Saramago’s papers for a first exhibition about his life and work, José Saramago: A Consistência dos Sonhos (The Consistency of Dreams, which opened in 2007 in Lanzarote), Fernando Gómez Aguilera discovered a whole series of drafts, short stories, unfinished novels and poetry, which Saramago himself had forgotten about (cf. Gómez Aguilera 2008) and which fill therefore the gap between the publication of Terra do Pecado in 1947 and his return to publication in 1966 with the volume of poetry Os Poemas Possíveis (The Possible Poems).
Works Cited
Agamben, Giorgio. 2009. What Is a Paradigm? In The Signature of All Things: On Method. Trans. Luca D’Isanto with Kevin Attell, 9–32. New York: Zone Books.
Amorim, Silvia. 2010. José Saramago. Art, théorie et éthique du roman. Paris: L’Harmattan.
Arias, Juan. 1998. José Saramago: El amor posible. Barcelona: Planeta.
Badiou, Alain. 2005. Being and Event. Trans. Oliver Feltham. London/New York: Continuum.
Baptista-Bastos, Armando. 1996. José Saramago: Aproximação a um retrato. Lisboa: Sociedade Portuguesa de Autores – Publicações Dom Quixote.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2012. This Is Not a Diary. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bauman, Zygmunt, and Riccardo Mazzeo. 2012. On Education: Conversations with Riccardo Mazzeo. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Bloom, Harold, ed. 2005. José Saramago. Philadelphia: Chelsea House Publishers.
Camus, Albert. 1991. The Myth of Sisyphus and Other Essays. Trans. Justin O’Brien. New York: Vintage.
Caputo, John D., and Michael J. Scanlon, eds. 1999. God, the Gift and Postmodernism. Bloomington/Indianapolis: Indiana University Press.
Céu e Silva, João. 2009. Uma longa viagem com José Saramago. Oporto: Porto Editora.
Derrida, Jacques. 1994. Given Time: I. Counterfeit Money. Trans. Peggy Kamuf. Chicago/London: The University of Chicago Press.
———. 2001. On Cosmopolitanism and Forgiveness. Trans. Mark Dooley and Michael Hughes. London/New York: Routledge.
Dooley, Mark, ed. 2003. A Passion for the Impossible: John D. Caputo in Focus. Albany: SUNY Press.
Foucault, Michel. 2002. The Order of Things. An Archaeology of the Human Sciences. Trans. Alan Sheridan. London/New York: Routledge.
Giglioli, Daniele. 2015. Stato di minorità. Roma-Bari: Editori Laterza.
Gómez Aguilera, Fernando. 2008. José Saramago: A Consistência dos Sonhos. Cronobiografia. Lisbon: Caminho.
———, ed. 2010. José Saramago. Nas Suas Palavras. Lisbon: Caminho.
Grossegesse, Orlando. 1999. Saramago lesen : Werk, Leben, Bibliographie. Berlin: tranvía Verlag.
Gutting, Gary. 2013. Thinking the Impossible: French Philosophy Since 1960. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Hallward, Peter. 2003. Badiou – A Subject to Truth. Minneapolis/London: University of Minnesota Press.
Heidegger, Martin. 1960. Gelassenheit. Tübingen: Neske.
Kafka, Franz. 1977. Letters to Friends, Family and Editors. Trans. Richard and Clara Winston. New York: Schocken Books.
Kundera, Milan. 2005. The Art of the Novel. Trans. Linda Asher. London: Faber and Faber.
Marion, Jean-Luc. 1997. Étant donné. Essai d’une phénoménologie de la donation. Paris: PUF.
Marques Lopes, João. 2010. José Saramago. Biografia. Lisbon: Guerra & Paz.
Medeiros, Paulo de, and José N. Ornelas. 2007. Da Possibilidade do Impossível: Leituras de Saramago. Utrecht: Portuguese Studies Center/Opleiding Portugese Taal en Cultuur, Faculteit Geesteswetenschappen, Universiteit Utrecht.
Newman, Saul. 2010. The Politics of Postanarchism. Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press.
Reis, Carlos. 1998. Diálogos com José Saramago. Lisbon: Caminho.
Resta, Caterina. 2016. La passione dell’impossibile. Saggi su Jacques Derrida. Genova: Il Melangolo.
Saramago, José. 1999. Charla con Noé Jitrik y Jorge Glusberg en el Museo Nacional de Bellas Artes, Buenos Aires. http://www.escribirte.com/destacados/5/saramago/notas/21/charla-con-noe-jitrik-y-jorge-glusberg-en-el-museo-nacional-de-bellas-artes-buenos-aires.htm.Accessed 17 Aug 2016.
———. 2005. “Pensar, pensar y pensar”: An Event with José Saramago in the Che Guevara Room of the Casa de las Américas, La Habana, Cuba, June 18, 2006. http://laventana.casa.cult.cu/noticias/2005/06/18/pensar-pensar-y-pensar/. Accessed 15 Aug 2016.
———. 2013. Da Estátua à Pedra e Discursos de Estocolmo. Belém: ed.ufpa.
Vanhoutte, Kristof K.P. 2013. Only the Country of the Blind Will Have a King. On Žižek’s Non-lucid Reading of Saramago’s Essay on Lucidity [Seeing]. International Journal of Žižek Studies 7 (4): 1–14.
Žižek, Slavoj. 2009a. Violence: Six Sideway Reflections. London: Profile Books LTD.
———. 2009b. In Defense of Lost Causes. London: Verso.
———. 2013. Demanding the Impossible. Cambridge: Polity Press.
———. 2016. Slavoj Žižek on Clinton, Trump and the Left’s Dilemma. To Paraphrase Stalin: They are Both Worse. In These Times, November 6, http://inthesetimes.com/features/zizek_clinton_trump_lesser_evil.html. Accessed 7 Dec 2016.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2018 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Salzani, C., Vanhoutte, K.K.P. (2018). Introduction: Proteus the Philosopher, or Reading Saramago as a Lover of Wisdom. In: Salzani, C., Vanhoutte, K. (eds) Saramago’s Philosophical Heritage. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91923-2_1
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91923-2_1
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-91922-5
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-91923-2
eBook Packages: Religion and PhilosophyPhilosophy and Religion (R0)