Longing for the Great Facebook in Portuguese: A Translated Phenomenology of ‘Graça’

Abstract

Starting from the Flusserian premise that every language existentially articulates what is taken for reality, we will seek throughout this chapter to make a phenomenology of grace from the lexicon ‘graça’ as it is operationalised in the Portuguese language. Thus, making the Portuguese an instrument of inquiry into the process of longing for the Great, we will trace in the peculiarities of meanings and everyday uses of the notion of ‘graça’ a way of sewing an affective phenomenology of the process of searching for the divine. To this end, we will materialise this work along the following trinity: first, locating in theorists like Vilém Flusser (Língua e Realidade. São Paulo: Annablume, 2007), Michel Foucault (O governo de si e dos outros. Tradução de Eduardo Brandão. São Paulo, Martins Fontes, 2011) and Humberto Eco (Quase a mesma coisa – experiências de tradução. Rio de Janeiro: Record, 2007) the intimate relationship between language and production of reality; second, articulating the different meanings attributed to the word ‘graça’ as it appears in the Portuguese language; and finally, using such linguistic possibilities to problematise how the present desperation for the connection with the Whole—with ‘divine grace’—is today manifesting itself through practices of technical mediation that increasingly challenge us to enter and unveil the mysteries of what we do not see or touch. We hope that in this weave of different realities, we can grasp the question: after all, what would be the ‘graça’ of smart devices connected to social networking profiles?