The Reversible World: America as Dissonance in Mário de Andrade’s Paulicéia desvairada

Abstract

The French philosopher Jean-Luc Nancy has theorized the possibility of radical politics from the posture of what he calls finitude. If the individual is a finite being, then the community—the collectivity of individuals—may well be infinite, in a particular sense. While Western philosophy affords the individual being an immanent power, the community—or what Nancy calls the “being-in-common”—can never be formalized or substantiated in the same way. The individual always exists in connection to the community, of course, but the community is never reducible to any individualized form. We can see this in the futility of applying close-ended, essentialized characterizations to whole societies: Is the United States uniformly “democratic” as certain proto-authoritarian neoconservatives would have it? Are Catholics uniformly “authoritarian” as Hegel stated on several occasions? Nevertheless, political regimes can try to force such limits upon the community, and efforts to shape the community into a singular body usually amount to totalitarianism. In Benjaminian terms, the “aestheticization” of the community under the metaphor of “body” is a mode of fascism. For his part, Nancy does utilize the “body” metaphor with relation to community, albeit in an entirely different direction. At the moment the individual realizes that its body ends (is finite), the individual begins to realize that others outside itself also exist; “community” occurs in the exposition of one finite face to another finite face.