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Law & Literature Journal
A COURT IN THE BACKLANDS
A nomadic justice in Brazilian literature
Abstract: This paper explores a conception of justice through a reading of the Brazilian
novel The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, written by João Guimarães Rosa. In this novel,
the character of Zé Bebelo is tried by a group of jagunços, which were nomadic bandits
that lived in the northeast of Brazil. What is analyzed in this scene is the spectral
dimension of undecidability that involves a decision, and how a decision intervenes in a
field of forces and reshapes the relationships and antagonisms of a conflict. To do so, I
seek to show how this novel operates a counter-actualization of Brazilian history by
updating and making act the memory of violence and war that marks life in the peripheral
regions of Brazil. Finally, I question how justice can be possible when war is a tendency
internal to the functioning of societies? What concept of justice can be possible when
faced with this continuous tendency to disjoint the social body? Thus, I propose a concept
of justice thought before the unbalance, conflictive and differential relationships lived by
the characters of this novel in the uncertain and contingent space of the Brazilian
backlands.
Keywords: Justice; Literature; War; Virtual; History.
Introduction
In this paper I analyze the scene of the trial of the character Zé Bebelo in João
Guimarães Rosa's novel, Grande Sertão: Veredas, published in 1956 in Brazil. The novel
was translated into English by James Taylor and Harriet de Onis and published with the
title The Devil to Pay in the Backlands in the US in 1963. Through this scene, I want to
address the spectral dimension of undecidability that involves a decision. The spectrality
of the field of conflicting forces in which a decision intervenes and modifies its
antagonisms. This concept of undecidability presented by Jacques Derrida in the essay
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Force of Law (1992) is articulated here in relation to the concept of spectre developed by
the same author in his book Specters of Marx (1994). According to Derrida, every
decision is haunted by a dimension of undecidability [1]. Regardless of how much
information one has available to ensure its calculation, a decision will always have a
margin of virtuality that surrounds it with unpredictability. In this temporal dimension
that the decision can neither control nor predict its results, there are always specters of
the forces that made up the tension of its act. Derrida says that a specter is always a
revenant that cannot control its comings and goings and that is always about to return [2].
Among the many ghosts that haunt a decision, I will address in this paper the insistent
return of the ghost of social antagonisms and political conflicts that keep active the
dispersive tendency of social forms.
To do so, I first address the relationship of literature with the virtual dimension of
time and memory that is not exhausted in the empirical and actual plane of history.
Literature is presented here as a machine that invokes ghosts and conjures their spectres.
Then, I intend to show how Rosa’s novel operates a counter-actualization [3] of Brazilian
history by updating and making act the memory of violence and war that marks life in the
peripheral regions of Brazil. Next, after presenting the scene of Zé Bebelo's trial and the
conflicts that emerge from it, I characterize the jagunço gangs as warrior communities
based on a parallel with the “societies against the state” described by French
anthropologist Pierre Clastres [4] and Gilles Deleuze’s and Félix Guattari's concept of
war machine in their book A Thousand Plateaus (1987). Although I also consider the
empirical and historical context of these gangs in Brazil, it is important to highlight that
my focus is Rosa’s literary reinvention of the jagunços and what his novel allows us to
think of justice.
Finally, I ask how justice can be possible when war is a tendency internal to the
functioning of societies? What concept of justice can be possible when faced with this
continuous tendency to disjoint the social body? I want to think of a justice that makes
this disajustment its movement, as Derrida questioned, "what if disajustment were on the
contrary the condition of justice?" [5]. A nomadic justice – justiça jagunça, as I prefer to
say in Portuguese – is thought from the unbalance, conflictive and differential
relationships lived by the characters of Rosa’s novel in the uncertain and contingent space
of Brazilian backlands.
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With this, I seek to propose a concept of justice that intervenes in that which
conditions the situations of injustice. To do so, we need to talk about justice always
moving from the singular situation of the subjects to the conjectures and assemblages of
the power relations that submit the existence of some to the interests of others. This is
why I prefer not to work with the more traditional theories of justice, because they have
a set of assumptions that need to be questioned. For example, a conception of a
transcendental subject that through its logical reasoning builds an ideal of justice, seeking
to eliminate barriers and misunderstandings until it reaches a supposed objective
definition of justice. The experience of justice will always be diverse according to the
different ways in which subjective dispositions are distributed. This transcendental
subject always tends to universalize the singular perspective of a supposedly autonomous
subject capable of performing conscious acts of will, and it always tends to be the old
European white man. This conception of justice as an ideal formula thought up by certain
subjects authorized to speak from their privileged places is transcendent in relation to a
set of causes, needs and relations of force that act on subjectivity and condition the
possibilities of acting. The subjects are not necessarily conscious of these constraints
involving them when they act. It is not fair to decide on certain situations from a position
outside them, demanding ideal conduct from the subjects involved by constraints imposed
by very unfair structures and not entirely knowable and controllable by them. This is a
transcendent way of thinking about justice driven by an ideal of Good and Fair that is
alien to how existences are constituted under the need to survive under precarious living
conditions and oppressive power relations.
Stories of war among the ghosts of history
João Guimarães Rosa was born in 1908 in the small town of Cordisburgo in the
state of Minas Gerais in southeast Brazil. He was educated as a doctor and worked as
such in the countryside of his state. This experience makes him closer to the reality of
people in the backlands and the sunny and dry landscape of the sertão, the characteristic
geography of a large part of northeast Brazil and northern Minas Gerais. Between 1938
and 1951, he also worked as a diplomat in Germany, France and other countries. His
knowledge of different languages influenced deeply his creative writing, leading him to
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mix it with popular expressions in Brazil to create new words. The reinvention of
language through neologisms and changes in the structures of sentences is a feature of his
writing. His work is an immersion in this context and its ways of expression, conflicts,
relations of power, mystic imaginaries and natural environments. Rosa was mainly a
writer of short stories but his main work was the novel Grande Sertão: veredas
(1956)¸written after a trip along with herdsmen conducting hundreds of cattle for 240
kilometers in 1952. This novel became one of the most classic works in Brazilian
literature and it is vastly discussed in Brazil. The discussions around this novel usually
approach the reality of the Brazilian backlands, its people and the structures of power
operating outside the institutional limits of the State. Rosa passed away in 1967 because
of a heart attack, after being indicated for the Nobel Prize in literature.
Grande Sertão: veredas begins with the neighing laughter in the teeth of a calf
that laughs like a person, neither human nor animal, “man-face or dog-face” [6],
revealing something else without form and empty of presence in the world, the trail of the
devil, which will cross through the whole story. Laughter breaks out among the
announcements of gunshots, which will also trace the meshes of the novel's composition.
Between the devil and the war, the backlands [7] and its people begin to emerge. The
movement also doubles in an immersion in the reality of this fierce crowd that lived for
war: the jagunços. Rosa developed from them an investigation into the modes of
subjective orientation in an unknown and unpredictable world and in confrontation with
an experience marked by violence and force in which well-defined oppositions between
ethical values such as good and evil are not guaranteed by any given morality.
The first word of the book, nonada, translated as “it’s nothing” [8]. As though
nothing had been given before writing; as though everything had yet to be created. As the
novel unfolds, language is reinvented concomitant to the world it constitutes. In his
interview with Gunter Lorenz, Rosa states that his motto is that language and life are one.
He says that "whoever does not make language the mirror of his personality does not live;
and as life is a continuous current, so language must also constantly evolve" [9].
Therefore, man, language and world are constituted concomitantly in the same process.
They exist in correlation and transform each other reciprocally. In one of the first critical
essays written about Rosa’s novel, the well-known Brazilian literary critic Antônio
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Cândido discussed the possibility of a parallel reinvention of the images of the human
and the world in literature:
"[...] For the artist, world and man are abysses of virtuality, and he will be more
original the deeper he goes in his research, bringing as a result a different world
and a different man, composed of elements that he has deformed from the real
models, consciously or unconsciously proposed. If he can do this, he will be
creating his world, his man, more elucidative than those of ordinary
observation, because they are made with the seeds that allow him to arrive at a
reality in potency, broader and more meaningful" [10].
Refusing any reduction of Rosa's novel to a regionalist image and circumscribed
to historicity, this analysis by Antônio Cândido highlights the process of creation by
which fiction transmutes the material of historical reality into reflections that call into
question human existence itself and its relationship to the world. Questions that were very
much highlighted by Rosa himself, who exposed his metaphysical and philosophical
concerns in interviews such as the one quoted above in dialogue with Lorenz. The author's
philosophical interest also appears in texts such as Aletria e Hermenêutica, the preface to
the book Tutaméia - Terceiras Estórias, in which authors such as Plato, Hegel and
Bergson are cited, and which begins with the statement that "the story does not want to
be history. The story, strictly speaking, must be against history" [11].
The plane of virtuality that Cândido highlights is the way through which history
is shaken and counter-actualized in its actuality. In a story, it is possible to experiment
with other ways of linking events in time and retrieve a trace of the intensity that is only
present in the process of duration of an experience. It reopens the events to virtualities
that were not actualized, realized and consolidated in empirical forms in the history,
which are the landmarks from which history traces causal connections to explain or justify
the present. Rosa says that the story sometimes wants to be more like the anecdote,
functioning as a catalyst or sensitizer to the non-prosaic, that is, to what is not reduced to
the material and practical side of life. He says that "the jest is no mere ordinary thing; so
much so because it scans the planes of logic, proposing to us superior reality and
dimensions for magical new systems of thought"; and a little further on he says that "the
non-sense, it is believed, reflects a twinkle of the coherence of the general mystery, which
involves and creates us. Life is also to be read. Not literally but in its supra-sense" [12].
With its jocosity, the anecdote can play with the truth, without commitment to be
true or false, but putting the truth somewhere, as it is proper to fiction [13]. The act of
narrating may be one of the oldest ways to set up a web of relationships between distinct
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elements, make intelligible the chaos of reality and give meaning to experience. Fiction
is a way of rationalizing time [14], and a form of creating meaning through imagination,
invention of language and production of images of other possible realities, which by their
differences make us perceive things about our current realities that previously did not
exist for us. By creating a reality in potency, fiction creates other regimes of visibility,
that is, the way in which reality is configured for our perception as a network of relations
loaded of meaning. By altering the intelligibility of how these relations between the
elements of reality are configured, the discourse and the statements that try to explain it
are also transformed at the same time that they participate in the constitution of what is
perceived.
In the wealth of publications about Rosa's novel, among the different forms of
approach by critics, there is an interesting debate on this novel as an allegorical portrait
of Brazil. This debate passes through the works of researchers such as Willi Bolle [15],
Ettore Finazzi-Agrò [16], and Heloísa Starling [17]. They place the literary work in
dialogue with political philosophy, history, and sociology. According to Bolle, this novel
reveals the workings of power relations in Brazil, analyzing from a perspective internal
to these relations how power operates. We intend to take seriously his problematization
that Rosa’s novel has a potential equal, and perhaps superior, to those of the already
known theories about Brazil, but which still needs to be deciphered [18].
In this novel, Brazil is explored into forces from the past that still resonate in the
present even after their historical presence is erased, such as that of jagunços. These
forces are updated in new trends and reshaped in new power relations. Rosa evokes the
memory of large landowners’ power in the backlands as a mode of shaping political
relations between farmers, land workers, jagunços and militias during the Old Republic.
He anticipates problems that the developmental policies and their promises of
modernization would bring later [19].
It is an interesting coincidence that the novel was published in 1956, which is the
same year that Juscelino Kubitschek assumed the presidency of Brazil with his bold plan
to accelerate national development of fifty years in five. A great dilemma of
developmentalism in all its history is that it never managed to integrate and organize the
favela, riverine and indigenous communities and always produced much violence against
these peoples. Grande Sertão shows the averse and monstrous face of this one-
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dimensional modernization process. There, the city is interpellated from the backlands.
The whole book is long monologue by the main character Riobaldo telling his memories
of when he was a jagunço. This monologue implies a dialogue with a doctorate man from
the city who comes to visit him and listen to his stories. The urban world marked by
development is exposed in its otherness, in what is exterior to it, but an exteriority that is
also intimate to it in its ever-present absence. After all, the production of this urban world
has always taken place through the inclusion of these margins and their populations as
excluded. At the same time this excluded space is exploited, having its energy and vitality
sucked out and its bodies punished by labor. Rosa's novel anticipated the signs of the
social laceration that the developmentalist project would cause on populations that never
fit into this project of nation [20] and survived on its margins absorbing the violence to
which they are exposed.
This project of modernization and national development never overcame archaic
structures of power relations that govern Brazil based on the power of large landowners
and relations between politicians and mafias. It brought a way of managing political
conflicts in which power relations and their privileges are always preserved, and a mode
of spatial distribution of violence that is quite unequal and marked by racism. For Sandra
Vasconcelos, the dissemination of jagunços gangs and the violence unleashed by them
were the corollary of the political relations in force since the proclamation of the
Republic:
“[...] Once the Republic was proclaimed, the maintenance of the country's
economic structure, based on land property, and the dismantling of the
slaveholding order, made available a contingent of free men. Without land and
work, they found in banditry a form of survival, either as capangas – men in
the service of a farmer who formed his private army – or as cangaceiros –
independent men who organized themselves into gangs under the direction of
a prestigious chief. The conflicts between relatives, between farmers and
political bosses, aggravated by millenarian movements such as Canudos in the
state of Bahia, Contestado in the state of Santa Catarina, and Caldeirão in the
state of Ceará, made the backlands a conflict zone in the first republican
period” [21].
In this novel, Brazil is narrated from these margins where war is actualized
without being perceived as a threat to the modern institutional project. This spectre still
persists in the present, reactualizing itself in new conflicts in the peripheral regions of
Brazil. The book could be rewritten today based on the conflicts between factions that
control the favelas, which like the jagunços co-opt black youth into their armies. Gangs
that always existed in relation with political leaders, farmers and colonels [22]. Riobaldo
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would be a young boy from the favela. Abandoned by his father and with his mother dead,
he tried to study but abandons his studies. Suddenly, without much of an alternative to
survive, finds himself inserted in a gang, with a gun in his hand and put in front of a war
that was not his choice. He spends a long time dealing with moral conflicts about the
violence and brutality that his group and himself promote, until he assumes a diabolical
pact that makes him affirm this as fate. He manages to become the leader of his gang and
a direct promoter of war, having the contradictory fortune to end his life as a farmer,
which is his condition as narrator in the book.
The novel speaks about the passage from war to the institutionalization of
property, of law, and of a new command over the land. From the nomadism of Riobaldo's
life to his settling as a farmer, a landowner, fixed within the limits of his land boundaries.
These two distinct experiences of inhabiting and distributing space, which will be
presented here not as fixed identities and absolutely exterior to each other, but as two
poles that indicate tendencies and inclinations that pervade the lives of those characters.
We do not want to turn this opposition into a fight of good against evil, because that would
hide the barbarities practiced by the jagunços. Instead, we want to understand how each
one of these sides presents itself, how the relationship of each one with space, social
relations and power works. The nomadic jagunço experiences the backlands as a
navigational space without determined boundaries, as a smooth space in an experience of
continuous variation, distributing himself in the space. Differently, the farmer distributes
the space, converts it into property by delimiting its borders in a process of striation [23].
Riobaldo is in an ambiguous position: a farmer narrating his memories as a jagunço. This
is only one of the many ambiguities that we can find in Rosa's work.
Literature somehow makes the experience of conjuring ghosts. Invoking images
of a memory that insists on haunting the present and anticipating the signs of passage of
what will give way to the future. What we are calling ghosts or spectres [24] here is the
spectralization of the presence of something that is no longer there, but that insists as
memory, habit or a compulsive and unwilling repetition of something that is no longer
present. Therefore, the spectre is also a failure of absence. This notion of spectre leads us
to a virtual level of reality in which the boundaries of difference that delimit beings blur,
multiplying to infinity the gradient effect that takes place between opposite categories or
identities. Thus, identity here becomes a tendency of differentiation of being, its most
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contracted degree of actualization, and not its essence. The spectre indicates the insistence
of memory – although it is not confused with that – in the temporalization of being and
its differentiation in time so that the past coexists with the present. It is worth noting that
the spectre is not to be confused with the virtual, but is between the virtual and the actual,
because it has a minimum level of inscription in reality.
I will consider war as a memory of civilization, as a ghost that haunts the social
web and tends to fray it, opening breaches and bursting lines that carry diverse tendencies.
These are updated beyond the established institutional forms. War will be considered in
a virtual dimension that permeates society and deterritorializes the social field unleashing
lines of flight. All societies, in order to constitute themselves, have invented ways to
conjure this ghost and contain the violence of its inscription in reality. In Rosa’s novel,
we find an approach to this problem in the scene of the trial of the jagunço leader Zé
Bebelo. The establishment of a court in the middle of the backlands, suspending an
ongoing war, was there a way to contain the violence. However, the decision that ends
the trial does not exhaust once and for all the virtuality of the conflict, but rather
reactualizes the field of forces in which this takes place.
The trial of Zé Bebelo and the outbreak of the antagonism between two jagunço
orders
For Luiz Roncari, the trial of Zé Bebelo is a turning point in the novel that brings
to the surface the clash between civilization and barbarism, order and disorder, institution
and custom [25]. One of the reasons this trial happens is precisely because at a moment
when Zé Bebelo was about to be shot, Riobaldo shouts out saying that his chief Joca
Ramiro wanted him alive, which was not true. Riobaldo did it because of his relationship
with Zé Bebelo in the past. Riobaldo was his teacher of letters. Another ambiguity
explored by Rosa: a literate jagunço. Zé Bebelo is then captured and demands a trial,
which is eventually granted by Joca Ramiro.
What were the real conflicts that motivated that trial? Before it begins, the
character Sô Calendário exclaims: "Trial! This is it! They have to learn who gives the
orders, who's the boss" [26]. It shows that there was a political issue involved, which was
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the recognition or not of Zé Bebelo as a leader. Zé Bebelo was seated on a stool, with his
hands tied, in the middle of the circle of jagunços and in front of the main leaders of that
universe. It is interesting to observe that the trial did not take place just anywhere. They
went to a farm called Sempre-Verde, owned by Dr. Mirabô de Melo, and they gathered in
front of this colonel's house. As Roncari points out, the big house was the totem of the
Brazilian patriarchal society and of the colonelist [27] system of power relations [28].
The place chosen by Joca Ramiro was a symbol of authority and tradition that had to be
respected. The whole physical and corporal composition in the institution of this court
problematizes the mode of assimilation of a modern institution by an archaic society,
putting in scene a process of updating memory in the production of a difference, which
forges the emersion of something new in tension with acquired habits.
As he begins questioning the defendant, Joca Ramiro sits down on the ground,
placing himself at his height, and makes the following accusation: “You came to sow
confusion, to turn the people of the sertão from their old ways" [29]. The law that is
invoked is not the positive law, the normative code under State tutelage, but the customary
law of a local tradition. Zé Bebelo is accused for threatening the conservation of a
tradition. As a leader, he intended to become a deputy, having a project for the
development and modernization of the backlands. He was always praising the law,
cheering the government, promising republican things, saying that everything would be
national. Therefore, his project would imply the intervention of a power that was external
to the traditional values and relations that shaped the reality of the backlands and contrary
to the local dynamics of power. To do so, he would have to exercise an even greater
violence than the jagunços do, even if it was in the name of the law and progress [30].
However, since it was not part of custom to set up courts to judge deviant
conducts, the establishment of the court depended on a sovereign decision that was
superior to the customs, but that was also magnanimous, since such a decision would
imply that the chief gave up a portion of his power over life and death and accepted limits
on his authority [31]. It is Joca Ramiro who might do this, described by Riobaldo as an
emperor that anyone even could not say his name for nothing. In this meeting between
Joca Ramiro and Zé Bebelo, custom and tradition are explicitly confronted. Zé Bebelo,
the character who comes from the outside with a modernizing project, confronts the
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maximum leader with irreverence and insubordination, demanding respect, even being in
the condition of a defendant and under the risk of being executed.
Joca Ramiro provides the opportunity for other leaders to take a position on the
case. They are divided between those who demanded the immediate execution of Zé
Bebelo, such as Hermógenes and Ricardão, and those who voted for his acquittal, such as
Titão Passos, Sô Calendário, and João Goanhá. It is exactly here that the real oppositions
that were in play begin to appear. An opposition between two different orders: those who
affirmed their nomadic life as the mainstay of their lives and others who were at the
service of external interests, working for landowners and colonels. It makes evident the
opposition between the jagunço nomadism and the political order under command of
colonels and landowners with their henchmen. The jagunços who adhere to the nomadic
life are not concerned with interests beyond their own will and assert another order of
values. For the warrior justice of the jagunços, there was no crime in question and what
was affirmed was the very possibility of combat. The law that governed them was that of
freedom and the affirmation of the risks it brings. For them was suspended any external
law to their own way of living that was constituted in the nomadic experience through the
backlands.
After hearing the other leaders, Joca Ramiro decides to acquit Zé Bebelo on the
condition that he should go far away and never return. Once the decision is made, there
still remains the shadow of this antagonism that emerged in that assembly. They resume
their journeys and spread out in different directions. But it is not long before news arrives
suddenly that Joca Ramiro has been cowardly murdered by Hermógenes in collusion with
Ricardão. The antagonism then becomes central, and from then on, the gangs reconfigure
themselves under a tension that will remain vibrant until the outcome of the whole
narrative: the final combat against Hermógenes. In that decision, the dice were re-rolled
and the pieces were redistributed on the board. As soon as the means to control and
stabilize a conflict are installed, and this soon leaks out the other way, making the ghosts
of war insist, which in its return makes a process of differentiation repeat itself, re-
actualizing the social field and its compositions of alliances.
The war machine between jagunço gangs and the societies against the state
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If we consider war as a tendency endogenous to society, it is then necessary to
question how society itself can be possible in face of that. Pierre Clastres tried to answer
this question in his essay Archeology of violence: war in primitive societies (2010). He
states the non-contradiction between the social system and war, no longer considering
war as a simple deviation or failure of the system, but instead thinking of war as a
condition of possibility of the primitive social being, which he states as “being-for-war”.
What interests us in Clastres' essay is to observe how war is part of the very functioning
of certain types of society, and to what extent Clastres' description of a warlike society
comes close to the jagunço gangs that we address here.
The author develops the problem of coexistence between war and social system
from a debate with Thomas Hobbes and Claude Lévi-Strauss. For Hobbes, war would be
the natural condition of humans before living in society and the opposite of society, which
for Hobbes is society with the State [32]. The absence of the State would allow the
generalization of war and make the institution of society impossible. For Lévi-Strauss,
what makes society possible is the exchange among whatever people; war being only the
result of unsuccessful commercial transactions. In this case, Clastres is commenting on
an essay by Lévi-Strauss entitled War and Trade Among the Indians of South America.
Clastres comments that the theoretical conclusions of this supposedly minor text are fully
taken up in Lévi-Strauss' major work, The Elementary Structures of Kinship. In the case
of this work, it is the exogamous exchange of women that founds society through the
prohibition of incest, and these exchanges are instituted within the framework of a
network of alliances between different communities. Clastres quotes Lévi-Strauss: "There
is a link, a continuity, between hostile relations and the provision of reciprocal
prestations: exchanges are peacefully resolved wars, and wars are the result of
unsuccessful transactions" [33].
Clastres will then oppose both Hobbes and Lévi-Strauss, stating that one cannot
reduce the social being of primitive society to exchange, nor can one think of it without
thinking of war at the same time. War, like exchange, is structural in those primitive
societies and takes place on a different plane than exchange, not having with it a line of
continuity in which it could unfold in failure. War will also play an important role in the
foreign policy of those communities by determining alliances with other groups. Since
war of all against all is impossible, the Others of these communities will immediately be
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classified as friend or enemy. The constant possibility of war implies the need to make
alliances. It is because one has enemies that one will also need allies. However, these
alliances are interchangeable and a given community that is an ally one moment may be
an enemy another moment. Alliances are subject to war and are determined by war [34].
The primitive social being is composed of these two heterogeneous elements,
exchange and war, and its ideal consists in maintaining a balance between the two. The
generalized exchange of all against all would be impossible because it would erase the
difference of the community's identity in relation to the others, dissolving its property of
autonomous totality, erasing the difference between Us and the Others. The war of all
against all is also impossible because it would cause what primitive societies seek
precisely to prevent, which is the domination relationship between command and
obedience, the division of society into losers and winners, masters and subjects, and then
the emergence of a forced unification of communities through the emergence of the State,
the most complete mark of this division of the social body.
For Clastres, war in primitive societies is not an effect of the fragmentation among
them, but its cause. More than that, dispersion is a purpose and war is a means to a
political end which is the maintenance of the multiplicity of sociopolitical unities [35].
War operates on a centrifugal logic and serves to maintain each community in its political
independence. It is through war that these societies conserve themselves. What they seek
to conserve is their autonomous totality and their homogeneous and indivisible unity.
Totality and unity are their essential sociological properties. Clastres says: “Primitive
society is a single totality in that the principle of its unity is not exterior to it: it does not
allow any configuration of the One to detach itself from the social body in order to
represent it, in order to embody it as unity” [36].
This One is the State that emerges as an organ of political power separated from
the social body, making power a transcendence in relation to the composition of social
relations that constitute society, dividing it between those who exercise power and those
who submit to it. Clastres comments on how Hobbes noted that war and State are
contradictory terms, one being a hindrance to the other. This is why Clastres says that
primitive societies are not stateless societies, but societies against the State, for in such
societies the State already exists as a potential virtuality, a tendency towards transcendent
unification and social hierarchization [37]. Although unknown in its actualized form, it is
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sensed in its virtuality and therefore conjured up through war. It is not that these societies
have not yet formed States, but it is that they were always conjuring it up by preventing
the madness of a society that is based on inequality, exploitation and hierarchical division
among its components. War ceases to be a state of nature to be a social mode that conjures
and prevents the formation of the State.
The first convergence we can point out between Clastres' texts and Rosa's novel
is that for us both texts narrate communities and conflicts that no longer exist as empiric
realities. The jagunços no longer navigate the backlands. The indigenous communities no
longer war among themselves and now struggle to resist the effective actuality of the
invasion of a State that they never requisitioned and that threatens to remove them from
their lands. These texts no longer have the presence of historical references to which they
refer. Texts that speak of what can no longer be seen. And this is also why these texts are
interesting for being discussed together. For ghosts are not necessarily visible and
apparent, but always unsettling, always referring us to a field of virtualities beyond the
effective presence of matter, which does not separate from it, but reconfigures the ways
in which it can be seen. By reworking memory, they also create ways to perceive in the
present the traces of these erased marks, but which are inscribed in the movements of
other bodies.
Rosa and Clastres' texts are troubling because they show social forms that always
put themselves at risk in order to maintain their freedom. They show social forms in which
risks are distributed and the safety of some people is not guaranteed at the expense of the
total exposure to risk of others. Rosa and Clastres show that freedom and equality between
their parties are not possible without a constant struggle to conquer them. They are texts
that do not lie by promising a costless peace. They do not propose a harmonic unity that
costs the silencing of many, but they place the need for our most fundamental conflicts to
be faced and not denied and thrown under the rug. It may seem absurd to speak of freedom
from texts that tell stories of peoples always at war, places where war can always break
out at any moment, but it will be absurd only if we are blind to the fact that the cost of
what we call security today rests on the constant threat of those who are foreign to us.
They must be kept at a distance and blamed in multiple ways when they try to cross the
borders that demarcate their limits of movement. This crossing is always made difficult
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for them in the most diverse ways, and staying where they have been condemned to stay
will always be a frequent exposure of their bodies to the risk of death.
We know that the jagunço gangs are very different from the primitive societies
analyzed by Clastres. The jagunços are by no means composed in an autonomous totality,
nor do they possess some homogeneous unity to preserve. On the contrary, the jagunços
are provisional and ambiguous men who organize themselves based on the immediate
demands of their experiences in the backlands. Rosa's jagunços are characterized by a
constant variation, a lack of boundaries and a constant ambiguity. His gangs are also not
closed and finished organizations, but are continually dispersing and reuniting in their
travels. However, if we make this approximation between these gangs and the primitive
societies it is because in both there is the constant working of a war machine that marks
an irreducible exteriority of these social forms in relation to a State.
The concept of war machine comes from the work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix
Guattari and it is directly related to their reading of Pierre Clastres. The exteriority of the
war machine in relation to the State is the first statement made by them in the plateau
Treatise on Nomadology [38]. For them, the irruption of war power should not be
confused with the lineage of State domination. When this happens, the war machine
comes to be conceived in its negative form. In fact, the State itself does not have a war
machine. It is always external to it and it can only have it by converting it into a military
institution. In this case, the nature of war changes totally, since it is subjected to the
political ends promoted by the State. But perceived in its exteriority, the war machine has
a totally different nature and its movement takes place precisely by crossing the points of
articulation of the State, sweeping away the possibility of its actualization. Its combat is
not for the conquest and subjugation of other peoples and territories, imposing its
unification and its projects, but rather to produce a smooth space of dispersed nomadic
populations, which the State always seeks to organize and internalize in its order [39].
The relationship between war machine and State will always be tense and they do
not stop crossing each other. It may always happen that war machines are appropriated
by State apparatuses, but they do not stop re-emerging from the most unexpected places.
If on the one hand the smooth space where the war machines develop can at any moment
be converted into a striated space under the demarcations and controls of the State, on the
other hand, the resurgence of the war machines causes the striated space to be constantly
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reversed and recreated again as smooth space [40]. While the State orders space by
demarcating borders and distributing populations based on the racist and classist logics
that run through it, nomads do not cease to create new lines of escape, emerging from
within and outside these ordered spaces.
Such as in primitive communities, a feature shared by the jagunço gangs is that in
both social forms war is part of the very constitution of the groups and of the alliances
with other collectives, and these alliances are always unstable and provisional. These
alliances work through a rhizomatic way in which heterogeneous elements from different
lineages enter into a relationship without identifying with each other, and stay together
maintaining an irreducible distance between them. We can notice a certain flexibility in
these social systems that allows a relative level of deterritorialization that is part of their
own mode of existence. But this puts social institutions always at risk, which is also a
fissure that makes alliances proliferate and gives an opening for the reconfiguration of
these institutions or even their dissolution.
Nomads and their war machines have never disappeared and have never ceased to
re-emerge continually in various forms, tensioning the boundaries of social organizations,
stirring up political conflicts, and threatening the cohesion of the social body. And it is
not that war machines are less complex than societies with a State. They also produce
their codes, their territories, and systems. But there is a fundamental difference in the
formation of war machines compared to State apparatuses. In the latter, the parts operate
as hierarchically organized organs with specific functions, producing an interiority built
on a differentiation from all exteriority, excluding and marginalizing everything that does
not resonate with its center and its codes. War machines, in turn, operate as
deterritorializing powers, forcing all interiority toward the outside, toward a pure
exteriority and an intensification of flow exchanges with other machines.
Conclusion: for a nomadic justice
Now, how can justice be possible when war, violence and conflict are endogenous
tendencies in social formations? Or would it be possible to think of justice beyond the
institution, the order and the equilibrium? A justice that does not presuppose the
permanence of the presence of a state of things and the consciousness of a duty fulfilled,
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but that is precisely the prompter of the quarrel that destabilizes the given relations and
demands the transformation of the current state of things; that is never exhausted and
never fully realized in a decision, but that in the act of decision opens the horizon of
variation of the present to the otherness of the future. A justice that must not be reduced
to rules, norms, or legal and moral representations, in an inevitable totalizing horizon, but
which is an a-economic and incalculable exposure to the singularity of otherness, outside
all logic of exchange, trade, and symmetry [41].
But how can such a conception of justice be reconciled with the problem of war
discussed above? The concept of justice proposed by Derrida is inspired by the work of
Lévinas [42], for whom war is a suspension of all morality and forces the subject to
perform actions that betray their ethical commitments and in which they do not recognize
themselves [43]. Lévinas says that war makes individuals mere bearers of the forces
commanding them and separates them from themselves and their being. War subjects
them to a future appeal that suspends the unicity of each present, such as the imperial
promises of peace that paradoxically rests on war. And war is a complete exposition of
being that eliminates whatever trace of transcendence, which for Lévinas is fundamental
for an ethical relationship with the Other. The Other transcends my-self, my own identity,
and can never be known in totality.
Firstly, it is important to say that the war I have discussed here does not take place
between States and is not oriented toward the conquest of territories and subjugation of
other peoples. This would be the case for Lévinas, who lived the horrors of the two World
Wars. But Deleuze and Guattari define the war machine mainly as complete exteriority
to the State [44]. They are inspired in the work of Clastres, for whom the function of war
in primitive societies was to maintain the dispersion of different ethnic groups and to
avoid the formation of a hierarchical power separated from the social body such as the
State. However, Deleuze and Guattari rely on the concept of the war machine as a
conceptual operation that is not reduced to the literal sense of war. The war machine for
them is an operation capable of producing a smooth space that reopens a field of
experimentation not determined by previous demarcations, as in the striated space with
its departure and arrival points already determined beforehand. They speak of a war
machine also operating in a philosophical dimension and which is also expressed in
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literature and the sciences. For them, the war machine does not have the war as its main
object [45].
Moreover, the concept of justice that concerns me here is opposed to totalizing
and sovereign entities such as the State. The concept of justice that I propose here is
concerned with the insistence of a heterogeneous collectivity against the imposition of a
spatial ordering and stratification of their bodies, which subjects them to a space of
exposure to risk and death, as Mbembe describes in his discussion of necropolitics.
Necropolitics is an unequal and geographical distribution of death marked by a racial
discrimination [46]. This is evident, for example, in military operations in contexts such
as Palestine or Brazilian favelas. The war machine discussed here is not the one that
intends to impose a violent ordering of the bodies; instead, it intends to subvert and undo
it, recreating a space of affirmation of the dignity and collective self-determination of the
bodies that suffer this violence.
Rosa's novel brings us into contact with communities that are always maladjusted
and are constantly reorganizing themselves based on their internal and external conflicts.
Besides the contradictory coexistence of beauty and war, love and violence, and all the
ambiguity that pervades the entire book, it is also important to note the ontological
intuition that underlies this novel. Rosa creates an image of reality in which there is a
constant variation of being, its exposure to time, its endlessness, its contingency, and its
constant production and differentiation. “The sertão is like that: you think you have left it
behind you, and suddenly it surrounds you again on all sides. The sertão is where you
least expect it” [47]. Rosa not only considered this openness to the unknown to be risky,
but also made it one of the main problems of his work. It is no wonder that Riobaldo
constantly reminds us that living is very dangerous business. In the interview with Lorenz,
Rosa said that "in the sertão, every man can find himself or get lost. Both things are
possible. As a criterion, he has only his intelligence and his ability to guess. Nothing else"
[48]. From this situation of the subject's abandonment in the world, Rosa explores the
experience and the ways in which this subject creates social and affective ties, constitutes
guiding values in the midst of uncertainty, and determines his will.
In Rosa there is no subjectivity given as a priori to experience, but rather a constant
process of subjectivation based on how subjectivities are disposed to the risks of
experimentation. As Riobaldo says: "Look, the most important and nicest thing in the
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world is this: that people aren't always the same, they are not all of a piece and finished
but keep on changing. They are in tune or out of tune" [49]. It is not that there is no
subject, but this subject is the product of the set of forces and needs that act upon him
during his experience with the world. Riobaldo's awareness of himself appears there as a
memory and retrospective of his actions. The entire novel is a monologue of Riobaldo
telling his story in the backlands. His consciousness is a product of the constitution of
meaning about his experience.
Considering this unstable and variable reality, in which subjectivities are produced
at the same time that they seek to orient themselves, how can an ethical decision be made?
How can a decision be fair or unfair when it takes place in this dislocated experience in
which one cannot be fully aware of the whole set of causes that condition the horizon of
expectations at the moment of the decision? For Derrida, every decision is haunted by the
undecidable [50]. Regardless of how much information one has available to ensure its
calculation, a decision will always have a margin of virtuality that surrounds it with
unpredictability. In this temporal dimension that the decision can neither control nor
predict its results, there are always spectres of the forces that made up the tension of its
act. Derrida says that a spectre is always a revenant that cannot control its comings and
goings and is always about to return [51]. In Rosa’s novel, the establishment of a court
and the decision of a trial mark the beginning of a new war, not its end. But this was not
under the control of the participants of that act. The decisional act must be perceived there
as a reconfiguration of the forces in conflict. The decision does not terminate a state of
affairs, but rather triggers a transformation of the composition of the community's
relations and conflicts. These transformations are not predictable and cannot be fully
calculated at the moment of decision.
If the causal relations that condition action at a given moment are blind spots for
the subject who acts or if his subjectivity is the product of the synthesis of forces and
tensions with the needs that condition his freedom, how could Riobaldo value his actions
if not a posteriori? If the answer to this question is the argument that there is a law and
that it should be known, we should consider the very concept of the law that we find in
this novel, which is a law immanent to the manner in which life and intersubjective
relations are organized in that context. Otherwise, we would have a subject who would
always be guilty a priori, because the needs to which he is subjected and which condition
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his action would not correspond to the transcendent laws that are imposed by agents
external to that cosmos.
Considering together with this the description we have already made of Zé Bebelo's
trial, we can say together with Derrida that Grande Sertão operates a deconstruction of
the transcendent conception of the law because it does not oppose it to the physis. There
is no opposition between nómos and physis because there is no opposition between the
law and war as a supposed state of nature [52]. War is precisely a constitutive part of the
ways of living of that community. What this exposition requires from us is another way
of conceiving the law and justice. This nomadic justice is deconstructive because it
destabilizes and complicates the oppositions to which these singular forms of life could
be subjected under a transcendent conception of the law. The justice of jagunços does not
submit to Manichean cleavages, but insists on giving right to modes of existence that
demand new values and categories to be understood in their immanence. It refuses to be
thought of by the axioms of good and evil that an external subject imposes on them. The
justice we find in the book is not confused with the law and is not characterized by its
transcendence and immutability. The justice we find there is produced in an immanent
way from the desire that connects a collectivity around a struggle for justice.
We cannot confuse this with the victory of a war, as it happens at the end of the
novel with the victory against the Hermogenes' gang and the revenge of Joca Ramiro's
death; nor with the superimposition of the will of the winner over the defeated. This
conception of an ultimate end and of a total and final resolution of conflicts would be an
interruption of the movement that would produce a necessary state of the social order that
could easily be formalized in the law. What produces, legitimates and sustains the
superimposition of the will of some over others is the law. And this is also exposed in the
book. After the triumph against Hermógenes' gang, Riobaldo becomes a farmer,
establishes his properties and delimits the borders of his territory. Justice has no owner,
no subject, no hero, no representative of good against evil. Justice runs through
subjectivities that are produced in the same extent they struggle for justice. Justice agitates
their bodies in collectives and networks of alliances, produces enunciations that alter the
meaning of reality, attracts the spectre of war, and incites the struggle in search of the
affirmation of an existence that wants to persist in its being. Justice arouses these events
without fixing itself on the identity of any subject.
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In a paper about Deleuze, the law and literature, Murilo Corrêa observes how the
law is impotent to trigger events, but does not cease to produce states, applying itself to
what happens and reproducing in them the same; or it seeks to restore past states and,
when in force, works as an apparatus of capture that extracts its force from the very living
upon whom it applies [53]. Justice, in turn, is fully unrealizable and is always an engine
of events and unleashing of becoming, which opposes the law and deconstructs it because
it reveals the insufficiency of its axioms to welcome the singularities that erupt in the
visible. Justice cannot be confused with systemic order and the balance of forces in
conflict in a given context. It lacks a controllable code and a stable semantics through
which the demands it incessantly places would be translated. Decoded and
deterritorialized from the assemblages that want to conform it to the law, more than a
normative logic, it demands prudence in opening itself to the incalculable experience of
exposure to the future, which cannot be foreseen or anticipated.
Thought of in this way, justice haunts. This spectral justice is disturbing and leaves
no one exempt. It will always be a disagreement and a cause for contention. It is clear that
this conception is unacceptable to those who are satisfied with the current order that
hierarchizes individuals and classes, guarantees privileges, and distributes violence
unequally. After all, if justice is thought of in this way, how can it be controlled? Who
will be able to take possession of it? However, it is because it is thought of as becoming
and as a movement of constant transformation of the community that it cannot be
mastered. Its appearance is not confined to the domain of a discourse and to the acts of
an institution, but becomes explicit mainly in the space of visibility that is established
with its demand, in the invisibilized bodies that make themselves visible and demand it,
in an irruption that makes visible the intolerable.
If justice has more to do with becoming than with a current order of things, literature
will have a more powerful capacity than theory to make it visible. Literature allows us to
go beyond mechanistic historicism, which traces the possible from cause-and-effect
calculations, as if everything were given and there was no contingency. Instead, it reveals
to us memories of a real in potency, a past that only happened by right. It is like when
Riobaldo says he seeks a reality in the real. Against the most absurd fictions that come to
justify the real, fiction creates a space in which we can compose a memory that is
independent of lived experience. And from this we can create another body capable of
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dreaming more than its own dreams, a language that leads the language to say more than
it says now, the signs of a world to come that only the desire for justice provokes in us
the need to think and pursue.
_
Endnotes
1 – Jacques Derrida, “Force of Law: the mystical foundation of authority”, In
Deconstruction and the Possibility of Justice, edited by D. Cornell, M. Rosenfeld and D.
G. Carlson (New York: Routledge, 1992).
2 – Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx (New York: Routledge, 1994).
3 – About the concept of counter-actualization, in the book Logic of Sense, Deleuze
explains it as follows: "With every event, there is indeed the present moment of its
actualization, the moment in which the event is embodied in a state of affairs, an
individual, or a person, the moment we designate by saying 'here, the moment has come'.
The future and the past of the event are evaluated only with respect to this definitive
present, and from the point of view of that which embodies it. But on the other hand, there
is the future and the past of the event considered in itself, sidestepping each present, being
free of the limitations of a state of affairs, impersonal and pre-individual, neutral, neither
general nor particular, eventum tantum... It has no other present than that of the mobile
instant which represents it, always divided into past-future, and forming what must be
called the counter-actualization”. Gilles Deleuze, Logic of Sense 1990 (London:
Bloomsbury Publishing, 2015, p. 151).
4 – Pierre Clastres. Archeology of Violence (Cambridge: MIT Press, 1994); Society
Against the State (New York: Zone Books, 1989).
5 – Jacques Derrida, Specters of Marx, p. 22.
6 – João Guimarães Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands (New York: Alfred A.
Knopf, Inc., 1963, p. 3).
7 – I have translated sertão with the word backlands, which is the alternative chosen by
the translators of Rosa’s novel. The word refers to a large territorial extension of dry lands
with a kind of vegetation called caatinga that covers the northeast of Brazil and the
northern region of the state of Minas Gerais.
8 – João Guimarães Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, p. 3.
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9 – Gunther Lorenz, “Diálogo com Guimarães Rosa”, In Guimarães Rosa, edited by
Eduardo F. Coutinho (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 1991, pp. 62-97).
10 – Antônio Cândido, Tese e Antítese - Ensaios (São Paulo: T. A. Queiroz Editora, 2002,
p. 122).
11 – João Guimarães Rosa, Tutaméia – Terceiras estórias (Rio de Janeiro: Nova
Fronteira, 1985, p. 7).
12 – Ibid.
13 – In an essay on the concept of fiction, Juan José Saer brings an interesting argument
about the relationship between fiction and truth: “[…] it is not to write fiction to escape,
due to immaturity or irresponsibility, the rigours which the ’truth’ procedure demands,
but rather for demonstrating the complex character of the situation, the complex
character of the limited process to verification implies an abusive reduction and
impoverishment. Making a leap towards the unverifiable, fiction multiplies infinitely the
possibilities of the process. By not turning its back from the supposed reality, it is, on the
contrary, caught in the turmoil, disdaining the naïve approach of claiming to know
beforehand how reality is made. It is not a claudication [claudicación] before this or that
ethic of truth, but the search for one that is less rudimentary.” Juan José Saer, El
Concepto de Ficción (Barcelona: Seix Barral, 2010, p. 11).
14 – Jacques Rancière, The Lost Thread (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2016).
15 – Willi Bolle, grandesertão.br (São Paulo: Editora 34 e Livraria Duas Cidades, 2004).
16 – Ettore Finazzi-Agrò, Um Lugar do Tamanho do Mundo (Belo Horizonte: Editora
UFMG, 2001).
17 – Heloísa Starling, Lembranças do Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Revan, 1999).
18 – Willi Bolle, grandesertão.br, p. 123.
19 – Sandra Guardini Vasconcelos, “Homens Provisórios. Coronelismo e Jagunçagem
em Grande Sertão: Veredas”, SCRIPTA, v. 5, n. 10 (2002), p. 321-333.
20 - Many national projects carried out in Brazil implied high degree of violence against
local communities. For instance, we can remember of how favelas were removed or
threatened because of the buildings for FIFA World Cup in 2014, which is the case of a
community called Vila Autódromo: https://www.theguardian.com/global-
development/2016/apr/26/rio-de-janeiro-favela-change-vila-autodromo-favela-
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olympics. Another important case is the building of a huge dam called Belo Monte in the
Amazon rainforest and the damages caused to indigenous peoples and their environment:
https://news.mongabay.com/2018/02/belo-monte-legacy-harm-from-amazon-dam-
didnt-end-with-construction/
21 – Vasconcelos, Homens Provisórios, p. 325.
22 – Elizabeth Leeds, “Cocaine and Parallel Polities in the Brazilian Urban Periphery:
Constraints on Local-Level Democratization”, Latin American Research Review, 31(3)
(1996), pp. 47-83.
23 – Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus (Minneapolis: University of
Minnesota Press, 1987).
24 – I am borrowing the notion of specter from Jacques Derrida's book Specters of Marx
(1994) and bringing it closer to Henri Bergson's conception of time. Despite the
differences between these authors, they share a similar conception of time. For Daniel
Alipaz, “Indeed, if we consider Deleuze’s rewriting of Bergson’s discourse in a
poststructural idiom, then we find that Derrida and Bergson share a close affinity with
regard to their perspectives of language in the face of time as a double movement. That
is, both thinkers operate with the understanding of a particular rupture in the full
presence of the present, an expansion of consciousness as a “now” to include a constant
deferral to memory.” Daniel Alipaz, “Bergson and Derrida: a question of writing time as
philosophy’s other”, Journal of French and Francophone Philosophy - Revue de la
philosophie française et de langue française, Vol XIX, Nº 2 (2011), pp 96-120.
A critique of this approach would be that Bergson's philosophy would still be tied to a
metaphysics of presence, which is so confronted by Derrida. In this sense, we share
Suzane Guerlac's argument in her book dedicated to Bergson: “Bergson is interesting to
read today precisely because of the ways in which his thinking escapes the critique
Derrida carried out so effectively against Husserl. The philosophy of Bergson appeals to
immediate experience (this is never recanted) and to intuition. In this sense, it could be
called phenomenological. Yet his thinking displaces the presuppositions attacked in
Derrida’s critique of Husserl. For in Bergson, as we have seen, perception itself is not
an immediate experience (it requires attentive recognition and an appeal to memory that
is regulated according to various degrees of tension or preparedness for action). Nor
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does perception occur in the service of knowledge; it pertains, as we have seen, to action.
Finally, in Bergson, it is never a question of self-presence, not even in the act of intuition.
What Bergson calls Pure Perception could hardly be called an experience at all and real
perception is not immediate. Bergson’s shift from a model of cognition to a model of
action significantly displaces a number of the issues involved in Derrida’s critique of
Husserl.” Suzane Guerlac, Thinking in Time: an introdution to Henri Bergson (Ithaca:
Cornell University Press, pp. 183-184).
25 – Luiz Roncari, “O Tribunal do Sertão”. Teresa – Revista de Literatura Brasileira, n.
2 (2001), pp 216-248.
26 – Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, p. 214.
27 – In Brazil, large landowners were usually called as colonels and their authoritative
power in the backlands was called as ‘colonelism’ (coronelismo).
28 – Roncari, O Tribunal do Sertão.
29 – Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, p. 217.
30 – Roncari, O Tribunal do Sertão.
31 – Ibid.
32 – Clastres, Archeology of Violence.
33 – Ibid., p. 253.
34 – Ibid.
35 – Ibid.
36 – Ibid., pp. 260-261.
37 – Clastres, Archeology of Violence; Society Against the State.
38 – Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
39 – David Lapoujade, Aberrant Movements (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2017).
40 – Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus.
41 – Derrida, Specters of Marx.
42 – Jacques Derrida, Adieu a Emmanuel Lévinas (Stanford: Stanford University Press,
1999).
43 – Emmanuel Lévinas, Totality and Infinity (Pittsburgh: Duquesne University Press,
1969).
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44 – Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, p. 351.
45 – We can find in this passage of Deleuze & Guattari’s Treatise on Nomadology a
convergence with Lévinas' concerns: The classical image of thought, and the striating of
mental space it effects, aspires to universality. It in effect operates with two "universals",
the Whole as the final ground of being or all-encompassing horizon, and the Subject as
the principle that converts being into being-for-us. Imperium and republic. Between the
two, all of the varieties of the real and the true find their place in a striated mental space,
from the double point of view of Being and the Subject, under the direction of a "universal
method." It is now easy for us to characterize the nomad thought that rejects this image
and does things differently. It does not ally itself with a universal thinking subject but, on
the contrary, with a singular race; and it does not ground itself in an all-encompassing
totality but is on the contrary deployed in a horizonless milieu that is a smooth space,
steppe, desert, or sea (Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus, 1987, p. 379).
46 – Achille Mbembe, Necropolitics (Durham: Duke University Press).
47 – Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, p. 238.
48 – Gunther Lorenz, “Diálogo com Guimarães Rosa”, pp. 62-97.
49 – Rosa, The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, p. 17.
50 – Derrida, Force of Law.
51 – Derrida, Specters of Marx.
52 – Derrida, Force of Law.
53 – Murilo Corrêa, “Deleuze, a lei e a literatura”, Prisma Jurídico, v. 10, n. 2 (2011),
pp. 471-487.
_
Disclosure Statement
No potential conflict of interest reported by the author.
_
Funding Details
This work was supported by a scholarship from the Westminster Law School.