Helena Costa Carvalho

In this chapter, we will try to reflect on the passage from the “I” to the “Other” which, being propitiated by the specificity of poetic discourse, has become particularly pressing in modern poetry. To do so, we will pay attention to the poetry of two of the greatest Portuguese-speaking poets of the twentieth century, the Portuguese António Ramos Rosa and the Brazilian Manoel de Barros, authors in whom we discover a poetic construction that continually enacts a process of depersonalisation and, simultaneously, a passage to otherness. Based on the strong affinity that emerges between the writings of the two poets—an affinity whose contours will lead us to the new ontology of some post-Heideggerian philosophers, as well as to an ontophenomenology such as that of Merleau-Ponty—we will be interested in assessing the extent to which their poetry helps us to think of the poetic word as a privileged resource for becoming “other”.

A partir de la tesis del filósofo español Miguel de Unamuno (1864-1936), según la cual el extremo occidental — Portugal — y el extremo oriental — India — se dieron las manos espirituales por vía de la comprensión de la vanidad del mundo (vanitas), presentada en su obra Por tierras de Portugal y España (1911), nos proponemos poner en diálogo las visiones del mundo barroco occidental y del mundo budista oriental sobre la vanidad y la muerte. En este sentido, nuestra reflexión se centrará en el pensamiento del P. António Vieira, como ejemplo capital del pensamiento barroco portugués, y en el Sermón de Benares, como texto fundador del budismo.

This work tries to show that the metapoetic meditation developed by Ramos Rosa throughout his very extensive poetic work not only did not condemn his poetry to a cold cloister in the textual plane, but also contributed decisively to the opening to the real, to the effect of evidence and to the sense of communion that would become increasingly sensitive in his writing. To this end, we propose to clarify the thread that, under the aegis of the poetic lucidity consecrated by the author, leads us from his metapoetic meditation to a poetic meditation of an ontophenomenological and sapiential nature, that is, from his metapoetry to a poetry whose wisdom provides a set of intuitions with a sapiential and philosophical accent. It is our intention to contribute, in this way, to the understanding of the (cognitive and ontological) demand and scope of Rosa’s poetic path, as well as, collaterally, to the debate around topics such as poetic (self-)reference, the ontological status of the poetic text or the philosophy-literature relationship.

Indagando a possibilidade e o sentido de uma poética do eu, será nosso objetivo clarificar, a partir do contributo incontornável do filósofo francês Paul Ricœur, de que forma o texto poéticose assume como uma mediação fundamental da compreensãodo si, bem como da sua configuração e refiguração enquanto um si mesmo. Neste sentido, atentaremos especialmente nas obras Temps et Récit (1983‑85) e Soi-Même Comme un Autre (1990), fulcrais para entendermos a relação que o filósofo tece entre narrativa, tempo e identidade, mais especificamente a importância da mediação narrativa para a superação das apo‑rias ligadas às experiências humanas da temporalidade e da construção identitária. Gravitaremos, neste contexto, em torno da noção seminal de identidade narrativa –enquanto ponto de mediação entre uma identidade idem e uma identidade ipse.

This study aims at assessing the meaning and the extent of the possible relationship between philosophy and literature in and from two significant contemporary thinkers, Maurice Blanchot and Paul Ricoeur. Based on the assumption that both represent the human effort of touching and configuring an essential bottom which seems to escape an immediate seizure – although it is generally considered that philosophy does it through the conceptual/critical discourse and literature through the metaphorical/poetic discourse – the key problem we wish to answer is to know, in that attempt, whether the mentioned activities can or must come close, especially the first in relation to the second. Such problem inevitably disseminates itself in a set of questions which we propose ourselves to think by having the mentioned authors as a starting point: can literature, in its specificity, open new possibilities of expression or mediation of a being or a neuter which precedes us and, therefore, assume itself as a privileged locus for (the calling for) philosophical reflection? Is it philosophically desirable, or even inevitable, a proximity to literature? Or, more radically, is the defense of a clear separation between philosophy and literature sustainable? In that sense, the essay is divided in three moments: in the first, we clarify the conceptions of the language, of the written text and of the relation author-work-reader from which the authors go from; in the second, we intend to think about how the poetic text opens new possibilities of expression or mediation due to its own world and devices; lastly, we will assess more thoruoghly the meaning and the extent that the relation philosophy-literature acquires in each of the proposals. Although they share a few assumptions, our authors’ perspectives will display different concerns or impulses – one we shall call retrospective and another we shall call prospective – which will lead us to different answers.

How to be being to be being/ next to the united and firm/ and trembling/ mouth of the poem?”, “How to say what is clearer than clarity [...]?” or “How to unite a light design and an obscure gesture?” These questions, as well as many others that emerge from the poetic and essay writing of António Ramos Rosa (1924-2013), represent different modulations of the same angular question: that of the relation between poem and reality, or, more radically, between poem and being. And if such a question spreads into so many formulations it is because, in António Ramos Rosa, its scope is total, simultaneously aesthetic and ontological, metaphysical and spiritual. It is, therefore, this question that we will try to answer by looking into one of its possible faces: how can poetic creation be at the same time the most intimate gesture and the one that touches most deeply the undomesticated matter of the real, that absolute and unapprehensible Other?

Blanchot shook the foundations of Philosophy like few others in its systematic and totalizing discourse and its close relationship with academism, appealing to the need for a new and disruptive theorizing about its role and its possibility. Refusing the title of philosopher, he called himself a writer who became interested in writing itself as an experience of the outside and expression of a neuter, an absolutely other that resists any attempt at apprehension and discursive unification, interrupting the various discourses and deconstructing the boundaries between them. In the radicalism of his thought, philosophical discourse loses its status of superiority and its possibility of overcoming literary ambiguity, seeing itself also devoted to seeking a non-existent unity and to the condition of not-knowing and non-power, whereby philosophy should approach literature and become itself image and fragment. In this context, the literary emerges as disruption of philosophical discourse, like the other word that resists within its boundaries to interrupt the word-concept by pointing to a there where thought does not arrive, and philosophy becomes, as the poetic, an investigation into the neuter, an exercise in listening and paying attention to this Other that remains nocturnal, infinitely moving discourses and their meanings and interrupting dialectic progression.