Profanações lexicais em O evangelho segundo Jesus Cristo, de José Saramago

Abstract

Saramago's work was masterful in evoking and/or provoking the past and its crystallized discourses, with The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991) being a notable example. In this article, I propose to revisit this Saramago’s novel in order to argue that the work in question mobilizes a profanation of biblical figures at the lexical level. More specifically, and in the light of the Agambenian concept of profanation (2007), I argue that the narrator and the characters, through their lexical choices, set in motion a process of restoring certain words to a use that until then was denied to them not only by the weaving of the canonical gospels as well as by the historically constructed readings of these same texts, which, ultimately, contributes to a profanation of biblical figures.