The Specter of Sartre in Brazilian Concrete Poetry: Paideuma, Affect, Politics, and the Question of World Literature

Abstract

ABSTRACT: This essay returns to Brazilian concrete poetry's origins and conception of the paideuma. It does so in order to unearth the cardinal, yet underestimated legacy of Jean-Paul Sartre for the Noigandres group's conception of poetic form, literary engagement, and world literature. Drawing on their theoretical writings as well as those of Sartre, Martin Heidegger, Oswald de Andrade, Ernest Fenollosa and Pound, I illustrate how the French thinker configured a matrical part of what the poets deemed the cultural-morphological process. Third, against the grain of the numerous critiques that have shortchanged the concretes' participatory experiments, the essay endeavors to throw light over the intervening power of their political poetics, concluding with an assessment of Haroldo de Campos's "poemalivro," Servidão de passagem (1962). By way of a return to antropofagia, the ideogram, and the Poundian paideuma, I show how Campos's breakthrough shatters "the Sartrean dilemma" and alters the theory and practice of committed literature, configuring itself as a generative, constellatory, and mediational praxis for counterconstructing the present (H. Campos, "Respuesta" 43).