Saramago's Philosophical Heritage

Carlo Salzani, Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte, Carlo Salzani, Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9783319919225
• eBook ISBN: 9783319919232
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Historiography

The past decades have seen a growing "philosophical" interest in a number of authors, but strangely enough Saramago's oeuvre has been left somewhat aside. This volume aims at filling this gap by providing a diverse range of philosophical perspectives and expositions on Saramago's work. The chapters explore some possible issues arising from his works: from his use of Plato's allegory of the cave to his re-readings of Biblical stories; from his critique and "reinvention" of philosophy of history to his allegorical exploration of alternative histories; from his humorous approach to our being-towards-death to the revolutionary political charge of his fiction. The essays here confront Saramago's fiction with concepts, theories, and suggestions belonging to various philosophical traditions and philosophers including Plato, Pascal, Kierkegaard, Freud, Benjamin, Heidegger, Lacan, Foucault, Pato?ka, Derrida, Agamben, and Žižek.

© The Author(s) 2018

Carlo Salzani and Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte (eds.)Saramago’s Philosophical Heritagehttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91923-2_1

Begin Abstract

1. Introduction: Proteus the Philosopher, or Reading Saramago as a Lover of Wisdom

Carlo Salzani¹ and Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte^{2, 3}

(1)

Independent Scholar, Munster, Germany

(2)

University of the Free State, Bloemfontein, South Africa

(3)

Pontifical University Antonianum, Rome, Italy

Carlo Salzani (Corresponding author)

Kristof K. P. Vanhoutte

Keywords

José SaramagoPhilosophyAllegorical turnEssayistic novel

End Abstract

1

Γνῶθι σεαυτόν (gnṓthi seautón): with these two words Socrates demonstrated, through the usage of philosophical irony, his great philosophical wisdom. And this ironical denial has since Socrates made history. Without desiring to list all those who have taken recourse to the “Socratic irony,” we find it very much present in the author that stands at the center of this volume: the Portuguese Nobel Prize laureate José Saramago.

In an entry on May 17, 1993, of his Lanzarote Notebooks ( Cadernos de Lanzarote ), Saramago—the future author of, ironically, a novel entitled The Cave , which opens with an epigraph from Plato’s Republic—confesses: “I understand nothing of philosophy” (CL 1:42). He will repeat this so-called ignorance on several occasions, stating either that “I have nothing of the philosopher” (CL 2:197) or “I know very little of philosophy” (Gómez Aguilera 2010, p. 165). These “confessions” must not be taken at face value but, obviously, rather ironically. In fact, at the same time he proclaims to know nothing of philosophy, he repeats, in several talks and interviews, that “our present society needs philosophy” (ibid., p. 165) and calls for a “return to philosophy,” in the sense of a return to “what we hope to find in philosophy, that is, reflection, analysis, a sensibility that be critical and free” (Saramago 2005). This “return to philosophy” is intended, therefore, as a “return to thinking,” to a dimension fundamental to and “inseparable from [,] human nature” (Saramago 2005) which contemporary society seems to have lost or at least belittled. Philosophy means here, broadly, “a space, a place, a method of reflection,” “simply a way of feeling life, of living life, which culminates, when it happens …, in peace of mind [serenidade]” (Gómez Aguilera 2010, pp. 165, 96–97). In this sense, Saramago even argues that “philosophy should be included in human rights, and everybody should be entitled to it” (ibid., p. 471).

This commonsense view of philosophy does not exclude, however, a more concrete interest in actual philosophy, in the “philosophy of philosophers.” Notwithstanding his ironical confessions of his philosophical ignorance, in Saramago’s diaries, talks and interviews, there appear sparse but regular references to philosophers and philosophies. For example—and leaving aside the already mentioned reinterpretation of Plato’s allegory of the cave—and once more through an ironical confession of his ignorance in philosophy, in a diary entry on September 17, 1994, he avows never to have taken interest in the philosophy of Karl Popper (who had just died) and wonders whether he has thereby missed some important tools to understand the world. The answer is negative, though the real target of Saramago’s ironical disinterest is Popper’s political —(neo)liberal—views (CL 2:197–98). In the same vein, on the occasion of the publication of one of Gianni Vattimo’s books in Spanish (Philosophy, Politics, Religion: Beyond “Weak Thought,” 1996), he confesses never to have understood Vattimo’s “weak thought” and especially his many “reconsiderations” about it—whereby, again, Saramago’s targets are the political impacts of these views (CL 4:229–30).

Not all of Saramago’s direct confrontations with the philosophy of the philosophers are, however, relegated to the ambit of ironical confessions of ignorance. At times he also goes for a much more direct “showdown” with the professional lovers of wisdom. For example, he recurrently attacks Francis Fukuyama for his thesis of the “End of History” that triumphally sanctifies neoliberal democracy as the final stage of human evolution (Saramago 1999; Céu e Silva 2009, p. 384). Furthermore, he also criticizes Jacques Derrida for reducing the world to a text or Roland Barthes for his thesis of the “The Death of the Author” (Céu e Silva 2009, p. 101).

Saramago’s philosophical lineage goes back, rather, to those masters of refined and compassionate rationalism like Montaigne or Voltaire (Gómez Aguilera 2010, pp. 139, 219; Céu e Silva 2009, p. 254n85; Baptista-Bastos 1996, p. 33), to an anti- (or pre-)academic philosophy that explored the depths, lights and shadows of the human condition in forms that confound and blend literary genres and academic compartmentalization. It is precisely in this sense that his oeuvre is profoundly “philosophical” (Grossegesse 1999, p. 10; Amorim 2010, pp. 27, 274): like the old masters, his works exercise systematic doubt, iconoclasm and pessimism, recurring to an implacable reason and embracing universal compassion. And this feature of his work has not been overlooked by interpreters and even by some perceptive philosopher: the Slovenian philosopher Slavoj Žižek, for example, has on multiple occasions taken recourse to Saramago’s novel Seeing (Žižek 2009a, b)—albeit mistakenly¹ (Vanhoutte 2013)²—and even before Žižek , Peter Hallward, the author of one of the more interesting reflections on the philosophy of Alain Badiou, wrote as a side-thought (but we all know that short remarks and quick “by the way” comments in philosophy contain the most interesting thoughts) that “Saramago’s story The Unknown Island (1997) might even be read, up to a point, as an allegory of Badiou’s philosophy in general” (Hallward 2003, p. 385n11).³

2

The reference to Montaigne and Voltaire is not accidental and helps moreover illuminate a peculiar trait of Saramago’s work, of which he was well aware. On many occasions he repeated that “probably I’m not a novelist; probably I’m an essayist who needs to write novels because he cannot write essays” (Reis 1998, p. 48); “in all my novels,” he stated again, “there is an essayistic temptation,” and so his books can be considered as “essays with fictional characters” (Gómez Aguilera 2010, pp. 223, 264). Saramago saw his novels as “the place of a reflection about certain aspects of life I care about. I invent stories in order to express my concerns, my questions…”; in fact, he emphasizes, “I don’t write books to tell stories” (Gómez Aguilera 2010, p. 264). Importantly, this “essayistic temptation” dissolves the divisions and separations between literary genres and transforms the novel into what Saramago himself calls a “literary space” (espaço literário), which, as such, admits everything into his realm: essay, science, historiography, poetry—and also philosophy (CL 4:212; Gómez Aguilera 2010, p. 199). Saramago’s novel is “a total expression,” a sort of summa, a “reunification of all genres, a place of wisdom. It accommodates epic, theatre, philosophical or philosophizing reflection” (ibid., p. 263). And perhaps philosophical reflection even takes a leading, unifying role:

I think that here there are reasons to approach what I’ve done not merely from the point of view of literary studies, but also from another point of view, which I wouldn’t know how to name, but that has to do with other kinds of inquiries. Is it worth here to name philosophy, or another research of this kind? (Reis 1998, p. 49)

This can be sensed already from the titles of his many books. In fact, as he himself notes (Saramago 2013, pp. 36–37), the titles of his novels are not “appropriate” to traditional novels and confound genre divisions. His first “mature” novel is titled Manual of Painting and Calligraphy (1977), and the book that made him internationally famous is titled Memorial do Convento (literally, The Monastery Memoir, English translation Baltasar and Blimunda, 1982). Other titles include The History of the Siege of Lisbon (1989), The Gospel According to Jesus Christ (1991), Ensaio sobre a Cegueira and Ensaio sobre a Lucidez (literally Essay on Blindness and Essay on Lucidity, English translations Blindness and Seeing , 1995 and 2004). “Manual,” “memoir,” “history,” “essay” and even a “gospel”: Saramago’s “literary space” combines and merges all genres in a critical analysis of the moral, social and political predicaments of our times, just like Montaigne’s essays and Voltaire’s stories and novellas. In the philosophical attempt to explore...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• 1. Introduction: Proteus the Philosopher, or Reading Saramago as a Lover of Wisdom
• 2. Correcting History: Apocalypticism, Messianism and Saramago’s Philosophy of History
• 3. The “Dark Side” of History: Saramago, Foucault, and Synchronic History
• 4. José Saramago’s “Magical” Historical Materialism
• 5. Some Remarks on a Phenomenological Interpretation of Saramago’s Cave
• 6. Death by Representation: In Law, in Literature, and in That Space Between
• 7. A Contemporary Midrash: Saramago’s Re-telling of the “Sacrifice of Isaac”
• 8. Female Representations in José Saramago: A Space for Oppositional Discourses from the Canonical Gospels to The Gospel According to Jesus Christ
• 9. Saramago’s Axiology of Gender Difference
• 10. Saramago’s Dogs: For an Inclusive Humanism
• 11. Traumatic Counterfactuals
• 12. Bye Bye Bartleby and Hello Seeing, or On the Silence and the Actualization to Do … Not
• Back Matter