[Presence and Transcendental Field: Conscience and Negativity in Bergson’s Philosophy], the doctoral thesis he presented in the 1960s but published only in the 1980s, and includes Filosofia da psicanálise [Philosophy of Psychoanalysis] (1991), Alguns ensaios: Filosofia, literatura e psicanálise [Some Essays: Philosophy, Literature, Psychoanalysis] (2000), the Error, Illusion, Madness that readers now have before them, originally published in 2004, as well as the posthumous works A retórica de Rousseau [Rousseau’s Rhetoric] (2008) and Ipseitas [Ipseity] (2017).
A professor at the University of São Paulo, he was purged by the military dictatorship in the 1960s and had to go into exile. Upon returning to Brazil after the amnesty,1 Bento Prado would dedicate himself to a philosophy founded on the continuous incorporation of contents that seemed external to it, such as literature, anthropology, psychoanalysis, and cognitive science. In each of these areas he was capable of finding the means that philosophical reflection requires in order to come to grips with the problems bequeathed by the field’s history and tradition. But this dispersion of horizons was the manifestation of a more profound limitlessness with which he treated the subject of philosophical tradition itself. Between analytic philosophy and French poststructuralism, between Bergsonian vitalism and a theory of consciousness along Sartrean lines, if one were to examine the moves that Bento Prado made across the board, one would be excused for thinking that he inhabited an impossible space. In his own way, however, Bento Prado was providing a possible answer to the question concerning the specificity of philosophy in a country like Brazil.
From time to time, those working in the field of philosophy in Brazil ask themselves what the country’s “national philosophy” would consist in. Does the philosophy that is practiced in Brazil have a perspective of its own? Is there a positionality that would be all ours? But what are we talking about when we speak of “national philosophies”? For example, it is not a given that “English philosophy” describes an ensemble of intellectual experiences that share some style or signature to some degree. Perhaps there is absolutely nothing common, in the strong sense of the word, between Alfred Whitehead and John Austin apart from the fact that they were both citizens of the same nation-state and subjected themselves to the same political power. The same observation could be made about any other so-called traditions: Habermas and Nietzsche, Foucault and Gabriel Marcel …
We could take this dissociation game to its limits and turn it into a game of reversals. For instance, it is not entirely absurd to say that, from the perspective of how those traditions unfolded, Heidegger is more of a “French” philosopher than a “German” one, seeing as his influence was stronger, richer, and much more decisive on Gallic soil than it was across the border, on Germanic territory. The history of Heideggerianism, if we take into account mostly its processes of reception, may well be tied more intricately to France. In the same way, “French poststructualism” is a typically North American invention, created in order to accommodate intellectual experiments that did not fit the constricted mold set by the analytic philosophy dominant in the United States. If we look at Derrida from the point of view of the consequences of his thought, it would not be absurd to call him a North American philosopher either.
This game of territorial scrambling is more than the musings of a contrarian spirit. It is a reminder that most of the styles we call national are probably no longer sustainable as such by dint of actually being the anomalous cultural constructions of local bourgeoisies that, from the nineteenth century onwards, sought to justify their control and economic frontiers by creating the illusion of an organic arrangement of ideas and forms that would provide the privileged expression of the “spirit” of a people whose natural place was the nation-states, then in the process of consolidating their identity. Philosophy was not immune to this dynamic of tradition creation. Thus the country of Siemens, metallurgy, and the Ruhr also required a “made in Germany” that consisted of Grund (ground), the illusion of a continuity between Meister Eckhart and Hegel, and a Kantian moral philosophy that, at least according to Marx, was the desperate effort to turn the economic and political impotence of its bourgeoisie into a cult of good will; it needed all these just as much as it needed a music in which depth was conveyed through the symphonic game of contrasting characters.
All this takes us to the question, what good is there in insisting on the existence of national philosophies today, and in whose interest is this done? Do they really serve the purpose of describing the play of forces immanent in singular philosophical experiences, which take place through the refusal of tradition rather than respect for it, through improbable leaps that bind what previously did not go together—as in Deleuze and his “tradition” made of the Englishman Hume, the Frenchman Bergson, the Dutchman Spinoza, and the German Nietzsche? Or are they good only for reasserting the existence of a spirit whose purpose is solely to give a semblance of organic meaning to the institutional monstrosity that is the nation state—with its intangible, immaterial counterpart, “national culture”?
It is with questions of this nature in mind that we can measure the extent of Bento Prado’s innovativeness. Instead of trying to affirm some kind of national specificity or situating himself within some historically constituted philosophical lineage, Bento insisted on thinking without a place. That is, he insisted on a mode of thinking that has an ear for resonances to which the filiation of projects and traditions has made us deaf; a mode of thinking without regard for the limits that adherence to a lineage imposes on us. One’s distance from the centers that produced the texts that came to compose the philosophical canon, one’s decentered position vis-à-vis their geography, these features were experienced not as banishment or expatriation but as the opportunity to listen without bounds. Here the peripheral position is no longer a deficit but a singular potential.
In Bento Prado’s hands distance is no longer a failing, a lack of fiber (as the cliché of Brazil as a country lacking moral fiber often has it), but the condition for the exercise of a movement that demands continuous flows of translation, the reconstruction of problems in a language that is not the one in which they were originally posed. As if it were only possible to think by translating problems in an errant language—“errant” not in the sense that it is wrong or off course, but insofar as it results from errancy, from a displacement akin to the one that Samuel Beckett imposed on himself when he decided to write in a language other than his own.
We should be careful, however, not to miss the most important wager—frightening for some, unacceptable for others—that this operation presupposes. What Bento Prado’s thought suggests is that, if the place of thought is the collapse of place, if its geography is the abolishment of spatial limits, this is because every true exercise of thought allows itself to be carried along by an experience that is common, yet has no language of its own: a common background that is Grund as much as it is Abgrund (abyss). This reverses the poles on the horizon that seemed to furnish the normative conditions of our thought. There is no common grammar that could turn all traditions into an emulation of the same set of problems, a sort of philosophical Esperanto. Nevertheless, every specific grammar is traversed by that which it cannot fully apprehend and which produces experiences that lead to categorial metamorphoses. Bento Prado’s wager was that thinking should start from this movement of traversal, of facing up to this common that does not have its proper language but reveals itself in the chiasma between things that could be considered incompatible (just as Deleuze and Wittgenstein could be judged incompatible). At the end of the day, however improbable that may seem, this was the best possible answer to the question of what it means to do philosophy in Brazil. It was this answer that Bento Prado transmitted to us.
A common place without a proper grammar
Perhaps this can help us understand why one of the fundamental axes of Bento Prado Jr.’s intellectual trajectory was the philosophical decision not to suspend the essential ties connecting subject and reason, even after all the critiques of the subject that twentieth-century philosophy rehearsed. This decision is one of the main reasons for the originality of his approach, as it runs against the grain of the most important trends in contemporary critical thought; and its consequences
