Dialectics and alteritarian politics in Brazil and the Dialectic of Colonization

Abstract

The article proposes a discussion about the meaning and functioning of the concept of dialectic in Alfredo Bosi’s Dialectic of Colonization and an exam of the alteritarian politics therein. Dialoguing with Roberto Schwarz’s analysis of this work, we try to show the critical productivity arising from a game between a certain theoretical flexibility and the ethical-methodological commitment inscribed in the Marxist tradition of that concept, and how this is reflected in the affectual-axiological complex that shapes the notions of “popular” and “animist materialism” in the book, in Bosi’s own confrontation with the figure and work of André João Antonil and in his reading of the contradictions of liberalism. Finally, we suggest a certain affinity of interests and procedures of Bosi’s Dialectic with the spectropoetics-spectrology of Jacques Derrida.