The hybris and the hybrid in Brazilian cultural criticism

Abstract

Any criticism, being an interpretation of an interpretation, exercises some type of symbolic violence over other discourses. It commits hybris. For the dialectical tradition, there is no modernity without hegemony, an idea which always appears associated to the notion of sovereignty. For the Nietzschean tradition, however, modernity consists of a hermeneutic game, that is self-constituting of the subject which accentuates the aspects that are not only nominalist, yet, above all, truth producing. In this debate, Antonio Candido’s criticism occupies an extremely specific in-between place.