Brazil, back and forth: humor, irony and indignation in Marilena Chaui’s philosophy

Abstract

Recent discussions about the “essence” of Brazilian philosophy seem to ignore a tradition of reading and producing thought that was painstakingly established in the history of the 19th and 20th centuries in Brazil, in favor of either a return to heroic thought, property of the dominant classes with Europeanized colonial roots who need to exclude difference and reaffirm their lineage at every turn, or the promotion of an idea of the resurrection of an autochthonous philosophy, which would exist outside the time and space of production of a Brazilian nation or social community, whose original nature would count as a certificate of epistemic-political validity. Although seductive, this idea sounds like a kind of return to a fundamental concept in the work of Marilena Chaui, a key representative of this mode of philosophizing under attack: the concept of founding myth. By retracing the construction of this concept, this article seeks not only to highlight the author's crucial role in the genesis of a way of thinking that can be called Brazilian, but also to analyze how this concept is kept alive not only in the political and social relations of a country crossed by inequality and violence, but also in the intellectual and social propositions presented by all fields of the political spectrum.