A smaller gesture, so rebel, in the brazilian literature

Writing and subjectivity in Plínio Marcos

Abstract

All it took was the arrival of a young body in the cell full of old men worn out by the World’s pain, for something to happen that morning. This is the case of the play Barrela (1958), by the Brazilian writer Plínio Marcos (1935-1999), whose dense narrative, full of intense dialogues and cleaved by multiple affects, allows us to think about a whole conception of humanity, subjectivity and institutionality in the Brazilian prison space during the 1960s and 1970s. The text analyzes the image of the violated young body, describing the intersections of class, gender, generation and sexuality that split a collective subjectivity based on pain and the reproduction of physical and psychological violence. However, it avoids incurring processes of individualization or psychologization of violence, but precisely seeking to think about the subjectivation technologies that Plínio Marcos’s literature allows to analyze in order to think about the affects, perceptions and tensions that his writing presents. From the dialogue with Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Maurice Blanchot, we seek to think about the relations between History and Literature, questioning the ways of giving reality to read through writing and social criticism operated in the midst of dark times. In this way, the article aims to contribute through an experimentation exercise to think about Brazilian history and the history of the young body from a literary source that, as a work of art, can always open other ways of thinking and feeling. Such a process allows us to think of literature as an ethical-political creation gesture about the world and life.