Dialectics, subjectivities and history, or a reading of A lata de lixo da história by Roberto Schwarz

Abstract

The play A lata de lixo da história was written in the late 1960s, a moment of great importance in Brazilian social life as of its author, Roberto Schwarz. Its production context was, from a national point of view, one of repressive intensification of the Brazilian civil-military dictatorship and, from Schwarz’s personal point of view, of sedimentation of a very significant critical turn in his work. In this sense, we aim to analyze the play looking at it articulately with the transformations the country was going through and a sedimentation of an end-feeling to the idea of national formation to the young Roberto Schwarz. At the heart of our analysis is the notion of dialectic, so central to Schwarz’s materialist point of view. Despite the various studies that have been done about his work, little has been discussed about the way in which dialectics operates in his work, except in a celebratory way. I am referring, above all, to the way in which the class struggle in its Brazilian sense is portrayed by the critic, taking into account his view on the practically absolute margin of will of the Brazilian elites and a somewhat static notion of slave relationships. The play was chosen precisely because it crystallizes a coexistence of contradictory temporalities that reveals a certain generational sense with what the military’s rise to power in 1964 meant, as well as it elucidates contradictory aspects of Schwarzian production that have been little commented on in his critical fortune.