Towards a Model of Inclusive Exclusion: Marginal Subjectivation in Rio de Janeiro

Authors

  • Fabio Akcelrud Durão Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Keywords:

Negative dialectics, Adorno, subjectivation, inclusive exclusion, Rio de Janeiro

Abstract

One does not have to be a fierce advocate of dialectics to consider the claim that the exercise of dystopic imagination may represent a necessary stage to think a better world. If it is good to know the worst, that does not mean, however, that cognition of the truly bad is immediately accessible or unproblematic. Such  knowledge demands rather that one walk the tight rope between turning the object of scrutiny into an example, thus weakening it of its impact, diluting the pain it generates in a chain of causality; or granting it the status of the absolutely singular, which approximates it to the ineffable (always so dangerously close to the religious) or the monument (solidified  history ready to be sold). The idea of the model, as developed by T.W. Adorno in Negative Dialectics and  Critical Models, for instance, offers a fruitful way out of this dilemma. For just as constellations or force fields, two other of his favorite figures of thought, models are ad hoc constructions, “not causal examples for, or explanations of, critical theory. They  are that theory, but always at the same time reflection, objective discussion and intervention in consciousness, which needs to be criticized when it is no longer a reflex of reality, but just comprehends and affirms what merely happens.” Models furnish, in other words, the illustration of a thesis they themselves only suggest; they constitute the “extension [Ergänzung] of a theory that only in them is unfolded”

Author Biography

Fabio Akcelrud Durão, Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro

Fabio Akcelrud Durão estudió en el programa de literatura y se doctoró en 2003 de Duke University. Actualmente es profesor de literaturas anglo-alemanas en la Universidade Federal do Rio de Janeiro. Ha publicado varios artículos sobre la Escuela Frankfurt, el modernismo anglosajón y teoría literaria brasilera. Su tesis doctoral Modernism and Coherence: Four Chapters of a Negative Aesthetics está bajo consideración en la editorial de Duke University.

Published

2005-09-10

How to Cite

Akcelrud Durão, F. (2005). Towards a Model of Inclusive Exclusion: Marginal Subjectivation in Rio de Janeiro. A Contracorriente: Una Revista De Estudios Latinoamericanos, 3(2), 88–106. Retrieved from https://acontracorriente.chass.ncsu.edu/index.php/acontracorriente/article/view/201

Issue

Section

Articles / Artículos