FROM SIMILARITY TO DIFFERENCE: HOW TO BE AFFECTED BY THE WORDS OF A YANOMAMI SHAMMAN

Abstract

In this article, I confront the proposal of the Yanomami shaman Davi Kopenawa to give his words to the “whites” in the book The falling sky with a Theory Literary fundamental question: what allows us to be affected in the context of the reception of an aesthetic object? I return to some assumptions of Aristotelian theory on tragedy, a aesthetics founding perspective in Western thought, to think about the conditions of production of affectation, taking the paradigmatic example of this aesthetic device. Furthermore, to make a theoretical unfolding of the question, I take the path already opened by the reflections of the philosopher Judith Butler, in her book Frames of war, in the sense of reflecting on how aesthetic objects can produce relations of alterity and recognition and what is the role of literature in the production of the recognition of a grievable life, the representation of the grieving life and the effect, in an ethical sense, that this representation can have on who reads. The idea is to consider how the conditions of being affected and the construction of the self and the other are articulated. All these issues, as I should point out, are of greater interest in thinking about the challenges to the reception and criticism of Davi Kopenawa's thought circulation in the field of literate culture and among whites, which, in my hypothesis, brings a break with those assumptions.