Blindness by Saramago

on the possibility of a purely acoustic intersubjectivity

Abstract

The main purpose of this article is to read Saramago’s Essay on Blindness (1994) following two aspects of his work. The first concerns his critique of the metaphor of light: in our opinion, Saramago tries in the Essay to draw all the consequences that the fictional hypothesis of an epidemic of blindness by excess of light could have on the modern social life’s reality. It is also an opportunity for Saramago to criticize the civilizational project conceived during the Enlightenment age, and to develop a new interpretation of the concepts of “state of nature” and “social contract”. The second aspect concerns his conception of acoustic intersubjectivity, certainly implicit, but present in the Essay. In our opinion, Saramago offers an original approach to the intersubjective phenomenon, which until then had always been understood from the primacy of the visible and in a subjectivist vision. In the Essay, it is possible to think the emergence of a common and anonymous reality, primarily constituted as audible, and which subsequently conditions human individuation and socialization. In this study, we want to measure the implications of this literary essay for the thought of intersubjectivity, taking seriously philosophically the reality that would result from it.