Poetics and erotics of disagreement

Abstract

Returning to the scene of a disagreement between Roberto Schwarz and Caetano Veloso regarding the publication of Verdade tropical and proposing that in the episode we find elements that help us understand the history of the Brazilian critical debate, this paper highlights the importance in these clashes of the dispute for the form of the confrontation – its limits, its rules, its objectives, its meaning, even its name. The hypothesis is that by paying attention to the form and style of these public enactments of disagreement one learns something important about how the authors understand dissent, critical sociality, the nature of intellectual dispute and political subjectivity. The paper also considers the pedagogical aspect present in these interventions, which are always also signs, to a third party, of how one must touch the other. The paper has a specific and restricted purpose and understands itself as a footnote to an ongoing debate that already has its own critical bibliography, with analyses of the discussion carried out by João Camillo Penna, Alexandre Nodari and José Miguel Wisnik.