Roberto Schwarz and the Brazilian Dialectic of Enlightenment

On the Reception of Critical Theory in Brazil

Abstract

This article aims to reconstruct Roberto Schwarz's reception of Adornian Critical Theory, particularly in what concerns the dialectic of Enlightenment. It argues that a specific intellectual experience of Brazilian reality, produced by alliances between archaic and modern forces and filtered through some Brazilian theories of modernisation, determined this reception to a great extent. In this way, Adorno's dialectics of myth and reason had unexpectedly encountered a particular historical framework in Brazil. By discreetly joining Fernando Henrique Cardoso's Theory of Dependency and Adorno's Dialectic of Enlightenment, Schwarz could spell out the ideological life of Brazilian elites incomparably. At the same time, this unpredictable arrangement tends to diminish the critical place for social conflicts. The crucial concept of favour takes a meaning considerably different from that originally stated by Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco in her theory of Brazilian social violence. Furthermore, when seeking to interpret, in Brazilian literature, some contesting characters, illustrative of historical, social struggles, Schwarz has to presuppose a concept of Enlightenment that contradicts the volatile reversion of the modern into the archaic.