Hostis and ξένος (Xénos) in Plague Diary of Gonçalo M. Tavares: Man becomes a stranger to himself

• Autor(a) principal: Martins, Ana Isabel Correia
• Data de Publicação: 2022
• Tipo de documento: Artigo
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Repositório Científico de Acesso Aberto de Portugal (Repositórios Cientìficos)
• Texto Completo: https://doi.org/10.34624/fb.v0i18.30996

On 23 March 2020, at the onset of the confinement in Portugal, prompted by the coronavirus pandemic, Gonçalo M. Tavares commenced, in the Lisbon-based newspaper Expresso, his daily chronics titled Diário da Peste (Plague Diary). The smallest element in nature, a virus, confronted Humanity with its condition’s fallibility. Convinced of our unwavering cyclopean gigantism, we are losing the presumption that the “military and technological might” could save everything. Faced with the invisibility of danger, we plunged into a collective blindness: the ethical values and social codes became scattered, blurred and the five senses insufficient to recognize the enemy and to preserve the species. The threat paralyzed us, forced us to wait as if waiting were an action and if to think was a physical movement. Utterly lost, the Humankind now finds itself deprived of its public spheres that inevitably compromises all its other ontological dimensions. This paper aims to deepen an etymological and semantic understanding of the concepts of hostis, xénos, barbarian, recognizing in which way Gonçalo M. Tavares plays these ambiguities in his literary challenge of Plague Diary. We will also shed light on this competitive relationship between man and machine as being two species of natural world: the supremacy of one represents the threat over the other. Consequently, we will point out the usurpation of spaces between man, animal and machine, the húbris resulted from the lack of respect for borderlines between their habitats, which deepens the reflection about hostility and hospitality. Who are the foreigners? Who decides who are the Others? Where does the threat come from? Who we are: nodal and preliminary issues for our exercise.