O demônio familiar: pensamento social e psiquismo em Os sertões

• Autor(a) principal: Diana, Marcelo Henrique Nogueira
• Data de Publicação: 2013
• Tipo de documento: Tese
• Idioma: por
• Título da fonte: Biblioteca Digital de Teses e Dissertações da UERJ
• Texto Completo: http://www.bdtd.uerj.br/handle/1/12434
• topic: Brazilian Social Thought; History of Brazilian Republic; History of Psychology; Intellectual History; History of Concepts; Pensamento social brasileiro; História da república; História da psicologia; História intelectual; História dos conceitos; CNPQ::CIENCIAS HUMANAS::CIENCIA POLITICA

The purpose of this thesis is to analyse the best-known work of Euclides da Cunha, first published in 1902, Rebellion in the Backlands (Os sertões). Therefore, it takes as a field of investigation the history of Brazilian social thought, the history of the discourses and the psychological knowledge at the end of the 19th Century, aiming to examine the conceptual semantics of the psyche as an essential element in the elaboration of the argument in his book. Although not specifically characterised in just one sense or school affiliation, the psychic system semantics operate in Euclides da Cunha's book as a rule of similarities which is also a function of reflection, that is, translation between a biological and a social organisms. In Rebellion in the Backlands, we argue, the psychic category is used as the metaphor that underlies the translation between physiology and sociology. Then, with the support of Hans Blumenberg and Niklas Luhmann works, the thesis analyses Euclides book exploring the historical and semantic horizons where this psychism appears systematised as a metaphor for the social. During the war of Canudos (1896-1897), when the Republican social order was attacked, Euclides elaborates on his main argument stating that national crimes are actually derived from the generalised unconsciousness of the inhabitants in the coast over the rural populations and, doing so, the war of Canudos becomes a sort of a national crime of conscience in face of which the author claims for himself the task of revenge, that is, to make visible and known the populations historically ignored and socially forgotten by modern civilisation. The psychic semantics, in this sense, provides Euclides da Cunha with a social observation technique as well as a political hypothesis on the historical and psychosocial conditions of Brazilian society in the beginning of 20th Century.