DELIRIA I - AGONY AND EXPERIENCE (GAMES OF LIFE AND DEATH)

Abstract

The present essay intends to expose an idea of agony as a life and death game in which the artist immerses himself in the act of creation. From the readings and conceptions of the term game in Johan Huizinga and in Roger Caillois, it exposes how such ideas are important to comprehend the human experience before the incomprehensible that is death. It shows how agony inspires the poet, principally in modernity, a distance from the certitudes of knowledge, implying an etymological reading of the term experience, that is, as ex periri (here, also, life and death game). Finally, it tries to see how the traces of this game – an eternal fight – subtly show themselves in the panics of Murilo Mendes and Paul Gauguin, artists in which the conscience of this fight is pervaded by the image of the place by excellence of agony: the Calvary