The Pivoting Core of Voice

Abstract

Taking as a point of departure the way voice operates in recent political speeches in Brazil, this article aims to demonstrate how they are associated with historically remarkable characteristics that converge upon the notion of cordial man, considered here as a continuous pivoting of voice between the private and the public, amiability and violence, remaining the core of the operation of power in any given case. Such an operation is connected to a certain way of conceptualizing the voice of God and its political hypostasis, a founding mechanism of the colonial process. Brazilian poetry, however, has taken on this pivoting role in order to call attention to different ways in which voice operates, not only in the European tradition - the question of voice in Greece, for instance - but, going beyond the Jerusalem-Athens spectrum, to enhance and poetically translate the effects of the cannibal oral complex highlighted by Viveiros de Castro in reference to the Amerindian world, and the dynamics between Edimilson de Almeida Pereira’s “Orfe(x)u” and “Exunouveau”, regarding black and/or Afro-Brazilian literature. When there are variations in these different modes of existence of voice, a new dynamics of poetic space as distribution and dissent appears, in a way in which pivoting and variation enable the emergence of a renewed ethics and politics of voice, as well as the survival of the worlds that they put into play.