Paris, 23 October (ALP) - Following Alexandre Adler's editorial in Le Monde,
dated 11 September 2001 and Eric Laurent's article in Bulletin No. 3 of the
Lacanian Press Agency, Dr Jorge Forbes, the Sao Paolo ALP correspondent,
addressed the two following questions to M. Fernando Henrique, the President
of the Brazilian Republic. He also sent M. Adler's editorial to the
President. The President replied by mail on 15 October 2001.
Sao Paolo, 27 September (ALP) - Questions put by the Lacanian Press Agency
to M. Fernando Henrique Cardoso, the President of the Brazilian Republic.
1. In France there is currently a controversy over the meaning of Brazilian
Comtism. Some say that positivism has been conveyed to Brazil by the army,
and that they have only picked up the rays of a star already dead in Europe.
Others maintain that the borrowings from Auguste Comte by the Brazilian
positivists and jurists are due rather to an original swing of the liberal
empire towards American Presidentialism, than to a servile imitation of
Europe. They signal moreover that the "coroneis" of the era draw more from
the notables than from the army. What is the President's opinion on this
subject?
2. What is the import today in Brazil of the reference to Auguste Comte?
Antiquated historical memory or permanent influence?
Brasilia, 23 October (ALP) - Interview of the President of the Brazilian
Republic with the Lacanian Press Agency.
One of the interesting aspects of your question are the terms in which you
formulate it. In effect, you refer to a controversy over the influence of
Comtian positivism on Brazil, and you specify that the debate opposes those
who explain it as the influence of "rays of a star already dead in Europe"
and those who understand it as "an original swing of the liberal Empire
towards American Presidentialism."
Leaving aside deciding between these two hypotheses, my response is: neither
one nor the other. Both have their share of problems. The first suggests,
albeit subtly, a somewhat mechanistic intellectual mimeticism on the part of
Brazil and the non-European world in general. This alternative presupposes,
although this is certainly only implicit, the existence of a radiating
centre Ü the image of the Sun, evidently - and of zones of more and more
dense shadow, where the rays which arrive no longer even reheat the universe
of ideas. The second alternative comprises a diagnosis, again unformulated,
that also points towards a relative local incapacity to give birth to
intellectual movements endowed with a history that would be their own.
If I separate these two alternatives, it is to challenge the presupposition
that knows that there is, in the circulation of ideas through the world, a
process of the impoverishing copy. I believe the contrary - and I recall
having written an article bearing precisely this title - that there exists
what I call "the originality of the copy." Certainly, the positivism of
Comte has a French matrix, just as Hegelianism belongs to a long tradition
of German thought careful to resolve the difficulties inherited from
Kantianism. These observations, close to a truism, nonetheless do not
signify that the influence of Hegel, in France for example, must be
understood as a passive assimilation. But what goes for one country,
particularly in this case, founds a rule that must be general.
I therefore do not believe that one can speak of a simple copy, but of an
original copy. In the case of Comtian Positivism in Brazil, this is very
clear. The most conservative aspects and tendency to uniformisation that
marked the European positivism of the XIX century have undergone clear and
profound modifications in interacting with an essentially distinct
socio-political and economic environment. Thomist metaphysics and clerical
power, cradles of the critique of Comte, did not have sufficient weight in
Brazil for this critique to have such an effect. On the other hand, it is
interesting to observe how this ideology that posits a law of progression of
humanity towards its positive state, transmutes itself in Brazil into a
reading essentially turned towards the material progress of the nation. The
concept of development, which Comte inherited from Saint-Simon, rooted
itself in Brazil under the form of the defence of progress. Naturally, the
accent put on order comprises in itself a conservative, even authoritarian,
potential, that leaves its traces in our history.
Whatever the case, I think that it is important not to lose sight of the
fact that the influence of positivism in Brazil towards the middle of the
XIX century came to found itself in a sweeping social movement, fed by the
crisis of the monarchical regime, the acceleration of the crisis of slave
production, and the ascension of a commercial bourgeoisie. In this precise
historical frame, positivism came to associate itself with the republican
ideals that demanded a new Brazil. It is evidently a paradox, not without
interest, that that one has had recourse to a conceptual armature of
conservative construction to take the defence of progressivist changes; but
the explication of this paradox can invoke neither an unoriginal copy of
ideas already old in their place of birth, nor a phototropism that would
pass by orienting itself with the North-American experience. In fact, the
explication is local, and above all illuminates the contradictions of our
process of development.
Finally, I would like to add a last observation on the subject of a point in
our recent history. It is true that the association between order and
progress finished by giving way in Brazil to a debate at the heart of which
are opposed that which I do not hesitate to call an "authoritarian
national-developmentalism" and an "open national-developmentalism." This
was one of the elements that caused the drama of 1964. The new fact in
Brazil today, and this I am sure of, is very simply that the ideological
option that was victorious in 1964 is no longer possible. I am not speaking
merely from a political point of view (of this point of view, I have the
most absolute certitude of the solidity of our democracy), but I refer also
to the terms of the conceptual debate. We have much advanced, and today
every project of national development can only be on the basis of givens
that I consider axiomatic. There are three: the conviction that free and
plural debate is indispensable; the struggle to overcome the heritage of
many years of development without social equality; and the concern to defend
the idea that our country has between its hands the possibility of resolving
certain of its gravest problems of social justice. The Brazilian reality is
today significantly better than that which we received in 1990. There is
certainly much to do, but we advance moved by the conviction that order is
not synonymous with a society where a single voice would be heard, and that
polyphony produces the only form of development for which it is imperative
to struggle.
Fernando Henrique Cardoso
Translated by Justin Clemens (Melbourne-Australia)
Editor: Susana Tillet (Melbourne-Australia)