Diálogo em tempos de silenciamento: o político na crônica de Carlos Drummond de Andrade nos “anos de chumbo”

Abstract

This study analyses the political character of Carlos Drummond de Andrade's writings based on the chronicles published in Jornal do Brasil (JB) between 1969 and 1974, a period is known as the "leaden years" of the military dictatorship. The increase in the use of violence and the implementation of censorship that followed the publication of Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5) in December 1968 establish the historical context in which these chronicles were pub-lished. The corpus of the research consists of 53 texts, almost all of them not published in books. The chronicle was chosen as the object of study because it is considered representative of Brazilian culture and society, besides being a literary genre, under-explored in Drummond's critical fortune. For this study, the concepts of Jacques Rancière's distribution of the sensi-ble and Michel Foucault's analytics of power, and the considerations about the human condi-tion and the political, on Hannah Arendt, and the concepts of state of exception and bare life, by Giorgio Agamben. The work revisits the discussion about the political role of the intellectu-als and demonstrates that, although Drummond declared himself as "non-political", especially from the 1950s on, the author kept himself, through the chronicle, politically participating in the public debate in the period studied. In the studied chronicles, there is a recurrent themati-zation of political disputes from a local perspective, but also a vision of the global context of the advancement of biopower strategies and the consequent objectification of the human be-ing. The political character of Drummond's writings appears, thus, both in the register of the advance of biopower and in the criticism and denunciation of political arrangements of the dictatorship and presents itself as a reflexive counterpoint to these movements by establishing itself as a space for dialogue and defense of plurality, configuring a discursive action in de-fense of the public sphere in times of silencing.