Democratic dissonances: intellectuals, universities and political thought in France and Brazil (1970-1990)

• Grant number: 23/13979-7
• Support Opportunities: Scholarships abroad - Research
• Start date: March 26, 2024
• End date: March 25, 2025
• Field of knowledge: Humanities - Sociology - Sociology of Knowledge
• Principal Investigator: Fabio Mascaro Querido
• Grantee: Fabio Mascaro Querido
• Host Investigator: Razmig Keucheyan
• Host Institution: Instituto de Filosofia e Ciências Humanas (IFCH). Universidade Estadual de Campinas (UNICAMP). Campinas , SP, Brazil
• Institution abroad: Université Paris Cité, France

Abstract

The most general objective of the research presented here is the investigation, in a comparative key, of the changes that the intellectual scene of France and Brazil underwent in the 1970s and 1980s. To this end, two intellectuals and two magazines that , in their specificities, were at the same time products and producers of such transformations: Claude Lefort and the magazine Textures, between 1971 and 1976, in France, and Marilena Chaui and the Desvios group, responsible for publishing the homonymous magazine, at the beginning of the years 1980, in Brazil. The underlying hypothesis, to be tested and broken down into its most detailed aspects, is that the same intellectual and political agenda - around the issue of democracy - led to different results in France and Brazil. While in the European country the theme of democracy provoked, in significant sectors of the intelligentsia, a distancing from Marxism and the "total intellectual", as can be seen in Lefort's trajectory, in Brazil it stimulated, especially in intellectuals linked to the University of São Paulo , a radical-democratic perspective, anchored more in society than in institutional politics. The itinerary of Chaui and the Desvios collective is, in this regard, symptomatic. Thus, even though it is an already well-studied period in the intellectual history of both countries, the particularity of the "empirical" objects chosen makes it possible to understand and explain from a specific perspective the broader dynamics of the French and Brazilian intellectual scenes at the time. It is no coincidence that the stay in France will be an indispensable part of the research: it will allow progress in documentary and bibliographical research, but also in dialogue with intellectuals who were close to Lefort and/or Texture magazine.