The Pessimism of Luiz Costa Lima

Abstract

This article examines the relationship between the philosophical marginalisation of pessimism in Joshua Foa Dienstag's Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (2006) and the concept of mimesis in the work of Luiz Costa Lima, particularly in his Control of the Imaginary (1988). My aim is threefold: (1) to compare the shared background and peripheral contexts of Dienstag's and Costa Lima's work; (2) to discuss the significance of Cervantes's Don Quixote in this comparative analysis; and (3) to characterise Costa Lima's thinking vis-à-vis conventional institutional thinking. The nature of my subject requires a narrative approach in which the writer remains on the margin of the material, bringing the reader into the same position; to proceed otherwise, as articles conventionally do, would be to adopt a position of authority, institutionality, and hierarchy that is at odds with the material. It is a position that avers conclusions and prefers ongoing questioning.

Notes

1. See, for example, Luiz Costa Lima, Control of the Imaginary: Reason and Imagination in Modern Times, trans. Ronald W. Sousa (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 1988; henceforth references to this work are mostly cited in the text; The Dark Side of Reason: Fictionality and Power, trans. Paulo Henrique Britto (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1992); The Limits of Voice: Montaigne, Schlegel, Kafka, trans. Paulo Henrique Britto (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996); for a range of online papers by Costa Lima, see Crossroads Special Issue (2008), at <http://www.uq.edu.au/crossroads/archives.html#v2i2>.

2. Joshua Foa Dienstag, Pessimism: Philosophy, Ethic, Spirit (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006); henceforth references to this work are mostly cited in the text.

3. Joshua Foa Dienstag, Dancing in Chains: Narrative and Memory in Political Theory (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1997), 197, emphasis added.

4. Costa Lima, The Dark Side of Reason, 106.

5. Costa Lima, The Dark Side of Reason, 3, emphasis added.

6. Costa Lima, The Limits of Voice, xi.

7. Costa Lima, The Dark Side of Reason, 7, emphasis in original.

8. Wlad Godzich, "Emergent Literature and the Field of Comparative Literature,” in The Culture of Literacy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 275.

9. Costa Lima, “The Hybrid Form of Literature,” Crossroads 2.2 (St Lucia, Qld: The University of Queensland, 2008): 165–72.

10. Costa Lima, The Limits of Voice, 187–88.

11. Costa Lima, The Limits of Voice, xiii.

12. Paulo Henriques Britto, in Costa Lima, The Limits of Voice, ix.

13. Godzich, The Culture of Literacy, 275.

14. Costa Lima, The Dark Side of Reason, 309.

15. Costa Lima, The Dark Side of Reason, 219.

16. Godzich, The Culture of Literacy, 236–37.

17. Godzich, The Culture of Literacy, 41.