Antropofagia Palimpsesto Selvagem | Author: Beatriz Azevedo | Ed. Cosac Naify, 2016

Excerpt from the preface:

“What do we have with this?”

“I had the pleasure of meeting Beatriz Azevedo when she attended a course that Alexandre Nodari and I gave at the National Museum in 2012,” From primitive matriarchy to society against the State and beyond. Cartography of the anthropophagic hypothesis “. Oswald de Andrade was obviously the main character – the guest of honor, so to say – of the course. Beatriz helped us immensely, with her extensive and deep knowledge of Oswald’s work and biography. Whenever our bibliographic memory failed, she was there to remind us or clarify. The book I present here gives an idea of ​​how much she will have contributed to the course, and more.

Antropofagia – Palimpsesto Selvagem is perhaps the first truly microscopic reading of the Anthropophagic Manifesto, foundational text for contemporary cultural sensibility, both “in here” and, increasingly, “out there”. Beatriz Azevedo’s book is a close reading of invaluable historical, didactic and analytical value.

In a true archaeological work, the author recovers many of the sources forgotten or ignored of the abundant enigmatic allusions (mainly for the reader of today) contained in the Manifesto; comments and elucidates line by line, aphorism to aphorism, this extraordinarily complex text, below – palimpsest – of its telegraphic concision and its joyful ferocity to stare; it emphasizes the rhythmic, verbal and visual architecture, its poetic (a)grammaticality and its politico-philosophical radicality; pursueing in Oswald’s later production the foundations, the developments, the explanations-in the literal sense of unfolding what was implied, implicit, and compacted-and taken up in a dissertative or conversational way of the theses, revolutionary then as revolutionary today and tomorrow, enunciated, or better, announced in the Manifesto.

The book by Beatriz Azevedo, adding to the already vast “Oswaldiana”, adds a layer of commentary destined to become a mandatory reference for every student or scholar of his work which is, without a shadow of a doubt, one of the greatest thinkers of the twentieth century “.

Eduardo Viveiros de Castro