Correcting history

apocalypticism, messianism and Saramago's philosophy of history

Carlo Salzani

pp. 19-37

in: Carlo Salzani, Kristóf Vanhoutte (eds), Saramago's philosophical heritage, Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan, 2018

Abstract

The novels that gave fame to Saramago in the 1980s are often deemed "historical novels' and read and interpreted by critics as "postmodernist" metafiction. This chapter argues instead that Saramago's trajectory inserts itself within a certain tradition of an emancipative (re)reading of history and shares some fundamental traits—the view of history as catastrophe, the anti-utopianism, the vindication of the history of the vanquished, the simultaneist perspective, the feeling of living on the verge of an epochal change—with a vision of history that spans from Walter Benjamin to Giorgio Agamben and is known as "messianic." Against this background, the essay reads the clash of different historical perspectives and visions in Saramago's work, with a particular attention to the play In Nomine Dei.

Cited authors

Agamben Giorgio

Benjamin Walter

Saramago José