Cegos que, vendo, não vêem; as multiplicidades do olhar em Ensaio sobre a cegueira, de José Saramago

Abstract

The privilege given to the visual tradition is an occurrence that goes back to Antiquity. In his works, José Saramago also tends to understand the importance of the issue of visuality, dialoguing with social, political and humanitarian tones. In the present work, we carry out a critical study of the different meanings of looking in Blindness, a novel in which the characters are mentioned in front of the deterioration of human character and moral blindness. The multifaceted look that points to a distinction between to see and to repair; the multiperspectivism that revolves around the lack of vision leads us to problematize this issue not from the physical sense, but from an allegorical and philosophical bias. In the light of theorists such as Maurice Merleau – Ponty, Teresa Cerdeira da Silva, Maria Alzira Seixo, Michel Foucault, Alfredo Bosi, Marilena Chaui, among others, we undertook a study about the look and the lack of it, as an allegory of social relations and dehumanization that corrodes the contemporary individual.