A metáfora da Pedra: releituras à luz do século XXI - um elogio à literatura como instrumento de reexistência

Abstract

This doctoral dissertation offers a critical (re)reading of five novels from the second phase of José Saramago's literary oeuvre, with particular emphasis on Blindness (2008) and Seeing (2021). Adopting an ethical-political perspective, the research investigates how literature challenges the boundaries between fiction and critique, silence and gesture, memory and forgetting—especially in light of a post-pandemic (COVID-19) world. Drawing on the contributions of Hannah Arendt, Judith Butler, Roland Barthes, and Giorgio Agamben, the study displaces literature from its traditional representational role to examine it as a space of confrontation with the present time. The narrative strategies of verisimilitude, allegory, and dystopia—perceived here through the lens of reception—are reinterpreted as tools for ethical and political inquiry. Grounded in Arendt’s and Butler’s ethics of plurality and responsibility, Barthes’s fragmentary and essayistic aesthetics, and Agamben’s politics of interruption and oxymoronic exposure of historical obscurity, the analysis reveals how Saramago’s novels produce fractures in normative contemporary discourse, opening breaches for possible re-existences. The character of the doctor’s wife emerges as a figure of radical alterity, invoking listening and displacement. Ultimately, through a close reading of the protagonist’s scenes, the tension between collective and state forces, and the symbolic recurrence of the color white, this thesis argues that literature is not merely an object of study, but a mode of presence in the world—a space where the Other can appear, and a gesture of care for shared life