The barbarism of ignorance and the ethics of critical surveillance in postmodern culture and in the fiction of Mário de Carvalho

Abstract

The fiction of Portuguese contemporary writer Mário de Carvalho addresses the specific topic of cultural ruin, i.e. cultural barbarism, as an upsetting symptom of postmodern culture. The growing ignorance about irreplaceable cultural matrices remains as a major ethical concern of this writer vis-à-vis one of the faces of contemporary cultural barbarism. This concern even surpasses his neo-conservative attitude. This becomes particularly clear in some of his narratives, therefore problematizing, indirectly, the engaged function or nature of literary art as followed by several contemporary thinkers – from Adorno and Said  to Steiner or Sloterdjk.