Dystopia, the Anguish of Annihilation and the Radical Poetics of Relation

Abstract

This article reflects upon dystopia through the lens of the anguish of annihilation (Mbembe, 2016), and ponders how this notion challenges the emergence of poetics of relation (Glissant, 1990) as a way of creating utopic and heterotopic (Foucault, 2009) literary spaces (Blanchot, 1955), in societies whose colonial past, and authoritarian incursions, have been perpetrated over centuries, as is the case of the Brazilian society. The primary hypothesis is that, in these contexts, the spaces of dystopia are established as the beginning, and not as the end of everything, becoming one of the foundational operators of a place (utopic or heterotopic?) created by the other, the colonizer. The anguish of annihilation is the primary tool for the construction of this place and this scene (which literature will propagate), and of the social ties and the effects of the subsequent spatial (social) and discursive division. In this sense, the article will question the contemporary notion of dystopia – constantly present in the narratives about the end of the world and in the arising of contemporary negative messianisms in the specific context of the formation of colonial societies, but not without observing some aesthetic-political strata in which a poetics of the relation outwit this design in post-colonial societies.