Maria Judite de Carvalho and the forgotten justice

Abstract

The forgotten are, for Giorgio Agamben (1999, p. 72-73), the ones who demand justice, and should not be consigned to memory and language, but remain unmistakable and nameless. To do justice to the forgotten ones will therefore be to talk about beings without importance and even existence, marked by emptiness and void, plunged into the despair of their bare lives, like the characters of the Portuguese writer Maria Judite de Carvalho are. This study wants to show how she does justice to the forgotten, displaying the lack of sense that only literature – the art which is disconnected from pragmatism and deprived of hope – can work with the tricks of Persefone and of Orpheus, in his transit between death and life, with the melancholy and negativity characteristic of forgotten subjects, trapped in their concentrated spaces of banishment and exclusion. The work recalls, therefore, Blanchot’s perspective that the literary work is proof of the impossibility of union, repetition that never ends, satiety that has nothing, scintillation of what is groundless and shallow. Nothing to do: no integration’s possible; for the forgotten, there is no rescue possibility. We know, however, with Almansi (1978): writers and poets are magicians, that language and poetry do not allow for a clear and definite sense; so it is possible to guarantee, with Orpheu’s songs and Persefone’s masks, life and prosperity in literature.