A patologia do tempo ou a historicidade da peste: história, tempo e memória em Artaud e Camus

Abstract

This work aims to examine the articulation between the different temporalities underlying the reappearance of the plague allegory in the Antonin Artaud’s and Albert Camus’s works. The analysis addresses plague as a survival, since it constitutes a reappearance of a recurring allegory in Western culture and develops in a double questioning. On the one hand, these plague allegories are questioned as evidence of the crisis of the modern historicity regime, symptoms of an endogenous disturbance in the relations between past, present and future and the individual and collective, experiences of time, history and memory in Europe during the interwar and postwar periods. On the other hand, we question the survival of these plague allegories under a distinct theoretical framework that, although reinforcing this indicative character of a crisis of modern historicity, allows for a heterochronic approach, attentive to the historicity proper to cultural objects, to the tensions and temporalities that they run through them and which form the core of the relationships that are established, individually and collectively, with them. An approach that makes it possible to oppose the objective, homogenizing and excessively rationalizing structure presupposed by historicity regimes. Finally, the last two chapters seek to operationalize this discussion in three sections: an archeology of the plague's temporalities; an analysis of the experiences of time under the plague; and finally, it explores the speculations launched by the sources about the relations between memory, forgetfulness, catharsis and history in the period that follows the plague’s time.