“Someone has to say the truth to blacks”: Olavo de Carvalho on black-african con-tribution to western culture”

Abstract

In the paper, we will study Olavo de Carvalho’s thought, focusing on his position regarding Brazilian and American Black movement in its struggle for reparation in terms of colonialism-slavery-racism. We will argue that his refusal of any reparatory praxis to political-cultural minorities and his position of a non-place for Black-African traditions in the context of Western culture/civilization, as with respect to his defense of the inferiority of Black-African culture-civilization when compared to Jewish-Christian, Greek-Latin and Medieval-Renaissance tradition, is pervaded by a dualist metaphysics with a highly anti-modern and anti-modernizing character, in which the dynamic of streamlining of “human drama about universe and eternity” is constituted (a) by the struggle between natural necessity (Behemont) and individual consciousness (Leviathan), that can only be won by the correlation of divine grace given by Jesus Christ and personal direct and immediate interiorization and intuition by each individual with God; (b) by the refusal of politics, history and intersubjective action as basically materialism and, in this sense, as the sphere of totalitarian political ideologies (to which Enlightnment modernity is the biggest example); and, finally, (d) by the centrality of spiritualism, of intimate and direct relation between God and man, mediated by Revelation, which points to the non-existence, in the Olavo de Carvalho’ thought, of objective parameters to rational discussion, interaction and justification – that is the reason of his delegitimation of science, politics, history and macro-structural institutional action, and his appeal to methodological, intuitionist and spiritualist individualism.