From Mythopoetics to Cosmopoetics — damaged language and body, plural worlds

Abstract

Based on João Guimarães Rosa’s short story “Meu tio o Iauaretê,” which uses a poetics of the unspeakable and the unfinished to integrate body and language damaged by colonial logic in the Americas, the article highlights the importance of a language that does not seek to dominate, but rather allows itself to be affected, opening space for new forms of existence and narrative. It dialogues with the thinking of Donna Haraway, who proposes thinking with the other — human and non-human — as an ethical and political gesture of reconstructing worlds, as well as with the concepts of Amerindian perspectivism and ontological turn of Eduardo Viveiros de Castro to understand how Western categories of subject, nature, and culture are problematized from Amerindian perspectives. This text thus investigates the transition from mythopoetics to cosmopoetics as ways of thinking about language, body, and experience in contexts of crisis and decolonization of thought. While mythopoetics acts as a symbolic resistance and allows listening to myths and traditional narratives as forms of cultural resistance, cosmopoetics expands this listening to an ethical and political practice of creating common worlds, marked by openness to otherness and ontological plurality.