Eni Orlandi interview

Abstract

Trata-se de entrevista com Eni Orlandi, para compor o dossiê "Discursos da cena política brasileira em análise: a (des)construção da educação, da ciência, da cultura."

Interview

The name Eni Orlandi inevitably comes up whenever the topic is Discourse Analysis in Brazil. As an intellectual known both nationally and internationally, Orlandi broke through established paradigms in the universities where she taught, carried out research, and supervised well over a hundred students on research grants and taking Master and Doctorate degrees. Her intellectual journey does not begin exactly when she started working at the university, however. It begins earlier, at the undetectable point of origin where the subject finds itself impacted by the experience of language itself. Orlandi, with her liveliness of thought, and without subservience, accepting the unthinking, the contradictory, and always creating displacements, promoted an inaugural work that problematized the processes of production and movement of the meanings, taking as her starting point two separate fields of theoretical reflection: Discourse Analysis, proposed by Michel Pêcheux, and the History of Linguistic Ideas, proposed by Sylvain Auroux.

Taking the concept of discourse as a theoretical basis, and positioned halfway between the two theories of language, Orlandi’s refined analyses were the source of theoretical innovations and formulations in the field of discourse, such as the concept of silence, authorship, founding discourse, historicity, understanding, interpretation, among many others, and all in a material, empirical, abstract way. Conceptual reterritorialization and the epistemological need to construct devices of analysis that would engender other gestures of reading from archives also helped to reorganize the field of Linguistic Ideas in Brazil, since the theoretical place of discourse produced effects in the ways of analyzing the relations between the history of the constitution of the national language and the history of linguistic knowledge in the process of building society. Following this path, Orlandi worked on denaturalizing the evidence of what would be language, a national language, a mother tongue, linguistic politics and grammar.

Eni Orlandi is a retired full professor from the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP). In her career at UNICAMP, Orlandi was the founder of the Laboratory of Urban Studies, a platform for a unique discussion on language and urban knowledge. She was also responsible for the organization of the Michel Pêcheux fund as well as for the inclusion of the subject History of Linguistic Ideas to the undergraduate curriculum of the Bachelor of Linguistics. She coordinated projects - always collective - which inaugurated original practices and new pathways: from her first project, registered in 1981, The construction of Brazilianness, to the most recent, Leaving the place and crossing limits: immigration and colonization, and Materiality of ideology: discursive practices, subjects and the social imaginary, what we find is a ceaseless, living, restless and propositional intellectual production.

In this unpublished interview for ABRALIN Magazine, Eni Orlandi tells of how she first came across Discourse Analysis and talks about her education, her comings-and-goings between different countries, especially France and Brazil, and about the way Discourse Analysis was socialized, sharing with the reader her unique journey in implementing this theory here in Brazil. She also discusses the political and ideological elements of linguistic theories and minority discursivity, reflecting on censorship, silence through excess, designification, raising questions about the linguistic policies created for indigenous peoples, among the many other issues that help us to read the current Brazilian political scene.

Taking the floor now, here is Eni Orlandi.

Bethania and Evandra: You introduced Discourse Analysis in Brazil and founded a new school of thought here. Currently, Discourse Analysis is a discipline present from north to south in numerous Brazilian higher education institutions. Could you tell us a little about your first encounter with the work of Michel Pêcheux, about meeting Pêcheux himself, and about what it was like to implement a theory such as Discourse Analysis here in Brazil, which works with the production of meanings in the relationship between the linguistic, the historical and the ideological, at a time when we were still living under a military dictatorship?

Eni Orlandi: These are questions that come up again and again about my first encounter with Discourse Analysis. Much of what I will say I have said elsewhere before. But I do it because I imagine that different slips in the way I formulate my answers, in the repetition of accounts, can convey my experience in slightly different ways, and this might prove useful for those interested in the history of discursive ideas. In any case, when I try to answer questions like these, I look back and what I perceive as visible, as countable, is just the tip of an iceberg. And this is what is more or less told, the known, the expected. But there is much more that is submerged, lying below the surface of what is said. It represents a lot of work, struggles, expectations, victories, frustrations, which are barely visible, because what is seen, of that lived, is only what seems enough for Discourse Analysis to exist. And everything was much more.

I'll start by saying that I always came upon new ideas - and here I'll talk specifically about my intellectual life - a little before they came to be institutionally established. Which is not always comfortable. And that was my meeting with Linguistics and Discourse Analysis. As for the relationship between linguistics, history and ideology, since my graduation in Letters in Araraquara, I have been more directly involved with academic politics and the reading of Marxism, which has opened the doors to many other readings, involving history, society, ideology and politics. In addition, at this time I dedicated myself to reading a lot of literature: English, Portuguese, American, Brazilian and German. This greatly enriched my intellectual life, affected my certainties, increased my questioning, provided me with some answers, which were the basis for new questions.

My background in Letters was strong, and the structure of these courses, in the 1950s/1960s, years of my training, allowed me to open up more than I do today. At the end of my secondary course, in the Classical course, I studied Natural Sciences, Mathematics and Chemistry, General History and subjects in the area of Letters such as Latin, Portuguese, French, English, Spanish and Greek. Language and Literature.

When I started my more adult "intellectual" life in college, I came into more systematic contact with what is political, and expanded my studies in Letters. History and ideology were entering my intellectual life in various ways, both through reading and political practice. In the 1960s, at the Faculty of Philosophy, Sciences and Letters in Araraquara, we combined Philosophy, specific disciplines of Letters, Psychology, Education, Economy, in a harmonious and stimulating way. And this corresponded to our practice, whether intellectual or political.

Likewise, just as my search for Discourse Analysis formed part of my concern long before I found, in Paris in 1969, a book by Pêcheux, ADA69, at the bookstore Maspero, Linguistics, as a science of language, was also present in my reflections, even before I had given it a name in my mind. My background in Portuguese Philology at the graduation in Anglo-Germanic Letters, with Prof. Clemente II Pinho, led me to Linguistics. It was this professor who showed me that my questions, in the works he requested, such as the one I did on "Saint Jerome and the Vulgate," were a concern more of Linguistics than of Philology as such. I read Saussure, Martinet, Jakobson, Benveniste, which sparked my interest in the subject's question in language. I had begun my path as a linguist even before there was Linguistics in my curriculum, or I properly knew what it was. The following year, a professor arrived to give the Linguistics course and we started taking it regularly.

When I first came upon Linguistics I was already passionate about intellectual life, about politics, social care, and also curious about history and ideology. In the last year of the course came the dictatorship, in March 1964. I was the class valedictorian in 1965, and we were "invited" to leave. My professors dispersed. Many went abroad. I went to São Paulo to study for my postgraduate degree, to work, to act politically. There was no General Linguistics course at the time, which I intended to take. Together with two other colleagues, I found in Professor Maurer, professor of Romance Philology and of Indo-European Linguistics, staunch support for the creation of a graduate course in Linguistics. The course, created by Professor Maurer at our request in 1965, was the first course in General Linguistics at the University of São Paulo (USP). I was a structuralist, and I think that every good theory is political, in a comprehensive sense. I learned a lot from structuralism, and especially from Hjelmslev, who considered semantics an anthropological question.

I was looking for a semantics that wasn't structuralist. In September 1968, I went to France as a lecturer, to study Linguistics. I remained a linguist, but forgot that I was. I studied at the University of Vincennes, where my advisor was Professor L. J. Prieto, from the Sociology department, who taught Noology, a structural semantics that worked with meaning. I also attended semantics classes with O. Ducrot at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS). I heard Ruwet, I heard Lacan, I heard a lot of philosophy at the University of Vincennes. It was a place where, on the walls during class, one could read: "Marighella sera vengé". I found politics; I came to understand better the ideology, in the corridors, in the courtyards of Vincennes, and even in the disputes that took place in the outskirts of the university, in the Bois de Vincennes.

I encountered the Semantics I was looking for when I discovered Discourse Analysis in 1969, not in the course I took, but in a bookstore on Rue St. Sévérin, published exactly in 1969. I found an author who, coming from Philosophy, had found a theoretical way to capture ideology through the materiality of language. This book by Pêcheux, his doctoral thesis, the founding work of Discourse Analysis, was already announced, with its original theoretical and analytical strength, in the proposal of the study of the necessary relationship between language and its exteriority. The notion of discourse inaugurates, at that moment, a new territory in the studies of language, in which the notion of the effect of meaning, metaphorical effect, joins those of conditions and production processes, proposing, through this, new procedures of language analysis. In the book's presentation, the importance of the notion of discourse as a process, put forward by its author, whose analysis requires the use of an original procedure that distinguishes itself from the frequent or thematic methods of classical content analysis, without, however, making use of the syntactic-semantic presupposed schemes, is already highlighted. A new field is opened in Language Sciences, which is also of interest to those who work in the Humanities and Social Sciences. M. Pêcheux, when he returned from his meetings and work, said people found him "disturbing". This because he took away what was already established about ideology; he messed with the methods of language analysis; he asked questions that touched upon what was not conceived.

Since 1970, upon my return to Brazil, with the country living under a military dictatorship, I practiced Discourse Analysis in Linguistics at USP, as well as the course I gave to translators and interpreters at the Pontifical Catholic University (PUC) of Campinas, even before there was a discipline called Discourse Analysis in any of the institutions. I read Analyse Automatique du Discours, by Pêcheux, from which I drew as much as I could, and many articles in French magazines. At USP, I taught Morphosyntax, Syntax, Mathematics Applied to Language, Sociolinguistics, and, in the middle of the courses, I presented Pêcheux and the Discourse Analysis he proposed. But I couldn’t actually teach a course called Discourse Analysis. Neither at graduate nor at postgraduate level was there a course with this name. This didn't stop me from teaching the class assigned to me. A clandestine science? A form of knowledge of resistance? I didn't give it much thought. Perhaps I had already learned to use silence in my favor. It was a time of dictatorship and the curtailment of freedom. The intellectuals were, "naturally", deemed suspicious. As I said at the beginning, I didn't wait for "things" to exist to be interested in them. I didn't name my paths before taking them. I always started beforehand, and this was not easy. In that beginning, upon my return from France, I did what I thought Linguistics should be, too. At PUC Campinas, the director of the Faculty of Letters, Professor Sampaio, was cultured, a friend of intelligence, and very cordial towards me. There was no political support. This was silent. Just as the name of the discipline, which was officially given by the Linguistics Program in the Specialization Course for Interpreters and Translators, remained silent. The course was very successful, as translation is an excellent field for Discourse Analysis. It raises fundamental questions. The students, who were numerous, loved it, and this was very stimulating. It was the seventies.

I only met Pêcheux in 1982, at a political science meeting at the University Research Institute of Rio de Janeiro (IUPERJ), when he spoke of the holes in ideology, or rather, that ideology is a ritual with flaws. And we talked in a little bar near IUPERJ. He advised me not to go to Paris at that moment and to delve deeper into my own work. He suggested reading Les vérités de la palice, which I had not yet read. He was going to teach a course in Brazil. He didn't come anymore. But his work was already out there. The repercussions of his work would occur in various ways. They inaugurated a new way of working with the political and the symbolic, of signifying the ideology, outside the field of sociology. For me it was a nod to the future.

Upon my return to Paris, as early as 1984, I came across Discourse Analysis again, in a Colloquium on Orwell organized by Pierre Achard, about Sociolinguistics and Discourse Analysis, in which this "and" was a trait of union and, at the same time, a question mark. It was at this Colloquium that I saw, heard for the first time, F. Gadet (who sold me the first issue of LinX magazine), P. Sériot, D. Maingueneau. Achard and F. Leimdorfer invited me to a work meeting in which I presented my reflection on the discourse of indigenous leaders and the discourse of colonization in Brazil, working with Discourse Analysis, explicitly, and displacing both the discourse of anthropology, on the indigenous issue, and the traditional ethnic question, and showing the processes of signification that are installed with colonization. I was interrupted many times by a researcher of the group, who insisted that Ethnolinguistics or Bakhtin could deal with this issue. I insisted on the theoretical principles of Discourse Analysis and was supported by Pierre Achard, who made sure I made my presentation through to the end. Achard, and the organizers, published my text for this Colloquium on Orwell, and a little later published, in the magazine Langage et Société, a text I wrote for the Meeting on Dialogy, held at the Institute of Language Studies (IEL) in 1981, in which I made a critical analysis of the conversational rules and spoke of discourse. Although all the texts accepted for the IEL Meeting, as mine was, should have been published, mine was not. Censorship. So, I submitted the text to Langage et Société magazine, which published it. My interaction with the Maison des Sciences de L'Homme (MSH) group continued for many years.

Pêcheux had given me the address of the Laboratory of Social Psychology, directed by Pagès1, where I met Claudine Haroche, whom I invited to come to Brazil to teach a course and to participate in meetings at Unicamp and in São Paulo, at PUC, in the department of social psychology. Discourse Analysis had already been included some time previously in the Linguistics department of the IEL, when I held the first event, which was about political discourse, and had as guests G. Gimenez (Mexico), P. Sériot (Switzerland), M. Tournier (France) and N. Goldmann (Argentina). With the determination to meet and not to divide, I also promoted many other small meetings that gathered many of those interested in Discourse Analysis. My procedure has always been to defend myself strongly against divisions, but not to produce them. As Roland Barthes used to say, it is necessary to sustain your discourse now official. Denise Maldidier, when she came to Brazil, was moved by the name Discourse Analysis at the door of my room at IEL. The tip of the iceberg.

In 1987, I returned to Paris for my postdoctoral degree at the University of Paris VII. No university offered Discourse Analysis courses in France at that time. I took a seminar on Discourse Analysis at the Maison des Sciences de l'Homme (MSH) in 1987, invited by P. Achard, who was then the director of Langage et Société magazine, and who made the magazine a regular meeting place. We maintained, until his death, a great friendship and mutual intellectual respect. Denise Maldidier, F. Gadet and Francine Mazière were present at the seminar. Denise spoke at the end of the seminar about the importance of the work I presented, recognizing the affiliation to M. Pêcheux. This is how I met her. A lot of people liked this seminar, but there were also those who felt bothered by it. What had been produced by Pêcheux, although silenced after his death, remained strongly latent and challenging. And every time I went to France, not only at that time, but at other times, many people came to hear what I was building, also on the side there, from my reading of Discourse Analysis affiliated to this author. I think that what attracted the visitors was the fact that I connected myself to the theory of discourse, in my affiliation to Pêcheux, and produced many analyses, which, for them, was a bit unusual. The analyses I made were not automatic, not only of political discourse. I explored the materiality of discourse in its different manifestations. The notions of interdiscourse, of discursive formation, of metaphor, of subjects, worked on in the Vérités de la palice by Pêcheux, already allowed me to find analytical procedures, especially from the notions of paraphrase and polysemy, which I elaborated in their relations, thus refining the method of analysis.

As I attended the National Library daily, I was introduced to J.J. Courtine. He gave me a large number of texts, published by him and other colleagues from the Pêcheux team, texts that I used in classes and later deposited in our CEDU, in the Laboratory of Urban Studies (LABEURB-Unicamp), in the Michel Pêcheux Fund. It was at that time of my post-doctorate in Paris VII that Gadet introduced me to Madame Pêcheux, and to a very large group of researchers who had been part of the Pêcheux group at the Centre Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). The first one I met was Paul Henry. As I will explain more fully later, my relationship with Madame Pêcheux, and with this group, was instrumental in the way I managed the institutionalization of Discourse Analysis in Brazil.

I would like to dwell on this working relationship with my French colleagues, now from a broader perspective. Not only with the Paris group, but also with other groups such as Praxématique, from Montpellier. My relationship with France began in 1968, when I was a lecturer in Montpellier, and France, especially Paris, became an extension of my life in Brazil. What connected everything was my incessant work. In Campinas, I worked, trained many researchers, instituted Discourse Analysis and circulated it. I traveled a lot through Brazil. In Paris, I worked hard, and many of my colleagues, aside from putting me in touch with what was being done in the sciences, especially in the Language Sciences, not only in Paris, but abroad, in general, also included me in programs that I would call socio-cultural, political, and important. Some booked a seat form places for me in the theater every time I went there. Others invited me to beautiful art exhibitions and music shows. Some liked to show me places more off the beaten track, in Paris, where there was some form of art or political and cultural event. Readings of plays. Visits to the home of novelists, sculptors, painters, etc. Places where there were small permanent exhibitions. Others invited me to dance shows. I also went to work meetings in very special bistros. But most of the work meetings were at the beginning with several of the researchers from M. Pêcheux's group, in what they called the Café Théorique, where they met when the team was still a group, with Pêcheux, at the CNRS: Le Rostand, in front of Luxembourg. There I also had numerous meetings, with H. Parret, for the organization of the Urbino Colloquium on Heterogeneity and Silence. It was there that I was introduced to colleagues not yet well known. I was often at less formal dinners, at colleagues' homes, with whom I worked more often and with whom I worked more closely. It was the occasion to meet other colleagues. I also met with people who attended my seminars or conferences and who came from different institutions and countries. I remember an Algerian woman, a friend of a German woman, whom I met every time I went to Paris, as well as a young Malagasy woman and a Gypsy friend who showed me how important my work was for so many non-French colleagues who came to my presentations. Meetings, discussions, projects. Intellectuals and politicians. And so, I came into contact with a large and diverse group of intellectuals. In the University of Paris III region, there were many work meetings in cafes or restaurants that served for us as home offices. And many colleagues introduced me to bookstores or libraries that brought me a lot of material for reflection. Rare books or in facsimile editions. Intense activity that resulted in so much or more work in Brazil, even if there was no specific course on Discourse Analysis in Paris at that time. Knowledge, culture, art, politics were mixed. It was always a great tour through language at each visit to Paris. Or Lausanne, where I also worked frequently with P. Sériot, with whom I went to the former USSR, or Lyon III, where I worked with experts in Francophony, who took me to Canada, or Fontenay-aux-Roses, or Lyon, where I developed a great teamwork, financed by the Capes/Cofecub Agreement, in History of Linguistic Ideas.

All my activities and the contacts I made meant I formed a wide circle of colleagues, and also helped to bring many graduate students to France. The History of Language Ideas meetings began in Paris, at the University of Paris VII, and in the Rue d'Ulm, where work meetings, seminars, conferences, round tables, followed by lunches, in the Rue St Jacques, with colleagues from many countries, where language theories were widely discussed, as well as language policies and related issues. It was many years of work and conviviality, especially with S. Auroux and F. Mazière, E. Bonvini, S. Delesalle, J-Cl. Chevalier. And I have always placed as a primary objective the elaboration of Discourse Analysis. This was done, even in the long conversations with St. Auroux at the University of Paris VII, in the formulation of the project that was going to put our questions of colonization, language, and linguistic knowledge on the agenda of the broad international research group that Auroux directed. I also developed my research in libraries in Rome, for the writing of my book Terra à Vista, at the time of my postdoctoral research, and I met a group of intellectuals dedicated to language in Rome. I include in my work on Discourse Analysis my participation in the Portuguese Language Commission, which provided me with an excellent opportunity for first-hand contact with the Community of Portuguese Speaking Countries (CPLP) and also with Portuguese colleagues. I looked at the language(s) from a discursive perspective. If I talk about all this, it is only to show the importance of an international working relationship when it is effectively supported by concrete work. These were cultural, scientific, political, academic "exchanges", whether my colleagues, from Discourse Analysis, or History of Linguistic Ideas, came and, or, whenever I went, or sent students. And, more recently, many new relationships have emerged that fuel our academic working relationships. Extending also to Italy, with whom we have carried out fruitful projects in the area of discourse. That's what I would call internationalization, which is made up not only of Meetings, with some guests from abroad, and in which, many times, people hardly know each other and each other’s work.

As for implementing a theory like Discourse Analysis in Brazil during the military dictatorship, it was part of my intellectual life, and I did what was necessary: I did not abandon my choices, and just went ahead with my plans. Many people became interested in Discourse Analysis. Those who were against it, in general, were surprised that politics, ideology, historicity, were part of language studies. I think what matters is having a real relationship with work. I am convinced that the obstacles can be - and, for me, always have been - many; they come and go, but the work, if it is real, remains. I acted as politically as I could, and I also put a great effort into making Discourse Analysis capable of changing something. I read the authors of Discourse Analysis, or related ones, and I never stopped trying to think for myself about the path I was building with my options and my own work, always thinking about the intellectual, social and political situation in Brazil. In a presentation I gave some time ago, I said that Elis Regina's voice was the politics she made. My work has always been my political voice. Along with other political practices, therefore, I think one should not confuse Discourse Analysis with pure and simple militancy.

Discourse Analysis is first and foremost a science of interpretation, which works with processes of signification. Not only of political discourse. What it produces by way of analysis can, on the other hand, make us better at our ability to practice politics. But the subject-position analyst and the subject-position militant have their specificities and are distinct. I really enjoy the work I do. I have wondered about language from a very early age. I signify myself through my work. With a special inclination for writing. It’s obvious that I consider the place of Discourse Analysis that I practice, that we practice, institutionally, is in the Linguistics department. I have fought hard for this.

I turn now to another aspect that I consider important in intellectual work: the socialization of knowledge. Already at Unicamp, when I left USP, at the end of the 1970's, I tried to elaborate a process of discourse analysis institutionalization. I invested a lot of time and work on this. I think that a form of knowledge is made with a great deal of study and research, a lot of work and a lot of insistence. And, also, by creating favorable conditions for its existence and the constitution of a juncture in which this knowledge develops and circulates, producing its effects. It was necessary to create conditions for a quality Discourse Analysis practice. In relation to institutionalization, the first thing was to work to have the course available in the institution both at undergraduate and graduate levels. And that was a long-term commitment. Besides, it was necessary to have students, which meant offering quality courses on a regular basis. To train the students, both as teachers and researchers. Many courses were offered, and many students attended, both for undergraduate and graduate courses, in order to circulate the work through our presence at events; to be recognized in the institutions that promote research; to be well evaluated by Capes.

For institutionalization purposes, but not only for this, as we will see below, the support of Madame Pêcheux and the researchers who were part of the Pêcheux group, at the CNRS, on the European side, was very important. And, in Brazil, the support of the Foundation of Support to the Research of the State of São Paulo (Fapesp) proved essential. For years in a row, and little by little, it became possible to bring over all the researchers of this group with whom I had contact. Initially, there were fifteen researchers. One by one, Fapesp granted funding for everyone to come to Unicamp and teach courses, hold conferences, not only for the students of our courses, but also for others interested in Discourse Analysis. The situation was very paradoxical, I would say. The Pêcheux group no longer existed at the CNRS. When I went to France, few still identified themselves as Discourse Analysts. Many even rejected that title. They were either linguists, or historians, or sociolinguists, or psychoanalysts, or philosophers. But I got on well with all of them, insisting on Discourse Analysis, which was my area of expertise, and, apart from conversations and work meetings — held, as I said, in cafés, in the MSH Library, rarely in the universities, because the workspace was small—they also invited me to give lectures, participate in seminars and speak in Meetings, as well as to teach courses in the universities. They opened up spaces for my work. When they came to Brazil, besides talking about their current interests, they also talked about discourse. Even because, in general, in what they did, the passage through Discourse Analysis was always present. And they were interested in talking about their experience in M. Pêcheux's group at CNRS. That's how I think I gave meaning to Discourse Analysis on both sides of the Atlantic. On the other hand, it was already more difficult when I sent students to France for specific courses in Discourse Analysis, because they did not exist then. But the students who went knew how to produce excellent work programs, in any of the institutions they were in, and our French colleagues were extremely responsible in their relationship with everyone. Only later, did courses in Discourse Analysis start to appear again, in another moment of their development.

Madame Pêcheux collaborated with our Discourse Analysis implementation and institutionalization program, making texts available to us and releasing their translation and publication in Brazil. Colleagues also gave away their texts for translation in Brazil. These initiatives helped us to institutionalize Discourse Analysis.

But there is another side to this issue which is the socialization of knowledge produced by Discourse Analysis. This is also a very important process. They can come together, but they are distinct. Institutionalization is a necessary practice, since science, in the political moment in which we are living, is also an object of interest, a commodity. Socialization is a way of relativizing the meaning of knowledge production as a market and, in a political gesture, of bringing it into the relationship of man with history, society and nature, towards its transformation. Since I had access to Discourse Analysis, I tried to put at the disposal of my students and other interested people, not only what I covered in class, but also my sources of reading, and the contacts I had made, and to which I had access, after a great deal of effort. As for the readings, I started not only to make the texts available, in general, in French, which was part of my work with the students, but also to translate these texts so that they could circulate more widely and produce a critical field of readers. That's what I call socializing knowledge, something I learned from my professors in the 1960s. I insist on the date, because more and more, over time, I've listened to people from the University who talk about socialism, society, but who socialize their knowledge less and less.

More recently, there is a key word that takes the place of socialization in the relationship of knowledge with society: it is the word "empowerment."2 And, through it, we have the discourse of globalization and that of minorities, taken by globalization, signified by the capitalist political and ideological juncture. These are new forms of politics, new forms of division. The word empowerment privileges relations of force over relations of meaning. It claims power. And it draws meaning from the capitalist system itself. It does not take distance from the situation, in the situation itself, as Nietzsche would say. And this way of producing a gesture that is said to be a gesture of resistance is proper to globalization, which equates divisions not by struggle and the recognition of divisions and ideology, but by the will and the availability of capitalist means. We are all the same, so it sounds like we are "troops". There is not only that in globalization, but this is what is generally available, when the practice is a practice that does not know the concreteness of the world and appeals to the will and consciousness. And it speaks of "disadvantaged classes".

But let's go back to the socialization process of Discourse Analysis that I sought, that I seek, that I practice. I am insisting on this word, because, in general, it speaks more about the institutionalization of Discourse Analysis. And it is necessary to distinguish between to institutionalize and to socialize. Institutionalization, in the capitalist system, is done through the institutions and administrative discourses, and it is necessary so that a form of knowledge has a specific place in the field of science and can be available for training and research. Socialization, on the other hand, is something quite different. With socialization, relations are not mediated only by institutions, but by the production of conditions of accessibility, by the politicization of the field of knowledge. By bringing the researchers of the Pêcheux group or making available to all interested parties the cultural and scientific "goods" to which I had access, I socialized the practice of Discourse Analysis, and made it permeable to the society in which I live. For me, it is a social necessity and a political duty of those who have access to science. I could paraphrase Pêcheux, in a displacement of what he says, and affirm that it is "an ethical question, a question of responsibility. And that's how I didn't just blindly follow the rules of the game set down by the institutions, nor did the Discourse Analysis that I practice close itself within the institution walls. We socialize. Concepts that I formulated, notions that I worked on, spread throughout Brazil. And even outside its borders. They are of social use. They exist independently. This is socialization.

Bethania and Evandra: In your work As formas do silêncio: no movimento dos sentidos (The Forms of Silence: in the Movement of the Senses) (1992[1]), a book that received the Jabuti Award, you set out to listen to what was sayable and in circulation during the period of the military dictatorship. In the second part of the book, you analyze the movement of the senses both in the functioning of censorship "that impedes the historical work of meanings" (ORLANDI, 1992, p. 11[1]), and in the work of resistance that is inscribed in this site of significance of the censored meanings. Hence the importance of thinking about the founding silence and its forms, in the movement of meanings, since, according to the proposed notion, "silence is at the base of the division of meanings" (ORLANDI, 1992, p. 111[1]). With the verse of Emily Dickinson's poem "Silence is infinity", an epigraph of the text Politics and Silence in Latin America: when one speaks for the other, published in 2019[2], you punctuate the notion of silence thinking about the present time, about the discourse of minorities. Could you talk a little more about the lure of the "fuss", and the listening of the unknowable, the not understood and the unusual?

Eni Orlandi: The question begins by saying that in my book, As Formas do Silêncio (The Forms of Silence), I proposed to listen to what was in circulation during the period of the military dictatorship. I would say that I was trying to listen to the unsayable, too, but that it is a bit more complicated than that. I would like to make an observation that I consider very important, because it constitutes the theory of silence that I propose. Indicating the nuances that need to be observed. When I set out to work with silence—and I say this in the first pages of the book—I was aiming at the concrete materiality of meaning, as a materiality distinct from the materiality of words, from the sayable, and even from language, as such. Silence does not speak; it means. It is not the sayable, then, but the signifiable. If I "translate" silence into words, if I make it speak, meanings will no longer be the same, and will imply different gestures of interpretation, given their signifying matter.

From this point of view—and here I recall what I call the founding silence—I consider silence as the very condition of the production of meaning. I am not talking about silence in its physical quality, but about silence as meaning, as history, human silence, significant matter. Distinct from language. Silence that is not a lack of something, is not an emptiness, but a horizon. In this way, and through my affiliation to materialism, I was able to inscribe my conception of silence, as I developed it, in this affiliation, as a process of signification. Even if a conscious relationship between the subject and silence is not established, in the face of discourse, the subject needs silence, as a necessary foundation for meaning and which is reinstalled by speaking. It is by thinking about the politics of silence, the one that divides meanings, that separates the signifiable from the non-signifiable, and the sayable from the unsaid, that one could say that I propose to listen to the signifiable and the sayable, but also, I would say, the non-signifiable and the unsayable, when it comes to the politics of silence, of censorship.

I also remember that censorship does not only exist under a military dictatorship. This is only one example of the presence of censorship, in my analysis, especially of music, in a certain political context. But the politics of silence—be it constitutive or local, as I call it—is a constant, which presents itself at any favorable juncture, creating the conditions for silencing. It's enough to remember what happens today with the exhibition of paintings, with graffiti, or comical caricatures, or texts, which are censored at every moment. And even entire graduate courses that are silenced.

My theoretical position is that if there is censorship, there is also meanings movement, and the censored meanings migrate to other symbolic objects. And they signify. A relationship that does not fall apart between the founding silence and the politics of silence. Where there is censorship, there is resistance.

I will comment on the second part of this issue saying that I think it is extremely important for us to observe the current discursivity in its forms of silencing and the consequent possible modes of resistance. For discourse analysts, the responsibility remains to clarify, with the theoretical and analytical devices at their disposal, what is currently presented. Since the beginning of my work with silence, it was part of my concern not to oppose "noise" to silence. Because, in noise, there is also silence. Noise here meaning a "tumult" of voices, the constant presence of language on walls, in pamphlets, in videos, in networks, everywhere. A constant flurry. Excess, noise that ends up producing insignificance. Indifference to signification.

We have been, for a long time, and are constantly, bombarded by languages of all kinds, sizes and colors. On the other hand, I think, like Emily Dickinson, that "silence is infinity". This is the opening of the symbolic, the silent thought as the founding silence, which opens up the horizon of meanings. But let's not forget that there is also what I call silencing, that which closes, divides, silences. To answer your question more directly, we had not known the extreme right in power, explicitly. The right-wing, yes. We already had a great deal of experience with that. Also with the dictatorships. The unusual thing, I would say, was that now we faced the extreme right. Nazism and fascism are so unacceptable, so grotesque, that they seem inconceivable. Especially if we consider them from the subject-position of a left-wing discursive formation. However, an extreme right-wing president has been elected, claiming with every statement to belong to the extreme right. We went from the unusual to what, for us, was inconceivable. But existing. This is real. It is impossible for it not to be so. Looking from an analytical perspective now, we can say that in the current political discourse(s) there are many forms of silence and silencing. I have already spoken of what I have called the volatility of interpretation, in which the real of meaning is diluted, the real of history is erased.

I would now like to speak of the silencing produced by excess, by the incessant noise of the networks, and the channels that seek to attract attention in order to distract the more acute listening of meanings that come together, creating a smokescreen for the extreme right to force their legislative proposals through Congress. There is, as I have already said, insecurity in words, because of the relationship with the silencing that accompanies them.

There is a war of meanings in a rhetoric that I have called "the rhetoric of advantage": any gibberish can be used to "mess up” meanings, to create confusion, to foment misunderstanding, contradiction, unreasonableness. Because these are favorable conditions for the survival of right-wing discourse. At this juncture, the dominant process, I believe, is the production of the processes of designification. In Chile, they are struggling to produce a new Constitution. Immediately, they begin to insinuate the idea that, in Brazil, we must also do the same. What is this? They talk about thinking about a new Constitution for Brazil, and they erase, silence the meaning of what is being produced in Chile, when they vote to no longer have the Constitution of Pinochet's time. At this historical moment, the Constitution in Brazil has the sense of democracy. The political is designified, because of the ideological war. An attempt is made to silence discursive formations, to erase distinctions. Because what has already been put forward, pre-constructed, in this discursive formation of the extreme right, is the erasure of the left, the silencing of its discourse. And irrationality is erected as a way of silencing. It is inconceivable that one should not want to vaccinate all Brazilians. It is unbelievable that one shouldn't take the point of view of science seriously. These are formulations that seem absurd to us. They steal from us, our meanings, with the greatest discourtesy imaginable. And this is also part of the process of designification: something that was said by the left, appears re-said by the extreme right, which destroys the specificity of signification. If you respond to the preconstructed, you get stuck with it, embroiled in the other's argument. How to distinguish yourself, how to take distance? How to undo the mistake? There is no way one can rely on meaning when it is being designified. I think that one way to create a proper listening in these conditions is to use the forms of silence - "silence is infinity" - to find reliability: to overcome comprehensibility, as Nietszche would say (The Gay Science, among others[3]). Not to be wrapped up in fake news, not to respond directly to designification, not to want to understand or to be understood. To accept the challenge of the unknowable. In these conditions, it is worth taking a risk in nonsense. To work and to produce nuances, delicacy, finesse of language, intelligence. Never get straight to the point. This is fatal. The media has often done this and keeps responding, turning falsely in the insecurity of words, in the designification, increasing the noise. Noise is the voice of this type of government.

Overcoming comprehensibility is the refusal to be understood universally. When Nietzsche proposes the overcoming of comprehensibility, and of the supra-individual, he is questioning interpretation, criticizing the doctrine that affirms that one can be perfectly understood universally. His criticism leads to individualization, for, according to the author, one cannot think that "communication in no way alters what is being communicated”. When he says this, he is denying the requirement of a universal understanding, one that de-individualizes man himself (we would say the subject) and his peculiar conditions of life (we would say conditions of existence). It is in this sense that I consider it essential, as Nietzsche says, to "individualize" a given interpretation, in the sense that I take the subject-individual (no longer the psycho-biological, but rather the socio-political) and take into account the conditions of production of meanings. There is, from this perspective, no supra-individual understanding. That of the troop, as Nietzsche might say. This pretension, which Nietzsche calls metaphysics, is the same as that opposed to the materialism of Discourse Analysis, when it considers the conditions and the process of production of meanings, ideology, interpretation.

What is needed is to distance oneself from the situation within the situation; Nietzsche says "I feel the distance to be different in each understanding, equally unmistakable, and to be above in comparison with each opaque element.” It is also Nietzsche who says that life is not an argument. And minorities often argue for life. The dominant discursive formation designifies this argument. No one is understood univocally by everyone under any circumstances. The language may sound strange. Pêcheux also tells us this when he speaks of reversal and displacement. The praise of in-comprehension. What Nietszche says does not deny life, but only its use as an argument. One cannot expect universal understanding. This, in my opinion, does not disqualify the discourse(s) of minorities. On the contrary, it prepares for difference, for the incomprehensible, and for the idea that an argument is not understood in the same way by everyone. What is dissymmetric is not the same. Again, ideology intervenes in interpretation. Nietzsche works, in the face of interpretation, with the paradox, we, with contradiction, with equivocity. Argumentatively, one cannot accept a hand-to-hand or body-to-body fight. The meanings are always further away. Nor do they have direct access to the processes of designification. It is in the deviation, in the other place, that the meanings can make sense, that the processes of designification can be neglected. It is better to make it mean what is silenced. The unreasonable is answered with equivocity, irony, reversion.

Irony has been a way of making what is designified signify, bringing out the unknowable. Humor has always been loaded with this possibility. One musician who has done this is Arnaldo Antunes. One of his songs is exemplary: O real resiste (The real resists). You can't interpret it directly, not even inside out. Metaphor works at a high level of sophistication, you have to overcome comprehensibility. Un-understand. "Authoritarianism does not exist (....), homophobia does not exist (...) ghosts, bogeymen do not exist". "It's just a nightmare and then it passes". To say that it doesn't exist, that everything is an illusion and, at the same time, to affirm: the real resists. Would it be possible, then, to think that the real, which exists, does not exist? Is it an illusion? But the real resists. And this is what is meant by sayings and images that strongly attest to the real which is being denied. And that it resists. Language, stretched to its limit, conveys meaning through designification as a response to the very process of designification. Poison, against poison, heals. But it's not that simple. "The real resists/is only a nightmare and then is gone," when it is said of the fascism that spies on us day after day, is beautiful, and packs a stunning force. Arnaldo Antunes, Nando Reis, are the poets who best deal with this form of discourse. Another example is the song Não vou me adaptar (I will not adapt), in which they say in the beginning: "Did I say what no one heard? Did I hear what no one was saying?" and they end up by singing: "Did I say what no one was saying?/ Did I hear what no one was hearing?” Jumps, continuous drifts, untying equivocity, exposing themselves to them. Indistinct, confused, difficult to understand. Interpretation has nothing to do with logic, with the rational, nor with the fantastic, either, with fantasy. It is with the incomprehensible, with the improbable, with the unreasonable, the unusual, the astonishing, the irrational.

The discourse we face is one that seeks to undo meanings and to gain time to provision the State as a Fascist State. And this without irony, but with mockery, with open ignorance, with the rudeness of those who dislike, who do not respect life. It is not a discourse of deconstruction, but of destruction, full and simple. What does Arnaldo Antunes' song convey most strongly? It denies only to affirm more vehemently. This, in rhetoric, is called litotes (H. Lausberg, 1966[4]): an ironical statement in which the affirmative is expressed by the negative of its opposite, that is, saying "no" to affirm "yes". More than this, we can understand litotes as a mixture of irony and emphasis.

I have already worked on irony and I would like, here, to make reference to what I find fundamental in the discursive understanding of irony: irony produces the sense of questioning. By being ironic you are interrogating and making the interpreting subject interrogate (themselves) in turn. And this happens gradually, through frequent repetition, the restriction of the space allowed to signification, and insistence. The paradox, which Nietzsche uses, is present in Arnaldo Antunes' song and is also one of the properties of litotes. The contradiction of contradiction. The opposite is denied, and the strong repudiation of what is denied is produced. At the same time that, in his song, Arnaldo affirms that x does not exist, he displays images that show scenes of what is denied, and, in between, repeats the chorus "The real resists". The relationship of existing and resisting disturbed by a "no" makes any parallelism, any reversibility impossible. And it takes us to the "where", the "what", the questioning that swings in the rhythmic air by the resonance of words, sounds and images. And so we can go beyond comprehensibility. Going through designification.

I think that, in answering this question, I answered a few others as well. More specifically, in relation to question 73, on current political discourse, I would only add one thing. To the question "Is to consider the adversary's discourse to sustain it, to apprehend it, to invert it, to take it literally?", I think I've already answered, in part, on how to answer it. It's not a body-to-body fight. Specifically, I would say that it is all this, and none of it, at the same time, because the question is the argument, the observatory of the politician, conceived discursively, that is, as I have proposed, the argument is structured ideologically, and it is there that one can confront the current political discourse. By not responding to it, but by producing a sense of detachment, drawing from it the universal, the evident meaning that it tries to pass, and then returning it to its commitment to the discursive formations in which it produces and makes sense (that of the extreme right), going beyond comprehensibility and knowing how to reach what is not yet signified. After all, in these processes of silencing, of erasure, of volatilizing the meanings, we cannot forget that discourse has materiality, and my bet is, through analysis, to get to the real core of the process of signification. The real resists. The real exists/resists.

Bethania and Evandra: We understand that theories are political, they make politics, although this form of politics is not visible to those who practice it. How do you situate Discourse Analysis theory in the practice of knowledge production? Pêcheux, in the opening of the Discursive Materialities Colloquium (1980), proposed that Discourse Analysis could constitute an intervention in the Humanities and Social Sciences, producing a reading-trituration of meanings, engaging in the "production of events". (PÊCHEUX, 2016, p. 27[5]). You have always received guidance from various fields of knowledge, and this has been repeated with various fellow researchers and scholars. Would you say Discourse Analysis as practiced in Brazil achieves this ideal formulated by Pêcheux?

Eni Orlandi: As for saying that theories are political, that they make politics, I fully agree. It is something that is part both of my background and my work.

Among others, my work on scientific dissemination in the Journalism laboratory made me analyze more thoroughly the production and circulation of knowledge, and also to reflect on how discourse analysts, through their studies, can affect scientific public policies.

In my wide experience of working in the graduate program, which we implemented in the south of Minas Gerais, and which had as its core the relationship between language and society, the issue of language in the production of science was a theme of continuous research, since the course, Postgraduate degree in Language Sciences, attracted researchers from very different fields. As many Discourse Analysis courses do, in Brazil.

More recently, I have been studying the position and the theoretical and methodological contribution of Discourse Analysis to the practice of knowledge production, taking the issue of the Humanities and Social Sciences as a point of entry. In fact, thinking about Pêcheux's own path, the question of science, in general, and the Humanities and Social Sciences, in particular, have always been concerns of his. Ideological formations and epistemological objects have always played an important part in his projects. The relationship between science and language is dealt with extensively, including in Vérités de la palice. His criticism of the Humanities and Social Sciences - which have difficulty in producing the necessary rupture between theory and practice, and which are in continuity with ideology - corresponds to his criticism of the Language Sciences which, to deal with the subject and the situation, tend to make alliances with psychology, sociology or history. Hence his criticism of sociologism, psychology, historicism. More directly, when he takes up and comments on D. Lecourt's statement that "practical ideologies attribute their forms and their limits to theoretical ideologies", Pêcheux (1975[6]) says that this means that the system of theoretical ideologies proper to a given historical epoch is determined by the whole complex with dominant ideological formations. And his quest is to constitute Discourse Analysis in discontinuity with ideology, breaking the relationship between theory and practice. This occurs, in Discourse Analysis, by moving in language analysis from the notion of function to that of functioning, relating the conditions with the discourse production process. This results in the possibility of analyzing discourse. Just as Discourse Analysis moves away from content analysis and proposes to expose the reader's gaze to the opacity of language, undoing transparency, the effect of evidentness produced by ideology. Hence its work with notions such as the change of terrain, the work of the unthinking in thought, the new issues it puts into circulation in the field of language, displacements.

What I am saying is that Discourse Analysis, affiliated to Pêcheux, is conducive to the discussion of science and, since its formation, this is an ever-present issue. And I think that Discourse Analysis allows us to do this, theoretically and methodologically, with mastery. Thinking about the field of Human Sciences, and the production of an intervention, as Pêcheux intended, my answer is yes, I think that Discourse Analysis as practiced in Brazil certainly constitutes an intervention in the Humanities and Social Sciences and produces a "read-trituration" of meanings, engaging in the production of events. I do not think that it is only in Brazil that Discourse Analysis achieves this goal, given the way it is constituted, having as a metaphorical field, as Pêcheux says, with which it debates, the field constituted by Linguistics, Psychoanalysis and the Theory of Social Formations (theories of ideology). The relationship between the constitution of Discourse Analysis and these fields brings fundamental results for the study of language, subjects, and meanings. And this affects the sciences in general, not only in Brazil.

This field of knowledge, that of Linguistics, Psychoanalysis and Social Theories (of ideology(ies)) acquires, through the development of Discourse Analysis, great importance in the production of sciences in general. In a plural and heterogeneous way. Discourse Analysis with its results, throughout its history, has developed a field of questions that have become indispensable for the understanding not only of man, society, history, politics, but has also raised new questions posed by ideology for the sciences in general. I think that, yes, this development takes place mainly, or primarily, in Brazil, in comparison with the Discourse Analysis produced elsewhere. Not because it "influenced" them, but because we produced, with our studies and research, displacements in the field of language sciences in general. This has become an object of interest even for those who develop their studies in other countries.

Discourse Analysis produces an epistemological break in the field of the Human Sciences. And I will speak for Brazil, and for the work I do, even if I think this may be happening elsewhere as a result of what Discourse Analysis introduced in terms of epistemology to the sciences. In science, no one can be unaware any longer of how its objects are built. And the issue of discourse, and I'm talking here about the discourse as object, is invested in this. What I propose in my reflections on the relationship between Discourse Analysis and the Humanities and Social Sciences is a consideration of what it means, among the Sciences, to be a Science of Interpretation. I would like to highlight, then, the question of interpretation to show how Discourse Analysis, with its theoretical and methodological principles, produces an epistemological break in which the question of interpretation ceases to be an obstacle to these sciences, those of interpretation, to have their importance, precisely because they do not ignore, but indeed question themselves about interpretation, qua sciences. I discuss the nature of the concepts (residues of metaphor, as Nietzsche says) and above all the question, in the writing of the interpretation sciences, of the place of metaphor. Metaphor not as a figure, but as a transference, in which we can observe the necessary abstraction that is produced with metaphor as a theoretical instrument, part of the analytical procedures of the Human Sciences, in the face of interpretation, ideology4. The metaphor, of which I speak, thought of in scientific writing, in relation to the concept, demands a sophisticated process of abstraction.

I think that, in the field of sciences in general, it is the Human Sciences - and I include Linguistics and Discourse Analysis among them - that can best qualify the new questions that are required for contemporary knowledge, in the context not only of politics, but also of science and technology. One science is a science in the midst of many others. They are heterogeneous in terms of their methods, their objects. They cannot be ranked. One is not any more or any less of a scientist because a given scientific field has been formalized or not. Because it is interpreted or not interpreted. The nature of the models is multiplied when one takes into account the language, the technologies, and the construction of the different scientific objects. The policies of validation and legitimization of science must think of knowledge in its production process, and all science must have its criteria based on its processes of signification, on solid epistemological bases, according to its own principles, respecting the theoretical and analytical affiliations and the specificity of its objects. Because there is no object of knowledge that can ignore the question of the production of meanings as part of its reflection, in the construction of its objects - whether this be through computerized procedures, or through metaphorization, as we propose to treat the question of interpretation in the construction of a knowledge event.

In any case, we can no longer think of the Humanities and Social Sciences as we thought them in the 19th century, but only as they exist in the 21st century. And Discourse Analysis, having introduced, with its proposal, the discourse object, produces a shift in this scientific field. When we reflect on science throughout history, and considering how the scientific event, produced in one moment, has consequences on steps taken in another moment, and sometimes, very indirectly, I think that in our studies and researches, in Discourse Analysis in Brazil, we have taken fundamental steps to achieve these objectives; we have created the right conditions for this. And more. Having said that, I am convinced that Discourse Analysis in Brazil, in its elaboration and development, certainly created the conditions for this intervention in the Humanities and Social Sciences, engaging in the production of events. I am sure that we have prepared ourselves for this.

Bethania and Evandra: The situation of indigenous populations is a matter for the State. In your book Língua e conhecimento linguístico (Language and Linguistic Knowledge) (2002[7]), you show that state policies cannot deny the history of indigenous peoples, since “both indigenous identity and their culture are in movement, especially in the contact situation in which these identification processes work acutely”. To which you add: "Better, in my opinion, is to propose projects in which the Indian actively participates as a subject who practices his culture and transforms himself by transforming it". (ORLANDI, 2002, p. 233[7]). In view of this proposal, thought out and elaborated in another socio-historical context, how do you envisage, in the present moment, the public policies that allow the Indian subject to practice and transform his culture? What about the resistance movements of the indigenous populations against authoritarian policies, against the destruction of their population and, in turn, their culture?

Eni Orlandi: The indigenous question is one that demands a lot of attention, reflection and theoretical-political consistency from linguists, anthropologists and discourse analysts. Because their work can touch the public policies that affect Indians.

I have worked for many years with the indigenous question and I have felt, not infrequently, in the various field researches that I have carried out, not very apt, theoretically and methodologically, to analyze, with consequence, the life situations that they have to face in their daily lives. Relative to their languages, cultural or political issues. I have been called several times to participate in evaluation processes of indigenous education projects. Many projects were of excellent quality. The issue was that by going out into the world, by becoming practical, they showed themselves incapable of understanding the real concrete needs of the Indians. I saw a lot of contradiction, a lot of equivocity, because if there is one issue that has to be thought of in close relation with the conditions of existence, the conditions of production in which some project is proposed, it is the indigenous issue.

I am, in principle, averse to the so-called "revitalization" of indigenous culture. I do not think that one should rethink the indigenous language for the Indian himself. Because we would have mere users of the language and not speaking subjects as such, in their identification processes, in their affiliation to memory. I have proposed what I have called polylinguism, that is, the recognition that languages are polysemic, and in their relations they are still polysemic, that is, there is also polysemy in the relations between languages, with drifts, slippages in and between languages. No language remains immobile, free from the possibility of change.

Projects must be open mainly to the participation of the Indians themselves, because they can and must take part in these projects, as subjects who practice their cultures, their languages, transforming them and transforming themselves. Everything moves. I am not in favor of the imposition of reeducating Indians to take up the practice of forgotten rituals once more, long since left behind. Because, as mediators between the Indian and his own language, between the Indian and his own culture, between the Indian and his own rituals, we are already intervening, we are not transparent. And, if alliances are built, they must represent a considered relationship, respectful of freedom, and of the decisions of those concerned.

I don't think that one can mediate between Indians and their history, their stories. Mediation constituted catechesis, pacification, colonization, in short. But, in a situation involving risk to the Pataxó hãhãi, I carried out research, together with Aracy L. da Silva and Greg Urban, to find words and phrases from the language of these Indians and put together the booklet they had asked for, just like any Summer5 might have put out, because, presenting, documenting their language to the authorities was a way for them to be recognized as Indians and claim the right to their own land. To prevent them from being constantly evicted from their lands and moved from one place to another. Seeing that they experienced a diaspora of their own, so common among Indians and so destructive of their identities. Not only with the Indians, but with any Brazilian, we should never intervene, mediate, or impose models - though we should not ignore their plight, either, or remain oblivious to their problems. These are dynamic and moving relationships. What we did was, at their request, to place our knowledge at their disposal.

And here we come to what I consider the most difficult issue of all. Identity. Where does the Indian end and the Brazilian begin? How do the Indians mean and signify themselves within their relations? Is it really necessary to maintain the idea of the Indian of our imaginary colonization, the village Indian, with a tacape club and a cocar headdress? For whom is this necessary? How are we listening to the Indian when we are ready to listen to him? I remember well my surprise when, having gone to the distant villages of the Xerente tribe - on a difficult trip because at that moment it was very hard to obtain funding to work with Indians - when speaking with an Indian, I heard in his speech the language of the linguist, of the anthropologist, of the pastor. He himself said, when I asked him about his language, that the pastor knew his language. In this case, one from the New Tribes. Hopelessness. And this gave rise to other questions. Why should we want the Indian to speak a language we regard as authentic, one that doesn't change with history? Who cares about this language? Polylingualism: I heard Portuguese in the indigenous language, and I heard the indigenous language in Portuguese. Where do these "pure", imaginary languages go? To the archives, the museums, the pastor; to the linguist? What does the Indian think of this? What does the Indian think about us, about Brazilian society? What does the Indian think about himself?

In this long history of contact, it is worth taking steps and asking how the Indians, today, present in Brazilian society, those who resisted and are still here, convey meaning and signify themselves. The villagers, the urbanized tribes, those who have already been a part of our society for many years. Their ways of life are different. And, speaking of resistance, one must realize that some indigenous groups are more resistant than others to the difficulties of Western, capitalist culture. There is no homogeneity in anything. And this is also what must be taken into account in these reflections.

The answer I found to many of these questions was that it is necessary, in the relationship with indigenous cultures, to constitute the Indian as our real interlocutor, to think of the Indian subject-position from itself, today, and always leave a distance, politically signified, so that there are multiple possibilities of interpretation, just as Discourse Analysis proposes. And to maintain a principle, which I learned by visiting the villages: identity is a movement in history. There are very major differences between the diverse indigenous groups, there are many differences between the many cultural, social, political situations of the Indians. There exist different ways of making contact, this between the Indians themselves and also between them and the society that surrounds them; there are different ways that they relate to their own culture and those of the Western world.

Thinking about teaching, I am convinced that many of them want, and can, maintain their traditional teaching practices, including the language used, at the moment, in the material form in which it exists, and at the same time have access to formal education of the sort we produce in our schools, but this in quality schools, not makeshift classrooms. They know how to distinguish between these. There are many Indians already living in the city. Indians from other countries have taught us this. In Chile, Indians take part in city life, in universities, in the social and political life of the country. With all its many possibilities. Their different living conditions. In other words, this is to see the Indian as every subject, one that signifies, and signifies in itself, a historical and symbolic subject, and therefore also affected by ideology. To make available and support projects that they can evaluate is something desirable, but I don't believe our organizations, our institutions, from Brazil or abroad, can act exclusively as their only interpreters. And I am critical of any discourse, from inside or outside Brazil, that speaks of "protecting", of "saving". Protection has been a mode of intervention, of management, of exploitation. On the one hand, one sees the desire to protect the Indian who, in this relationship, be it with Brazil or abroad, takes on the guise of an imaginary Indian, whose meaning is defined by colonization. Describing how the Indian is part of Brazilian society is not enough; it is the Indian who must do the describing.

Projects, proposals, must work as they should, for society as a whole, as projects that meet the social demands as they are constituted from the movements of that society, in constant transformation. In the case of the Indians, as I said, this means considering the possibility of their participation as a subject that means itself in the practice of their culture, one which transforms itself, as well as in their relationship with the Brazilian society of which they are part. The Indian is a socio-political subject.

As we know, however, in Western society the lefto-vers, the surplus, are multiplied in their segregation from society and history. This is a condition of capitalism, which unceasingly divides. In the case of the Indians, first because of their culture, then because they are social beings like anyone else, subject to dissymmetry, to privation, to the failure of the state in its way of individuating subjects through symbolic-political articulation, institutions and discourses.

In general, when one asks about the question of indigenous populations, one is only aiming at the foreground of this division, the one that produces the "minorities," which end up being signified by the discourse of globalization, erasing its historical-social concreteness. But it is the many plans of division that capitalism generates and shelters. Because division is the structure of this system. That is why, when I say that I think one should put forward projects in which the Indian can take an active part, or ones that he proposes himself, as the subject who practices his culture, transforming it, in the movement of history and society, I would add, not ignoring the fact that one lives "in a capitalist society," which has division as a form of existence, and power relations that disqualify difference.

There is no way to "adjust" oneself historically and culturally. What is necessary is, as L. Giard says in the preface to Culture in the plural by De Certeau (1997[8]), to question "the obscure ways (...) by which a social group manages to take advantage of the conditions imposed on it to invent its freedom, to find a space of movement.” Or, as Nietzsche says, a space to maneuver. It is this freedom, this space of movement, to maneuver, that should guide any stance, considering that every culture has its own modes of appropriation, in its exchanges and its forms of transformation. We cannot avoid contradiction in the relationships we propose, recognizing differences. Nobody stays out of history. It is in history that we mean.

Finally, a reference to globalization. The ideology of globalization does not diminish the gravity of the indigenous situation. Because, treating minorities as it does, in general, it conveys meaning through localism, folklorizing them, making them museum pieces, managing them from the outside in, and often submitting them to the treatment of multiple organizations that are not state institutions. The latter is established through an electoral process and can be called to account for its social duties and responsibilities, which is more difficult with many of these other organizations, currently heavily commercialized, through market disputes, or even by religion. This, however, does not paralyze the indigenous manifestations and their resistance movements. These movements are heading towards conquering their social space, politically signified by their culture, as it means today, in the reality of this history, and not in the imagination of the Western colonizer. Where does the Indian end and the Brazilian begin? Identity has no beginning, no end. It is only process and movement.