Nymph in trance: the political status of desire

Abstract

This project, to be developed during the research internship period at the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales (EHESS), in Paris, France, arises as a development and deepening of two fundamental questions to the research project in the country "Ninfa in flower: the legs, the enigma, the hot ballets of Carlos Drummond de Andrade". They are: the nymph's metamorphoses in modernity with its movement of decline, fall, approach to the ground, and what we call a political statute of desire. What we propose is a kind of dialectical encounter between the "modern nymph" and the "painful nymph", in which the movement of one contains, generates and doubles itself on the movement of the other. It is as if from this drapery that is drawn, from this stormy encounter, a subtle choreography of slips and jumps emerges, in which the fall brings latent the gesture of "rising against", essential to the uprisings. Desire plays a fundamental role in crossing the two movements, as it presents itself as an ambiguous place of life and death, a precarious but profound opening to eternity, to which poetry also leads us. (AU)