Interview with the author J. Graeff about the essay book Eu-Outro (Me-Other)

Eu Outro, livro inédito de J. M. Graeff, uma filosofia sobre a metafísica do poder.

Thiarles Soares is a journalist and editor-in-chief of Nova Ágora.

João Graeff is a polygraph writer and gaucho philosopher, author of Eu-Outro, which will be published by Nova Ágora, among other books.

T. Soares: It is with great satisfaction that we speak with you again, João. The first time we talked about your literary life and your view of current Brazilian culture. Since that interview, has anything changed? Your perspective on the world or your critiques?

J. Graeff: It seems that the world has become a sinister soap opera, where I am the villain. The superficial youthful hyperbole of the new right and the new left, the politically off-focus discussions, the intellectual devastation of the internet... I have become a historical alien, or I have simply aged. I, but not my ideas: direct democracy, worker autonomy, universal social assistance, free comprehensive education.

T. Soares: Tell us more about your current research. What led you to write such essays on Eu-Outro?

J. Graeff: I'm not sure, but I think it was the long digestion, since I was fourteen, of the work "I and Thou" by the Jewish-Austrian philosopher Martin Buber. His binary dialectic is very original compared to Hegel, Feuerbach, and Marx, or rather, it would be better to say that it advances toward a dialogical philosophy. However, in my intellectual biography, the figures that influenced me most were Kant, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Descartes, Sartre, Camus, and recently, Ernst Cassirer. I had no idols from the CULTURAL INDUSTRY or sports: my idols were philosophers, as well as literary figures such as Carlos Drummond de Andrade and political (and theoretical) leaders like Lenin and Marx. Today I consider Leninist theory, as in "The State and Revolution," to be necessary, but in his position as president, he referred to this and other writings, including "WHAT TO DO?" as "April nonsense." The fact is that when he returned from exile in Sweden, his rallying cry was all power to the soviets, but he would dissolve them as soon as he took power. Therefore, there is the theoretical Lenin (I know all his work) and the Lenin in government, who rightly said, "What we have is a czarist state whitewashed red."

T. Soares: In this study, you develop a very pointed concept, that of infrapolitics. Can you explain a bit more about it? Seeing it as a structure of inherent reality in human relations?

J. Graeff: Infrapolitics is the field that works with the most basic and fundamental relations between people, as a foundation of the structure of interpersonal relationships. I deal with the most essential human relations, within the description of micro-socio-facts, hence I also call it political ousia. Ousia, essence in Greek.

T. Soares: You make it very clear that interpersonal relations are based on a tension, a directed will to "control" the other, if not by force, then by something analogous and gentle, words. This reminds us of "soft power," where powers develop a subtle form of power over weaker nations, bombarding them, not with bombs of destruction, but with "ideas and words" that infuse their culture and values. Do you think that today soft power has lost strength in global diplomacy? Given so many current conflicts, it seems that leaders and powers have lost their capacity for soft power, and we have fallen into a more primitive form of power approach. We can intuit this from the reading we do of your study; it seems to direct the idea of war politics as something consequent of infrapolitics.

J. Graeff: I believe that, as a time of inflection, we are living in times of inevitable tensions... thus, both hard and soft power apply more. Just look at what Russia and Iran have been doing about this, besides the US and England. Is China lagging behind in the struggle for geopolitical soft power due to a lack of interest? The fact is that between the end of the Cold War and some point during the Ukraine War, we emerged from an ERA OF INNOCENCE, where it was thought impossible to have another Great War. Until a regime of rollback and crisis was established, culminating in the Palestinian genocide. The PINK CLOUD of History has passed: Japan and Germany are rearming, while in Africa, the era of War never passed, like the Cold War between Pakistan and India.

T. Soares: The idea of infrapolitics as something "omnipresent" in human relations is interesting because it leads us to a reasonable thesis on the formation of a political character. Throughout the study, you address infrapolitics as a structure of structures in interpersonal dynamics, and along with it, other factors are added to personality formation. The political man, before being from the polis, is infrapolitical, meaning that he learns the structures that will enable him, but this process does not guarantee a linear formation, but rather a problematic one, of personality. You pointed out, for example, dictators who overstepped and embittered interpersonal relations with “issification,” or the relationship I-it, as a sick form of the relationship I-you. Can you explain more about this? Do you think that today, in the democratic culture of the 21st century, and with technological means accessible to more people, this sick process of human relations has been overcome or is it still present?

J. Graeff: The tyrant sees everyone as an It. The problem is that when he relates exclusively to Its, he becomes Himself, an It. The tyrant becomes OBJECTIFIED; barbarism is established. Today we have a faceless barbarism. We obey a system of numbers, machines, internet, forms, passwords, documents, etc. It seems to me that this objectification or, as you say, "issification" without a face is worse than tyranny with a face because impersonal oppression finds no human barriers. It is cold and relentless. The System is never responsible. It is a machine; it is not there to be judged. It must produce.

T. Soares: You point out that the formation of personality begins with the emergence of the I, and this emergence, one could say, is born several times throughout life, the first time, right at birth, with the "cry for help," the first word, and then we have that beautiful picture where the child first encounters the "other," the mother. Is the mother the first other? Can we say that this initial relationship is the root of conflict? Or would you see the birth of this conflict when the other is someone who refuses to give themselves?

J. Graeff: According to Freud, at first, the child does not distinguish the mother from herself. It is when she notices the mother’s absence, as soon as she cries and is not attended to, that she understands that the other, in this case, the mother, exists. Before, she thought her crying was the efficient cause of breastfeeding and other care. The I arises when the OCEANIC BEING is expelled from the womb, and there is a need for the other.

T. Soares: You conceptualize an interesting idea about the Double, a kind of Jungian Shadow, but in the form of a sick inner discourse that can take control of the I itself. Tell us more about this, as we see a growing problem of cases of depression and suicide around the world, especially among youth. What do you think is the point at which the I loses its own control and transmits to the inner “Other,” contrary and alienating?

J. Graeff: I imagine that on the margins of our organized personality, there is another subtly organized personality that cohabits the psyche. Another inner voice. This voice, this persona, the "double," can take on dark traits of personality, even aiming for the destruction of the model discourse, of the very I that grounds it and appears to it as another.

T. Soares: Still talking about the Double, we see that it establishes within us a role similar to the tyrant in political life, taking away freedom and creating a captive I that does what the alienating “Other” wants. What scares us the most is that often it is our own consciousness that feeds the inner tyrant, much like the slave to his master. However, it seems to us that the “psychic Other,” when healthy, is a formator of the I, as the I, as you pointed out, forms itself in the very inner discourse. How can one develop a good inner discourse?

J. Graeff: The inner discourse is a subjectivized mimesis of the outer discourse. The words I express in my monologue (or inner dialogue) are the same used in outer discourse; however, the nature of their destination is different. And its destination defines what it is, as the outer voice is communication, while the inner voice is self-awareness. The discourse becomes internalized and assumes an identity. Thus, the spirit arises in the infrapolitical sense.

T. Soares: You told us that someone had said to you that the Metaphysics of Being has already been surpassed, and you wondered about the truth of this, until you realized that you weren't writing about the metaphysics of being but the Metaphysics of Power. Infrapolitics, therefore, is part of this macro study on the Metaphysics of Power? Tell us more about this work? Is there still space for the Metaphysics of Being?

J. Graeff: It seems that between 1850 and 1950 there was a systematic abandonment of Aristotelian principles:

   In ethics, a new proposal emerged beyond exemplary morality and hedonism. Nietzsche's overcomeism, where the UBERMENSCH creates his own values.

   In aesthetics: art no longer imitates nature, but follows imagination. In literature, Kafka's absurdism; in visual arts, the post-Aristotelian naturalism culminates in Pollock, without figure, without image, without trace (he used the brush like a spatula to throw paint on the canvas); in music, the de-naturalism without tone of Schoenberg; the theater of cruelty and the absurd theater of Artaud, and in cinema, the surrealism of Buñuel.

    In Metaphysics: Kant delivers the first stab at Aristotelian metaphysics when he transfers ontological problems to epistemology, within his critique of reason. The twentieth century witnessed a whole effort to bury Metaphysics once and for all, with Foucault, Deleuze, Adorno... contemporary philosophers like Chul-Han, Zizek, Habermas have no metaphysics. But we have Heidegger, with his attempt to surpass classical ontology; Sartre, with his reverse metaphysics in "Being and Nothingness"; Buber, with his dialogical ontology; Bergson, with ELÁN VITAL.

      Most authors abandon metaphysics as if everything that could be said about the subject had already been said by so many scholastics and others. They consider ontological speculation an alienation in the Feuerbachian sense. The metaphysics of power merely transfers the speculative logic of ontology to the logic of interpersonal psychology; philosophical psychology, in this case.

T. Soares: What can we expect from your upcoming works? Can this study be grounded with other ongoing projects of yours?

J. Graeff: I write philosophy primarily in two styles: that of philosophical description, as in this essay that forms part of the "Metaphysics of Power" project, and that of Philosophical Anthropology. Recently, I started a text that combines both aspects.

T. Soares: We want to thank you for this exclusive interview for our special edition. We believe it will provide our readers with a broader view of this great work that is being developed and now presented in its initial forms in Eu-Outro.

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The book Eu-outro: Formation of Personality and Infrapolitical Structure of Interpersonal Relations is a new work by author JM Graeff which will be published by Nova Ágora. Follow our Instagram page and stay updated with our publication: @editora_novaagora https://www.instagram.com/editora_novaagora/ and stay informed about news.