O declínio da alteridade: uma análise do ethos da violência em Ensaio sobre a cegueira, de José Saramago

Abstract

This work presents an analysis of the alterity relations established throughout the novel “Ensaio sobre a cegueira” (1995) and a reflection about the emergence of the ethos of violence constituted as a result of the strong decline in these relations between the self and the other. This is a bibliographic research. As a theoretical foundation, studies by Birman (2021) and Paul Ricoeur (1991) on otherness were used and Zizek (2014), Kehl (2015) and Benjamin (1986) about the meanings of the critique of violence and the violence of images. From these theoretical contributions, an ethos of violence rooted in contemporary society was found as a result of a disregard of otherness. In view of this, “Ensaio sobre a cegueira” points out the cruelty of contemporary man, questioning the current economic-political system and allowing the reader to reflect over the formation of man as a social being, in addition to raising new ways of thinking and living in society, established on otherness.