Marco Grosoli is presenting is talk "The Desert of Literature. Julio Bressane’s São Jerônimo with Maurice Blanchot" at the 2026 Conference of the Association for Philosophy and Literature, dedicated to the theme "The Object(s) of Literature", and taking place between July 15 and 17, at the Instituto de Estudos da Linguagem, Campinas.
Abstract In The Space of Literature, Maurice Blanchot argues that, although the objects of literature are the objects of the world once they have lost their use and become image, it would be wrong to assume
that first there exist the objects and then their image emerges by negating them. Conversely, to become objects of the world (endowed with usefulness etc.), objects must relinquish a primordial, inert, non-processable remoteness that is eventually regained once the object becomes an image and enters the “space of literature”. Death is how Blanchot (revising Hegel’s “negative”) designated this two-ways conversion between the object and its image.
Seemingly in dialogue with Blanchot, Julio Bressane’s 1999 film São Jerônimo on the eponymous, Bible-translating saint is set, in the first and last third, in a Brazilian) desert embodying the death-related, pre-post-object (thus “sandwiching” the second, Rome-set part) space of literature implied as the common ground enabling the translatability across languages. In a nod to Haroldo de Campos, translating in São Jerônimo means embracing the specific sensuality of languages; Jerônimo, however, only masters this sensuality through a mortification of the senses: a aradox that Bressane emphasizes by resemanticizing the “skull” and “lion” visual motifs recurring in many paintings of the saint. A similarly paradoxical sensuous nothingness, featuring primitive rock inscriptions much intriguing this Brazilian Jerônimo, the desert is the (cinematic) figuration and localization of a negative unity between world and (the nothingness of) language. It is this negative unity (both primordial and subsequent image-wise in relation to the objects of the world) represented by the desert (itself a definite, situated object of the world), rather than Blanchot’s space of literature qua non-figurable negation (originally negated by the object) of the object, that the film implies as grounding the multiplicity of languages (hence the possibility of translation).
You can check the conference's full program here.
📷 São Paulo [1924], by Tarsila do Amaral
