Cartesian, in his own way: Between the scams and camouflages of Silviano Santiago

Abstract

Known as a fiction writer and an important intelectual in the brazilian literary scene as well as in the foreign scene, Silviano Santiago is an author whose works are characterized by a persistent mockery of the limits among the literary genres, like the biography, the autobiography, the memoirs, the essays and the fictions. In this paper, resorting to the Cassio Hissa’s theories about the notions of “borders”, as well as the Jean-François Lyotard and Eneida Souza’s reflections about “narrative knowledges”, I propose a brief analysis about the book “O falso mentiroso: memórias” [The False Liar: Memories] (2004), in which Santiago, into a “contamination” and “hybridization” process, links essay, critic and fiction to thinking better about the most important questions in his literary production.