Under the Sign of an Evil Power: Jacob Burckhardt and Alfredo Bosi

For those interested in comparative approaches to the work of Brazilian literary and cultural critic Alfredo Bosi (b. 1936), Swiss cultural historian Jacob Burckhardt (1818-1897) may not represent an immediately intuitive pairing. Yet the Bosi-Burckhardt comparison proves fruitful for those interested in the broad, conflicted relationship between power and cultural production, particularly as concerns the contradiction apparent in culture’s simultaneous position as the product and assumed critic of power. In this article I argue that Burckhardt’s vision of power as “evil” works to lend coherence to Bosi’s simultaneous insistence on culture’s embeddedness within (and indebtedness to) socio-historical power structures, and his affirmation of the critic’s ethical obligation to resist these same structures. I focus particularly on Burckhardt’s Reflections on Universal History (1905) and Judgements on History and Historians (1929), and on Bosi’s Céu, inferno (1988), Dialética da coloniza o (1992), and Literatura e resistência (2002).