A man called love

A MAN CALLED LOVE

‘Reading Xavier’ is a follow up to the slide projection ‘A Man Called Love’ and it could not have come into being without the generosity, insight and brilliance of both Avi Alpern and Soyoung Yoon.

A MAN CALLED LOVE Reading Xavier

Tamar GuimarĂŁes

Book for reading in your next life and then for remembering you had already read it.

Contents Reading Xavier The Garden and the Courtyard The Medium as Historian, a Missed Encounter with the Left and a Terrible Affection Dusk of Nations, Happy Subalterns, Love as Principle and its Place in the Flag Order and Progress, The Fantasies of the Nation State and a Gentle and Just Spirit’s Wrath Getulio Vargas, Estado Novo, an Immature Country and its Enlightened Ruler Integralism, the Worst in the World’s Typed Faces and its Role in the 1937 Coup Work, an All-Seeing Eye, the Regeneration Chambers and a Notebook

The Law. God too is an Administrator A New Family and a Remorseful Child Shades of Grey Revisited but Not Revised, Alan Kardec and the Remarkable Events and Discoveries of Each Reign The Florist from Beyond the Grave The Doctor, his Right of Intervention and a Poisonous Black Substance Gobineau’s Carnival, Sheila the Healer, Meimei and Civilization A Spiritist Reading of the Left, a Materialist Reading of the Spirits Divine Flights of Tenderness, Sovereign Passivity and The Weaker Sex

Reading Xavier

To begin with there was this queer figure whose camouflage included amusing wigs and dark glasses, and who became a national celebrity at the age of 60, having spent his life notating the words spoken to him by disembodied spirits.

Francisco Candido Xavier was a Brazilian psychic medium and psychographer - a “channeller” of spirits in order to write. The dead spoke and he wrote it down, as a kind of secretary - a task similar to the civil servant job he held until retirement. He has been described as ‘the biggest and most prolific psychographer worldwide of all times’, having written over 400 books. In the 60s and 70s he was a celebrity in Brazil, drawing large crowds whenever he appeared in public.

I have scrutinized Xavier for some time as the case 7

of a predicament – that of a man entangled in the lace of racism in disguise, the cordial racism prevalent in Brazil - a country that has not come to terms with the gap between its reality of white supremacy and its myth of racial democracy. So perhaps this is about Brazil its race relations, its social malaise - with the scrivener to the spirits himself a channel for Brazil’s turbulent history and social political anxieties - anxieties which seem to coalesce, crystallize and find new ‘incarnations’ in his work.

Xavier’s literary work speaks of an ‘other-world’ remarkably similar the one he lived in. My endeavour is to conjure up some of the historical developments restaged, or shall I say reincarnated, in his work. I will diverge from Xavier to some of the figures and events implicitly and explicitly alluded to in his writing as well as digress to other texts which have come to shape my reading of him. Even, or especially, if this is to concede that the meaning of one text does not reside within it, but within the world of other texts.

One of the questions raised here, and one for which I have no answers, is: what produces consent? Why does one say ‘yes’ to the law? How does one come to love the law with abandon? And, with this, another question - how autonomous can one ever be?

Reading Xavier’s public life and work without do8

ing violence to him constitutes a substantial difficulty.

How to avoid reducing him, his context and his work to a set of socio-political and psychoanalytic signs?

How to discuss his devotional practice in ways other than neurotic symptoms and/or anthropological data?

Xavier’s ‘love’ is also a form of radical non-violence.1 A solution for this problem would be deferring too quick a reading of Xavier in order to understand his works differently - that is, delaying this violence in order to produce different readings.2 But on this occasion ‘devotion’ will remain a left over, a residue, untouched by whatever seemed necessary to address first, in order to clear the way for its postponed approach. For now, the social-political events recounted in Our Home, the ‘neighbouring’ city on the astral plane described in one of Xavier’s most famous books, will be seen in the light of symptomatic re-stagings of social structures in disarray.

9

The Garden and the Courtyard

Xavier was born in 1910 in the Brazilian state of Minas Gerais, and died in 2002 in a city not far from his place of birth.

Biographical literature regularly starts with his parents’ professions - washerwoman and factory worker – and a childhood of poverty and suffering. Orphaned at the age of 5 and systematically maltreated by his godmother, his first paranormal experience happened as he ran out of the house and into the garden to cry. There, while crying, he saw his un-dead mother.

As a teenager Xavier was visited by a spirit wearing a blue toga who introduced himself as Emanuel.

Discussing the accumulation of his identities - as if an individual spirit were a kind of palimpsest, Emanuel 10

disclosed that in his past lives he’d been, amongst other things, a Roman senator in the 4th century, a slave in the 5th century and a Jesuit missionary called Father Manoel da Nobrega - a key figure in the colonization of 16th century Brazil, responsible for religious instruction and peace treaties with the Tamoio Indians, and the founder of several cities, including Sao Paulo.

In one of their later meetings Emanuel - the Roman senator who had been Father Nobrega - took Xavier to the courtyard of the Jesuit College he’d built as the foundation of Sao Paulo city - and told Xavier that in that courtyard he’d had a vision of the huge blessing of this metropolis yet to come.

A ‘blessing’ is a curious euphemism for a sprawling city built in the midst of the violent process which characterizes the colonization of South America. There were approximately 2.000 indigenous nations in Brazil at the time of its colonization by the Portuguese. Indigenous people now amount to 0.4% of Brazil’s population3 - a population otherwise made up of the descendents of African peoples brought there as slaves by the Portuguese, of Portuguese settlers, and of immigrants from central and Southern Europe, Japan and the middle east.

One of the books psychographed by Xavier is the novel Our Home. First published in 1944 and continu11

ally in print since, the novel describes a city situated in ‘the vicinity of Rio’, where the recently deceased learn and work. The book portrays a tropical vision of social democracy - a town with magnificent squares and benches for a million people, where delicate flowers grow amid illuminated fountains.

Our Home was written during the second-world war, but it speaks of the war as if it were about to happen. The city state known as Our Home is in turn described as a hospital settlement, a regeneration colony, a work outpost, an extensively formulated program, a complete organization, a transitional zone and an old foundation initiated by Portuguese settlers who died in Brazil in the XVI century. Its economy is based on service, self-sacrifice and the effort to obtain wisdom.

The colony’s strict hierarchy is infinitely just.

I will return to the plot of Our Home in greater detail later on. Its parallels with Brazil in the 1930s reveal how the phantasmagorias of the state, as well as its aspirations to become a modern and developed nation, were crucial for the imagery ‘channelled’ by Xavier in his subsequent books. Yet his sympathies towards ‘modernization’ as well as the disregard for indigenous culture characteristic of Brazilian society are clear from the following anecdote: during a walk in the countryside with friends, Xavier arrives at a large 14

waterfall. There, he remarks on the spectral presence of natives engaged in ritual - people he describes as ‘low evolutionary beings’. To one of his friends, he offers the following comment in advance of an unasked question - ‘yes, they are all naked’.

Emanuel became Xavier’s main spirit guide, dictating his behaviour and literary output. He commissioned 40 books from Xavier, then another 40, eventually commissioning 409.

Emanuel cautioned Xavier to hesitate before following the advice of spirits, and to apply judicious censorship. On a TV program in 1971 Xavier talked about the poetry books which he could have written but didn’t, since they had no educational purpose and would have been dictated by amoral souls. Later, Xavier talked about his celibacy and the fact that his erotic dreams should always remain private and unrealized. It is unclear whether this censorship demanded the suppression of his love for men.4 Perhaps censorship is also at the core of Xavier’s statement, delivered during a TV interview as a message from Emanuel: ‘remember to subject yourselves to the ones in government. Be obedient and ready to assist in the good work’. In the 19th century Spiritualism was tied to the search for new social organizations, social unrest and utopian socialisms, but it had found 15

a new home in the Brazil of 1971, the most repressive moment of the military dictatorship which lasted for over two decades (1964 to 1985).

16

The Medium as Historian, a Missed Encounter with the Left and a Terrible Affection

If history is the impossible conversation with the dead, as Michel de Certeau suggested, then the medium has a privileged role as a history writer.

At first, I thought I could employ Xavier as an indirect means for talking about the underground left wing movements in 60s and 70s Brazil. Soon it became clear that even though I could speak about Xavier’s desire for social justice and universal well being, implicating him and the rest of the Spiritist community in the struggle for socio-political reform was not going to be an easy task. The medium was indeed a historian but not a channeller of the history I had desired. Xavier’s huge popularity and by the same token Spiritism’s 17

popularity in Brazil coincided with the dictatorships of two periods: the Vargas Era of the 1930s-40s and the military dictatorship from 1964 to 1985. The dictatorships shaped the brand of Spiritism which Xavier helped forge and popularize.

Xavier is haunted by the phantasmagorias of the nation state: order and progress (the caption in the national flag), political sovereignty, world visibility, industriousness and commerce. There is a collapse of the state and self. Xavier’s universe is shaped by his lifetime employment as a typist at a government model farm.

When he writes of the city of the dead, it resembles the world of state propaganda, and the highly bureaucratic and hierarchical universe which he inhabited.

In his Theses on the Philosophy of History, Walter Benjamin suggests that historians have to be psychic mediums of sorts, ripping signs from the past in order to bring them into the present. ‘Ruptures in time’, or explosions of history, are necessary to redeem the past in the name of the future. One needs a rupture from the past in order to begin a revolution, but a revolution also has to redeem the past.

Benjamin’s notion of redemptive criticism calls for recovering revolutionary dreams of earlier generations. In Benjamin’s strange concoction of theology and Marxism he says we, in the present, are weak mes18

siahs because our present was prophesized in the past.

If we hear that call breaking open the present, we are no longer weak messiahs, because we are able to redeem those voices that were never heard.

The starting point of the research project which led to A Man Called Love was to take that suggestion literally. But for all the heavy-breath of voices of the dead, and the teachings of historical figures, Benjaminian notions of redemptive encounters with the past are missing in Xavier’s writings and public appearances.

They are missing because the spirits Xavier voices speak in the name of the law, the state, and hierarchy. They reiterate the social order rather than call for its undoing. Xavier redeems conservative spirits – those voices which, Benjamin might argue, were already heard. The role of the historian would be to ‘produce’ the left wing spirits – or, rather, to excavate whenever possible and to ‘produce’ if necessary. But if at first I was eager to literalize Benjamin’s call, my endeavour is no longer to ‘produce’ left wing spirits, but to bring the untameable discrepancies of Xavier’s work and context into view.

The question of why he remains tied to the state despite his marginal position is another way of posing the question, what produces consent? Why do we say yes to the law? I have no answers. For Althusser the state is never absent from the subject. And even though the 19

process of interpellation implies mis-recognition (méconnaissance), even though one’s ‘proper’ name is not being enunciated, one answers the call because it seems preferable to be called by an improper name than not to be called anything (not to have a name) or not to be called at all. 5 Perhaps some of Xavier’s delight in service hinges on the joy of having a name - a name that wasn’t ‘pariah’. Perhaps, as Slavoj Zizek suggests, one’s desire to be interpellated is stronger than one’s fear of the law.

When I spoke with his nephew we talked about the oft told story of Xavier’s childhood when his godmother forced him to lick another child’s open wound (the child with the slow-to-heal wound was also under the care of Xavier’s godmother but was her favourite godson, while Xavier was routinely or perhaps even ritually maltreated by her). Xavier’s nephew puzzled ‘why didn’t he run away?’

His is a phantasmagoric cathection with the state.

In other words, there are other elements of Xavier, elements of his spiritualist tradition, of his queerness, of his race, which mean that the identification he attempts ultimately fails. These elements in Xavier’s identification will account for and remain a meconnaisance of state and self.

Despite the fact that Spiritism took a conservative turn in Brazil the idea on ‘non-violent’ progress is 20

clearly at odds with the military state of 1971. In terms of race, there is a ‘brushing aside’ of what was visible of his mulatto ancestry, but here it becomes somewhat delicate - I don’t want to suggest that ‘blackness’ (or mulatto-ness) is an essential condition which Xavier has a duty towards. To a certain extent I have to operate within the understanding of skin colour/colour lines which Brazilians have of themselves - veiled racism aside, popular notions of race in Brazil suggests a non-essentialist understanding of identity - a way of understanding identity in terms of trajectories, loans, temporary affiliations and practices rather than signs of irreducible authenticity. And then again, maybe this is a kind of understanding of identity which, after all, hinges on Xavier’s creolized context.

But it is remarkable that when, in the same TV program mentioned above, when asked about Umbanda (an Afro-Brazilian religion which incorporated elements of Kardecist Spiritism, Catholicism and African practices) Xavier speaks of it as an organized religion by the spirits of ex-slaves brought to Brazil in the last few centuries, asking for compensation from ‘us’ as well as guidance towards education and progress in the same way that ‘we’ look for education and progress. He then asserts that ‘we’ don’t think in terms of (skin) colour in Brazil and that ‘we’ are all brothers. He goes on 21

to say that We respect Umbanda, like all other religions, but we find in Spiritism the wavelength that relates to us in our present evolutionary stage, for the study for our destiny and immortality. Regarding miraculous cures we see in Umbanda - we sometimes ask for immediate relief from physical ailments, and our African friends in spirit form agree to execute immediate cures because they have become so used to obeying us, nearly blindly, and even came to like us, with an affection which we could see as terrible, if we consider how egoistic we are. 6 It is surprising that he could speak of an ‘us’ and ‘them’.

His mother was unmistakably black. If on one hand, one couldn’t say that a ‘black identity’ would be preferable, on the other hand a ‘not black’ identity seems equally problematic. He seems painfully aware of the pitfalls of a ‘terrible affection’, the affection of a subaltern that will be exploited by anybody with the power to do so. And yet this is the ‘subaltern love’ he practices and urges from others.

4

Dusk of Nations, Happy Subalterns, Love as Principle and its Place in the Flag

A digression and a parallel – in My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity, Eric Santner suggests that Daniel Paul Schreber – the then recently appointed president of the Saxon Supreme Court in late 19th century Germany, whose Memoirs of My Nervous Illness (1903) provides an account of real and delusional persecution and states of sexual ecstasy as God’s private concubine, and who became the subject of several studies, the first of which being Freud’s case study of paranoia – ought to be understood as a “‘nerve bible’ of fin-de-siècle preoccupations and obsessions, an archive of the very phantasms that would, after the traumas of war, revolution, and 5

the end of empire, coalesce into the core elements of National Socialist ideology.” Santner ������������������������� hinges this reading of Schreber on what he calls a “crisis of investiture.”

Schreber’s breakdown was ‘precipitated by a malfunction in the rites and procedures through which an individual is endowed with a new social status: his condition became acute just as he was named to a position of ultimate symbolic authority’.

Santner suggests that Schreber’s delusional system – what Santner calls ‘his own private Germany’ – did not prefigure the ‘totalitarian solution’ that would culminate in the Nazi catastrophe, as Elias Canetti proposes in Crowds and Power (1960). Instead, Santner shows how ‘this tragic figure succeeded in avoiding the totalitarian temptation by way of his own series of perverse identifications, above all with women7 and Jews’, that is, with those who were not invested with symbolic authority in the context in which he lived.

Some affinities and differences: Santner writes that Schreber’s preoccupations with decomposition were crucial, and that his metaphors to describe a literal and figurative rottenness resonated with the terms used amongst artists, writers and intellectuals to account for a general sense of decay and degeneration in fin-de-siècle social and cultural criticism – a rottenness indicating the waning of faith in progress through knowledge, 4

science, discipline and strength of will.

At a first glance, preoccupations of decay do not appear in Xavier’s work - his talking spirits are not ‘corpses’. But even though he presents a situation where death has been abolished, suffering on both sides of the grave divide still persists, even if suffering is understood as a form of education and a necessary step towards moral recovery.

Another crucial difference between the context of Schreber and Xavier is that the mood of late 19th century Brazil was quite other than what Max Nordau called a fin-de-siècle mood as a ‘compound of feverish restlessness and blunted discouragement’ culminating in feelings of ‘imminent perdition and extinction’, (…) a sense of ‘Dusk of Nations’, in which all suns and all stars are gradually waning, and mankind with all its institutions and creations is perishing in the midst of a dying world8.

The Brazilian turn of the century experience was one of wider cultural possibilities born of greater wealth, a larger leisure class, an urban way of life in the expanding port and administrative centres, and the greater access to European cultural models through travel and luxury 5

imports.9 The republican regime was ushered in 1889 under the positivist slogan “Order and Progress”. And even if the influence of Comte’s positivism upon the republic waned considerably between 1897 and 1914, it was still a strong current in Brazilian intellectual life in the early twentieth century.10,11 Part of Schreber’s delusions include his belief that the world had ended or was about to end, and that he was the sole survivor of this catastrophe12. In his work on Schreber as a case study of paranoia, Freud writes: The patient has withdrawn from the people in his environment and from the external world generally the libidinal cathexis which he has hitherto directed on to them. Thus everything has become indifferent and irrelevant to him, and has to be explained by means of secondary rationalizations as being ‘miracled up, cursorily improvised.’ The end of the world is the projection of this internal catastrophe; his subjective world has come to an end since his withdrawal of his love from it.13 But if Schreber’s subjective world has come to an end due to his withdrawal of his love from it, the opposite is true of Xavier. He will come to lose himself as he pours his love into this (delusional) Brazil of order & 4

progress. A Brazil which, significantly, didn’t include the ‘love as principle’ part of Comte’s dictum L’amour pour principe et l’ordre pour base; le progrès pour but (“Love as a principle and order as the basis; Progress as the goal”). Xavier might here be understood not as fragmented by the state, but as trying to give back to the state what it had lost, at the cost of his own autonomy – an identification with the state that leads to his succumbing obedience to authority, be it what it may.

On the 23rd of May 1964 - politicians, student union members and trade unionists board to Bolivia as political refugees.

Yet, despite not figuring in the flag, ‘love’ has been a powerful ingredient in Brazilian imaginary and political discourse. The president turn dictator Getulio Vargas was known as ‘the father of the people’ and the Integralista movement of the 1930s left no doubt about its concoction of nationalism and ‘feeling’. It is not by coincidence that the motto of the military dictatorship was ‘Brasil, ame-o ou deixe-o’ (love it or leave 5

it) - proclaimed as a chorus backdrop for the deportation of political prisoners during the 64-85 period.

When the popular dictum ‘God is Brazilian’ (‘Deus e’ brasileiro’)14 is combined with the equally popular dictum ‘God is Love’ (‘Deus e’ amor’) the syllogism follows ‘Love is Brazilian’.

The extreme violence of Xavier’s childhood experiences (if accounts are true he was severely abused by his godmother) were counteracted by a world of love and protection, reinvented out of ... thin air (i.e. through the spoken words of his (m)other).

Likewise, it has been suggested that Schreber’s paranoia was the monstrous result of years of child abuse’ (…)

‘Moritz Schreber, Daniel Paul Schreber’s father, an ambitious physician, chronically traumatized his son by a series of aggressive orthopedic and pedagogical interventions and controls. Moritz Schreber’s pedagogical program stressed the necessity of taming the rebellious savage beast in the child and turning him into a productive citizen15 When Schreber writes of ‘talking birds’ addressing him with repeated particles of near-words Santner relates 4

‘those “intermediary instances” responsible for the writing down-system’16 to Kafka’s world, populated by semi-human copyists, secretaries, and assorted servants.

Such figures, he says, partake in characteristics of animal and machine, occupying an uncanny ontological domain which he calls the ‘subaltern sublime’. Santner says that in Kafka’s text one sees ‘the elevation to the status of a sublime Thing effected within the context of bureaucratic culture’17. He adds that the great master of subaltern sublime was the Swiss writer Robert Walser’ of which Susan Sontag writes ‘The moral core of Walser’s art is the refusal of power, of domination.

I’m ordinary - that is, nobody - declares the characteristic Walser persona… The recurrent “I” of Walser’s prose is the opposite of the egotist’s: it is that of someone “drowning in obedience.”18 I would like to borrow the term ‘subaltern sublime’ from Santner, since it serves like no other to characterise Xavier’s operating mode. Xavier was an inflexible law abider, a lover of norms, an extreme legalist, a model citizen, a charitable man, a devoted conformist to civic duties, a happy subaltern, a sublime bureaucrat. As the unmediated scrivener for the dead, the ‘non-author’ of hundreds of texts, he is somewhat like the automatonmachine sparked with jouissance. The word ‘sublime’ appears in Our Home 38 times, and in many instances 5

in relation to the joys of working.

These states of subaltern bliss in Xavier and its counterpart on Schreber’s memoirs find a parallel in their becoming ‘feminine’ – a process which happened to both. But if Schreber mutated into a ‘woman’ completely infused with sexuality, cross dressing as a religious practice necessitated by his relationship with God and meant to impress God19, Xavier’s mutation implied a ‘feminine’ body saturated with ‘receptive’ channels (for hearing the spirits), ‘forgiving’ capacities (towards humankind) and elated by the prospect of ecstatic surrender to be found in ‘service’ (to humankind, to the spirits, to a divine legislator) - ultimately a body of ‘invincible vulnerability’ precisely because the pursuit of mastery, authorial and authoritative power has been relinquished.

4

Order and Progress, The Fantasies of the Nation State and a Gentle and Just Spirit’s Wrath

Our Home was dictated to Xavier by the spirit of a deceased Brazilian doctor20 known to Xavier by the pen name Andre Luis. Since its publication the book was translated to several languages and sold 1.500.000 copies in Portuguese alone. The book’s back cover states that it ‘permits us to have a glimpse of the spiritual world which awaits us at the moment of our physical death’.

Our Home is ruled by a governor and six ministries: the ministries of Regeneration, Assistance, Communication, Elucidation, Elevation and Divine Union each with twelve ministers. The city-state is built in six triangular sections stretching out from the governor’s 5

palace. Each of these triangular sections is a jurisdiction with different tasks and purposes, according to its ministry. The narrator describes Our Home’s parks, gardens, tree lined avenues and architecture with wondrous enthusiasm.

The Governor, who’s been in power for the past 114 years, lives at the governor’s palace where a staff of three thousand assist him in his administrative duties.

He is the most earnest and untiring worker in the Colony. The Ministers travel at times to other spheres to renew their energies and acquire new knowledge, and we, too, have our habitual amusements. Only the Governor has no leisure time whatsoever. While he insists that we take periodic vacations to rest, he himself works ceaselessly, sacrificing even his sleeping hours (…) I have never seen the Governor at any public entertainment. Yet the radiation of his powerful mind reaches every branch of activity and his fatherly assistance involves everybody and everything here.

When explaining the organization and structure of Our Home, the narrator’s guide and nurse explains that all manifestations of order around him proceed from 4

higher planes and that “every useful organization on the material plane has its first roots in higher spiritual worlds.” He goes on to say that “illustrious Portuguese pioneers” settled in the spiritual planes over Brazil in the sixteenth century after their death. Portuguese culture then, models Brazil both as a result of its colonial past and by means of emanations from the city above.

These settlers at first encountered tremendous and exhausting difficulties (…) The pioneers’ work was indeed hard and discouraging, even for the stronger spirits. The area where delicate vibrations and majestic buildings now abound was also peopled with primitive natives whose childish architecture reflected their elementary minds and who filled the atmosphere with their undeveloped thoughts. Still the founders did not lose heart. They proceeded with their efforts, following the example of the European settlers on the physical plane. Only they substituted persevering work, brotherly solidarity and spiritual love for violence, war and slavery.21 On the chapter titled ‘the nourishment problem’ the narrator enquires about supply and distribution of food and other necessities. His guide explains that in 5

the past these services had a more prominent role in government, but that the current governor dismantled something akin to a ministry of economy because it resembled the way things were organized in the flesh and blood plane. The governor wanted to minimize what he understood as reminders of purely materialist concerns, so the question of supply was reduced to a distribution service under direct control of the governor. The guide tells how over a hundred years earlier the colony strove to adapt its inhabitants to laws of simplicity and frugality. Many of the recently arrived demanded food and drinks in the manner of their earthly vices. Only the ministry of the Divine Union was immune to these abuses, due to their inherent characteristics. The other ministries were overworked by these demands. As soon as the current governor was sworn in he invited two hundred instructors from a higher sphere with the aim of spreading new knowledge regarding the science of breathing and the absorption of vital principles from the air.

After many meetings and assemblies technical experts from Our Home opposed the idea, on the grounds that Our Home was a transitional city and that it wouldn’t be just or possible to demand such radical transformations from the recently deceased without danger to their spiritual organization. The governor 4

didn’t budge. Various important entities protested publicly. In several occasions the Ministry of Assistance was filled with patients who hadn’t been able to cope with the deficient nutritional program. In these periods the opponents to the nutritional reduction multiplied their accusations. And yet the governor didn’t punish anyone. He invited his opponents to the governor’s palace and like a benevolent father he exposed the aims of this project. In addition he funded his fiercest opponents in research trips to higher and more advanced spheres, therefore gaining a larger number of supporters. After twenty-one years of Governmental prodding the Ministry of Elevation adopted the minimum supply system.

The opposite was true for the Ministry of Elucidation, due to its high contingent of spirits dedicated to the study of mathematics and related sciences. Imbued with positivistic values they were unwilling to give way to the realities they found themselves in. While deliberations went back and forth between the governor and the ministries, disturbances of a dangerous nature took shape in the Regeneration Department. Encouraged by the protests from the Elucidation workers, the lower spirits collected at the Regeneration staged deplorable demonstrations. This produced a huge split in the collective organs of Our Home, giving the opportunity for an assault by the obscure multitudes of the ‘threshold’, 5

who tried to invade the city by taking advantage of gaps in the Regeneration services, where a large number of workers dealt in clandestine imports, to satisfy their food habits. The governor consulted with the Ministry of the Divine Union and with their advice he closed the Ministry of Communications, filled the dungeons of the Regeneration with the disobedient, warned the Ministry of the Elucidation, forbid all assistance to the lower spheres, and for the first time in his administration he ordered that the electric walls of the city be switched on, for the emission of magnetic darts at the service of general safety.

For more than six months the nourishment services of Our Home were reduced to the inhalation of vital elements from the air, and to water mixed with solar, electric and magnetic elements. The colony came to know a gentle and just spirit’s wrath. At the end of this critical period the government was victorious. The Ministry of the Elucidation recognized its mistake and offered its cooperation in the readjustment works. These were moments of public rejoicing and some say the governor cried and said that the general understanding was the true prize of his heart. The department of Regeneration was then converted to a Ministry. From that time onwards only the Regeneration and the Assistance Ministries receive greater supply of food which resembles 4

food on earth because they have weaker souls in need of that. The other departments receive the minimum necessary for subsistence with sobriety and without excess. ‘It is now generally recognized that the governor’s apparently arbitrary imposition meant a great deal for our spiritual advancement. Spirituality arose as physical expressions were minimized’.22 On the Chapter ‘Learning about Our Home’, the narrator’s interlocutor explains that the ‘Colony strongly stresses the principles of order and hierarchy. Personal merit is the only standard used to evaluate those who may be assigned to prominent positions (…) As a rule, after long periods of apprenticeship and service, we reincarnate to continue our struggle towards perfection.”

Our time here is spent in a round of active work.

The work in the Ministry of Assistance is difficult and complex; in Regeneration it requires strenuous efforts; in Communication it demands a high standard of individual responsibility; in Elucidation it calls for a great working capacity and a well-trained mind, while in Elevation, abnegation and spiritual enlightenment are indispensable. As to the missions of the Ministry of Divine Union, profound wisdom and sincere 5

universal love are essential requisites. The Government, in its turn, is the busy centre of all administrative activities, and numerous services are under its direct control, including nutrition, distribution of electrical energies, traffic and transportation. In truth, my friend, labour regulations are always fulfilled here. Rest, on the other hand, is also rigorously observed. This is necessary in order to ensure that tasks are fairly distributed.

The only exception is the Governor himself, who works ceaselessly, even during leisure hours.�23 If we pause here and look at Brazil in the 1930s we find:

4

Getulio Vargas, Estado Novo, an Immature Country and its Enlightened Ruler (Or, Modernity in early 20th century Brazil the violent event of modernization in an uneven terrain)

The Vargas Era is the name given to a set of social and economic measures introduced in Brazil by Getulio Vargas from 1930 onwards. Vargas became president of the republic by means of a popular and military movement which took power in 1930. He was ousted in 1945 but returned to the presidency in 1951 by means of popular elections. He remained in power until 1954 when he was forced to resign. The Vargas Era marked the processes of industrialization, urbanization and social organization in Brazil to the extent that some still wonder if its development model lingered long after Vargas’ suicide 1954.

The Vargas Era was based on an interventionist state model, one in which the government has greater power 5

over decisions than social movements or even the market. The government is in charge of appointing economic, political and social solutions, and the president, ministries, secretaries and the armed forces are charged with the task (and the right) of deciding what is most convenient to all. The government does not serve the interests and desires of its constituency but appoints the ways in which it should behave. The key figures associated with this authoritarian model of government in Brazil in the 1920s were the intellectuals Azevedo Amaral, Alberto Torres, Oliveira Viana and Francisco Torres, all of whom were lawyers as well as politicians and writers. Of note, Viana was a proponent of eugenics in Brazil who was later ‘immortalized’ by becoming a member of the Academia Brasileira de Letras (Brazilian Academy of Writers).24 For Alberto Torres, both the armed forces and the political elites were not trustworthy forces towards progress. Rather the solution was to come from the intellectual elites committed to nationalist ideals, acting by means of the free press, educational channels, public opinion and a commitment to study. 25 In short, a version of progress closely linked to the political Enlightenment proposed by Kant one hundred and twenty years earlier. Despite their different positions, together Azevedo Amaral, Alberto Torres, Oliveira Viana and Francisco Torres opposed both 4

socialism and individualism, proposing instead that a strong and unified state should guide the masses. In their view Brazil was an ‘immature country’, lacking in nationalism, and whose population was unable to conceive of its aim and destiny, therefore in need of an ‘enlightened’ leader to guide the way forward.26 Positivist Temple in Porto Alegre, Brazil, 2007. Religion de l’Humanité was a secular religion created by August Comte. The Brazilian flag motto Order and Progress was inspired by Comte’s L’amour pour principe et l’ordre pour base; le progrès pour but (Love as a principle and order as the basis; Progress as the goal).

The Vargas Era was marked by economic development, governmental control of the workers unions, state planning, public investment and for the role of the state as economic agent in a manner contrary to liberalism and neo-liberalism. But from a political point of view it was marked by the precariousness of public freedoms, the weakening of social participation, for the legal barriers against social mobilization and expression and for the disdain for the political parties and the parliament.

With the backing of the politicians of his region (the south of Brazil) Vargas adopted many of the same dictatorial and populist measures adopted in the world 5

at large in the 1920s. In 1937, in the name of what he judged to be ‘better for the country’, Vargas closed the congress, repressed public liberties, isolated dissidents, persecuted his enemies and co-opted possible opponents, imposing himself as ruler of the state and leader of the people.

4

Integralism, the Worst in the World’s Typed Faces and its Role in the 1937 Coup

One can say for sure that the Integralistas were a key ally for the 1937 coup. Integralismo was a Catholic movement originating in Portugal in the early 20th century.

It is based on notions of order, respect for social hierarchy, social harmony and personal merit. It opposes the egalitarian doctrines such as socialism, communism and anarchism.

The founder of the Integralista movement in Brazil was the writer, poet and politician Plinio Salgado, who had, been part of the Semana de Arte Moderna of 1922 alongside Oswald de Andrade e Mário de Andrade27.

Plínio Salgado systematized the Theory of the Integral State, designed uniforms, symbols and ritual gestures of the members of the Integralista movement and founded the Ação Integralista Brasileira (Brazilian Integralist Action) in 1932.28,29 5

PlĂ­nio Salgado, founder of Brazilian Integralista party and Integralista propaganda poster, 1937

The Integralistas preached a recipe for national greatness based on a strong military establishment, government management of the economy, and a corporate political organization with provincial governments completely subordinate to the central authority.

In his biography of the communist leader Luis Carlos Prestes, the Brazilian Marxist and fiction writer Jorge Armado writes of Plinio Salgado: Never in the world, not even in Marinetti’s futurism under Italian fascism, nor in the Nazi German Aryan theories, were such idiocies, such mediocrities, such bad literature written as was in the Brazilian Integralism. Greater than its ridicule was its dishonesty. Plinio Salgado, the Fßhrer of operettas, cheap theatre messiah, was 4

infected with the germ of bad writing. Having failed in his plagiarism of Oswaldo de Andrade, and resigned to not having been born to copy good literature, he plagiarized what is worst in the world’s typed faces. It’s the most imbecilic of all conceivable literatures.30 And yet, the Integralistas were largely responsible for the defeat and erasure of the Communist party in Brazil.

Anti-Communism was the crucial bond between Vargas and the Integralistas and their role in the coup of 1937 reaches its climax in the ‘Cohen ���������������������� Plan’ - a counterfeit document falsely attributed to the Communist International, detailing a strategy for the taking of power by Communists in Brazil. The ‘Cohen Plan’ was written by Olímpio Mourão Filho, a military officer, member of the elite of the Brazilian Integralista movement. With full authorization from the leaders of the Integralista movement and the military, this document was widely distributed to the Brazilian government and constituted the main pretext alluded to by Getulio Vargas for implementing the Estado Novo.31 Seizing the document, or shall we say, the moment, Vargas imposed a new state of siege on October 1, which entailed suspension of constitutional guarantees and press censorship.

5

Closing session of Integralista congress, Blumenau, Southern Brazil, 1935. Plínio Salgado sits at the centre of the photograph.

Integralistas had most support and memberships within the Teuto-Brazilian communities of Southern Brazil.

In private meetings with Vargas, Salgado was at first promised the Education ministry and the effects of the partnership between the party and government32 were visible to all,33 but with the coup d’etat of November 10 strongly backed by the army, Vargas dissolved the Chamber of Deputies, nullified the Constitution of 1934, and promulgated a new charter creating the Estado Novo. A state of emergency was proclaimed and while this lasted Vargas was to rule by decree. All political parties were dissolved, and this also affected the Integralistas. A decree-law forbade not only all ������� political parties, but also any civic militias and auxiliary organizations. The use of uniforms, banners and special emblems or insignia was also prohibited - a step clearly aimed at the Integralistas. They had been valuable in the anti-communist struggle ‘but no political organizations could be tolerated in the New State’34. The State was now absolute. In 1938 the Integralistas staged a 4

coup attempt, during which Vargas and his family and house attendants stood off the insurgents at Guanabara Palace until help arrived; those who had attempted the coup sought refuge in the Italian Embassy.

The clearest parallels between Xavier’s Our Home and the historical circumstances of that period are the book’s ‘enlightened’ and ‘hard working ruler’ - a governor who sleeps little, has no days off duty, has been in government for 114 years, and who has ‘always favoured patriarchal attitudes, because he believes that one should always administer with fatherly love’ - and Vargas. Vargas became known as ‘the father of the poor’, to which it was added ‘ the father or the poor and the mother of the wealthy’. Nevertheless, like the government of Our Home his government is centralized, entails sate intervention and overall planning and most strikingly the book details the state of emergency, its repression of public liberties, isolation of dissidents, persecution of enemies and co-option of possible opponents – all expressions of ‘a gentle and just spirit’s wrath’. Our Home’s sate of emergency came about due to threats from ‘outside forces’ amid protests against the governor’s insistence that the colony’s inhabitants should adapt to the ‘laws of simplicity and frugality’ an ironically polite euphemism, taken that Brazil is still striving to counteract the effects of hunger and mate5

rial deprivation for large parts of its population. In Our Home social opposition and mobilization read as ‘huge splits in (its) collective organs, giving the opportunity for an assault by the obscure multitudes of the “threshold”’ – i.e. the threat of Bolshevism.

But even if both Integralism and Communism were eventually seen as “exotic trees which the snobbism of some, the ambition of others and the good faith of very few” were trying to transplant in Brazil,35 Our Home shares with the Integralistas their love of the nation, law and the family, as well as some key terms such as ‘personal merit’ which in Our Home was the basis of the bonus-hour system and meant to do away with nepotism and inherited privileges.

Yet although there are parallels between Our Home and the Vargas Era, Xavier vision for an after-world where changes are made for pure spiritual gains, is almost incompatible with the reality of the dictatorship.

As if Xavier must channel this other world in order not to see what was happening on the plane of the living.

4

Work, an All-Seeing Eye, the Regeneration Chambers and a Notebook

One message is clear throughout Our Home: ‘work sets you free’. On his way to work at the correction chambers within the Ministry of Regeneration – a de facto psychiatric hospital for disturbed patients recently arrived from the lower regions, the narrator walks past a building complex where more than 100.000 creatures enlighten themselves working at factories producing juice, textiles and general artefacts.

The narrator learns - and in turn teaches his readers - that labourers must adapt to the demands of their bosses, that the obedient servant conquers his superiors and that one needs to establish ‘chains of sympathy’, or cooperative networks: those who do not cooperate do not receive any cooperation.

Moreover, the spirit-author is lectured on the inefficiency of workers on the earthly plane, where 5

Doctors and workmen neglect the moral responsibilities inherent to their positions, their sacred duty, and, like poisonous flies on bread, avail themselves of laws to claim privileges, bonuses, and pensions (…) it would never enter their heads to doubt their right to the remunerations corresponding to the positions they so inadequately hold. (my italics) Doubting one’s right to privilege – or rather working one’s way into deserving rights to privilege - is a recurrent theme in Xavier’s work. He sees ‘justified’ ������ exemptions granted to persons in authority (albeit based on credit accumulated through work) and administrators, lawyers and doctors overpopulate his universe. I will come back to this in a separate section.

He is told that enthusiasm for work is rewarded, and that ‘just payment (…) is never assessed without taking into consideration the moral effort exerted.’ As to whether administrators and labourers should receive the same wages he is told: ‘In positions of responsibility as well as in humble ones, if the work requires self-sacrifice and abnegation, the corresponding remuneration is properly calculated.’36 Implied in this is the idea of an all seeing eye, who perfectly takes notice of the levels of individual enthusiasm for work, an omnipresent 4

administrator with access to individual’s inner feelings, taking notes, adding them up. The alternative to the allseeing-eye would be that the proof of one’s enthusiasm is simply to be found on productivity levels.

If the first version is suggestive of the panopticon37, the latter is equally twisted and twisting, as it implies that the supervision of human worth is based on productivity and its proof and accountability to be found on the accumulation of ‘bonus-hours’. In both cases individual life is at the service of a greater and controlling machine (the sate?), which profits from either obedience or high productivity or both. And Foucault has a term for that too - bio-power, or ‘life and its mechanisms into the realm of explicit calculations’. Santner speaks of bio-power as a fundamental paradox at the heart of the En��� lightenment project, a paradox related to what Adorno and Horkheimer famously theorized as that project’s dialectical undoing: the ‘scientific’ knowledge that accompanies and puts into practice the principles of Enlightenment culture, that seeks to foster, in the terms of technical rationality, the cultivation of Enlightenment subjects, is marked by a kind of aberrant and ‘perverse’ productivity.38 5

All-seeing eye on the tower of a cathedral in Aachen, Germany and pyramid with the all-seeing eye on the back side of the US one dollar bill.

Our Home’s narrator is advised to be grateful for work even though he would be divested from his position as a doctor and given an unskilled job as a mental nurse assistant: “The ability to begin anew is one of the most sublime lessons we may learn. Very few indeed are those who fully understand it and extremely rare are the incarnate men who distinguish themselves in that line.”

Later he’s admonished against career ambitions: Those in authority may justly refuse a request for some special line of work whose practice is legitimately reserved for those who are duly qualified for it through great efforts and much suffering, but they will most certainly accept cooperation of the spirit of goodwill, from those anxious to serve in any capacity.

When he finally arrives at the Regeneration chambers he says: I have received innumerable benefits without offering the least useful retribution. Surely my place is here amidst the redeeming activities. Please let my permission to visit be transformed into the possibility to serve. Now I understand as never before the urgent necessity of redeeming myself.

I have wasted too much time in useless vanities and misspent a tremendous amount of energy in ridiculous self-worship. and muses to himself: I had certainly wanted to work, but perhaps not to serve. (‌) I suppose the truth of it was that I really wished to continue being what I had been until then - the proud and respected physician, a slave to my preposterous claims of self (‌) Now (... ) at last I was sincere; I was not in the least worried about the kind of work (‌) but really anxious to carry it out in the sublime spirit of service.

And as his first day of work came to a close he was met with the following remarks: “Well done, my child! Fall in love with your work and inebriate yourself with useful service. Only in this way can we bring about our everlasting edification.” 39 When first given the opportunity of working at Our Home, the minister of Assistance hands him a small notebook which he ought to keep - a document serving as a permit to admittance to the Ministries of Regeneration, Assistance, Communication and Elucidation for the period of one year.

I’d like to make a parallel between this notebookdocument and the notebook-document called ‘Carteira de Trabalho’ (work notebook or work journal) - a compulsory document necessary for exercising any form of professional service in Brazil which reproduces and provides proof of all details about a persons work life.

Proposed and regulated by decree in 1932, the Vargas government ruled the workers notebook mandatory in the process of regulating workers rights in 1934.

The rationale given for the worker’s notebook is that it guarantees basic working rights such as unemployment support. But working regulations in Brazil should be viewed with scepticism. I would like to detour into some of the issues surrounding the transition from slave-labour to wage-labour in 19th century Brazil.

David Baronov suggests that: The principal outcome of the Brazilian abolition of slavery was, in fact, not the emancipation of slaves but the emergence of new forms of extramarket labour extraction (migration, vagrancy laws, monopolies in landholding, prison, fear) designed to continue the practice of relying on coerced African labour. (…) The legacy of this period’s enthusiastic embrace of racial subjugation is reflected today in Brazil’s race-based division of labour, which finds its mooring not in legal writ but in the firmament of a social ideological reality of 500 years’ construction. (…) For the slaves in Brazil, a careful examination of the period in question will make evident that the immediate consequence of their “liberation” was either (1) their effective marginalization from profitable roles within capitalist production or (2) their reincorporation into new regimes of coerced labour. (…) The abolition of slavery in Brazil was characterised, above all, by its drawn-out, patently calculated nature. Little was left to chance.

In this regard, there were four events punctuating the formation of post-slavery in Brazil: (1) the end of the slave trade (and a growing freed slave

population), (2) the institution of new forms of race-based, coerced labour (3) the formal abolition of slavery and (4) a large-scale (race-based) immigration policy with the explicit purpose of marginalizing freed slaves.40 Baronov’s work was criticized for its misconceptions about Brazilian society, in that he fails to recognize the Afro-Brazilian population’s heterogeneity, referring to them all as Africans,41 but his assessment of the transition from slave-work to wage-work is important here.

According to Baronov, in post-1850 Brazil but prior to abolition in 1888, Brazilian authorities recognized four types of “legal” status for people of African ancestry: slaves, free-born people with slave ancestors, libertos (freed slaves who had been born slaves) and emancipados (freed slaves who had been taken from slave ships).

Kraay calculates that in 1872 there were a about 200.000 freed slaves and about four million free-born people of African ancestry in Brazil.42 Note the conditions of “freedom” the libertos were subjected to: Libertos were freed slaves who had been born slaves before being manumitted. There were a number of means by which slaves could be manu-

mitted in this period including unconditional release by the slaveholder, conditional release by the slaveholder, self-purchase, purchase through ‘emancipation’ funds of third-party altruistic purchase. The condition of one’s manumission determined one’s legal status. Conditional manumission by a slaveholder, for example, was a common practice by the 1870s, in which the slave would remain in the employment of their slaveholder until the slaveholder’s death. The security of such manumission could be rather tenuous. “The possibility of revocation of freedom was quite real. The law allowed it until 1871, and the cartas (letters) sometimes included the threat of it, ‘should the said (freed slave) turn ungrateful and scornful of this proof of esteem, by failing to provide services (to the former master), or behaving himself in such a way as to be unworthy of this grace’ (then such freedom will be revoked).”43 And here back to Our Home - there’s a parallel between the terms and conditions of freed slaves and the author’s anxious gratitude and high esteem for authoritative power. He was neither ungrateful, nor scornful and provided services with warm enthusiasm.

And again, a shadow of the transitional apparatus between slave-labour and wage-labour can be found in Our Home’s hospital-factory-school. Of that transitional system, Baronov writes: The emergence of an elaborate state apparatus of coercion (national and state prison systems, police networks and vagrancy laws first emerged in this post-1850 period. Beginning in the 1850s with the close of the external slave trade, the Brazilian government made extensive studies of the European and U.S. prison systems. In this spirit, the construction of Recife’s House of Detention was begun in 1850. As a testament to the prescient nature of Brazilian social planning, over the next few decades (between 1860 and 1885) day labourers came to represent the largest population of inmates held in the Recife institution. Additionally, agricultural schools, beggar’s asylums and state orphanages were created, beginning in the 1870s. Only three years after the passage of the “free-womb” law (passed in 1871, law freed all children who were born to slave women) the escolas dos orfãos (orphanage schools) were created. Such orphanage schools, in fact, were little more than a means of housing concentrated

number of libertos to supply child labour to industry, as Huggins’ example from the sugar industry illustrates. ‘The state had converted an orphan colony, Colonia Isabel, into a disciplinary industrial school. The orphans school had become a complement to the sugar industry, for in 1887 the provincial president reported that the school had an engenho with the capacity to turn out five thousand kilograms a year of ‘excellent quality’ sugar, as well as machinery to make rum.’44 (…) The range of tools at the disposal of Brazilian elites to control and discipline labour in this era was ever growing. Provisions were passed allowing planters to turn plantations into penal colonies (Law 370 in 1899). (…) However, the most cherished of the Brazilian ruling class’ many social weapons were, without doubt, the vagrancy ordinances. Indeed, vagrancy laws represented an essential tool of social control, labour discipline and general repression throughout Brazil (and throughout the Americas and Central and Eastern Europe) in the post-slavery (and post-serfdom) era. (São Paulo) Senator Godoy considered a vagrancy clause a necessity because of ‘the lack of ambition in the national proletariat, from which results its lack of motivation for

work’.45 It is important to note that by the end of the 19th century, some two-thirds of the free population in the state of Minas Gerais (where Xavier comes from) consisted of non-whites, many themselves slave-owners.46 Hence identification with ‘exploiter’ and ‘exploited’ cannot be reduced to colour, and should best be thought in terms of inherited and/or acquired ‘rights’ and ‘duties’.

The Law. God too is an Administrator

Investiture, or one’s legal right to privilege – pervades not only the work of Xavier but perhaps the practice of Spiritism as a whole - a practice curiously overcrowded with doctors, lawyers and judges, both alive and in spirit form. Santner defines symbolic investiture as ‘those social acts, often involving a ritualized transferral of a title and mandate, whereby an individual is endowed with a new social status and role within a shared symbolic universe...the rites of symbolic investiture are among the means at a society’s disposal for the cultivation and regulation of (its) ‘predicative enjoyment’’47 Biographers of Allan Kardec, Spiritism’s founding father, write that he was born at Lyon in 1804, of an ‘old family of Bourg-en-Bresse, that had been for many generations honourably distinguished in the magistracy and at the bar. His father, like his grandfather, was

a barrister of good standing and high character’. After giving up a career in law, or at any rate in worldly law, Kardec became an educator and eventually codified the principles of Spiritism which are still in use today.

A remarkable encounter between Xavier and the Law concerns his first book, Parnassus from Beyond the Grave (1932). The book included 259 poems dictated by famous dead Brazilian poets. The widow of one of these poets took Xavier to court to get her part of her dead husband’s royalty. A judge denied her claim, explaining: “The man is dead, and dead people have no rights.” Rather than making a point for or against the rights of the dead, this anecdote suggests that if the Brazilian Catholic Church often worked against Spiritism, the courts often seemed to be in its favour. Subsequent instances of Xavier and the Law include cases where his channelled messages were used as evidence in court to absolve murder suspects in two different occasions.

At séances in Brazil today, healing touch procedures known as ‘magnetic passes’ are delivered to little crowds in attendance. Among those delivering the passes are a high percentage of lawyers, police chiefs and other figures of authority. This function extends their invested legal power to other-worldly dimensions. Following the logic of Santner’s interpretation of Schreber, the insistence on the divine origin of the law and its con-

comitant hierarchy serves the purpose of covering up the illegitimacy of the law. It hides the fact that the ‘king is naked’.

Our Home’s narrator grasps that on earth, a title i.e. a doctor’s title - is an open door to all kinds of absurdities and exemptions. Such ‘unjustified’ privileges granted to persons in authority are corrected in Our Home. But ������������������������������������������������� ultimately, the message is that national government and its administrative body are appointed by God (or given an opportunity by God) to fulfil divine designs. It is the fallibility of human understanding of divine designs that accounts for the gradually evolving nature of legislation. With all certainty, administrations are benevolent and strive towards progress.

In most spirit colonies, services are remunerated with the hour-bonus which unites two essential factors. The bonus represents the possibility of receiving something from our brothers and coworkers, or of recompensing someone sharing our efforts. However, the determination of the hour’s value, just as on Earth, belongs exclusively to God. Because of our fallibility as evolving beings, errors may occur in awarding hour-bonuses.

The real computation of the spirit hour is a private question between the worker and the Divine

Forces of Creation. That’s why our experimental activities on the road to progress, starting at the physical sphere, undergo continuous, daily modifications. The administrator to whom the Lord has granted the opportunity of cooperating in the Divine Plan of Life, experiment with tables, registers, and remuneration. He grants them this opportunity just as He grants His creatures the temporary privilege of being fathers or mothers on Earth or in other worlds, and all sincere administrators do their utmost to carry out the tasks assigned them to the best of their abilities.48 Finally, the divinely anointed nature of administration is evoked in ‘God also, my child, is a careful Administrator and most loving Father.’49

A New Family and a Remorseful Child

The word father is used 96 times in Our Home. The narrator’s father is stuck in the darker regions of the ‘threshold’, a lower zone where unrepentant spirits wonder aimlessly, plagued by teasing entities, desiring and despairing. But Our Home delivers a new family in the absence of the narrator’s own and the various higher and lower hierarchy employees the narrator meets there are described on fatherly, motherly and brotherly terms. These fatherly figures are strict but benevolent and he often cries on their lap, like a remorseful child.

Shades of Grey Revisited but Not Revised, Alan Kardec and the Remarkable Events and Discoveries of Each Reign

There were no official segregation laws after the end of slavery, but the interaction between Brazil’s varied colour hybrids and Brazilian ‘whites’ was, and still is, marked by asymmetrical relations of domination and subordination. Xavier - mulatto, poor, uneducated was able to acquire respectability only through an accumulation of wigs, discourse and demeanour which had to be characterized as ‘white’, and in its extremes characterized as ‘white and European’. As a Spiritist, Xavier ‘becomes’ the 19th century French educator Alan Kardec.

The Spiritism Xavier championed in Brazil is a doctrine developed by the French educator Hippol-

yte Léon Denizard Rivail under the pseudonym Allan Kardec. Kardec was a diligent pedagogue. To render instruction attractive as well as profitable, he constructed a table of French history as a memory aid for students in remembering the ’remarkable events and discoveries of each reign’.

Among his published works are titles like: A Plan for the Improvement of Public Instruction, A Course of Practical and Theoretic Arithmetic, A Classical Grammar of the French Tongue, A Manual for the use of Candidates for Examination in the Public Schools, with Explanatory Solutions of various Problems of Arithmetic and Geometry and Normal Dictations for the Examinations of the Hotel de Ville and the Sorbonne, with Special Dictations on Orthographic Difficulties.

In about 1850, while the phenomenon of tableturning spread through Europe, Kardec compiled a codification of Spiritism, The Spirits Book. His vision of the other world was bureaucratic and functionalist.

This codification of Spiritism was based on several sources, including the theological writings of Emanuel Swedenborg. Kardec was writing in the context of mesmerism, positivism, utopian socialism and spiritualism.

Rivail himself was not a psychic medium and constructed his text with the help of two girls who had be-

come well-known mediums in Paris.

Miss Anna Blackwell, the English translator of Kardec’s book describes the girls in the following terms: They were gay, lively, amiable girls, fond of society, dancing, and amusement, and with worldly and somewhat frivolous disposition, but “spirits of a much higher order than those who habitually communicated through the two young psychic mediums came expressly for him (Kardec), and would continue to do so, in order to enable him to fulfil an important religious mission (…) the girls willingly consented to devote a couple of evenings every week to this purpose, and obtained through table-rapping and planchettewriting, the replies which have become the basis of the Spiritist theory, and which they were as little capable of appreciating as of inventing.50 A different version, to be found on the Fodor Encyclopaedia of Psychic Science, gives the following account: the story of Kardec’s first investigations into spirit manifestations is somewhat obscure. The Spirits’ Book, in which Kardec expounded a new theory of human life and destiny, was published

in 1856. According to an article written by Alexander Aksakof (imperial councillor to the czar and a pioneer of spiritualism in Russia) in 1875, the book is based on trance communications received through Mlle. Celina Bequet, a professional somnambulist who gave medical advice guided by spirits under the name of Celina Japhet. Her mesmerist, M. Roustan, believed in multiple existences and it doesn’t seem surprising that in her automatic scripts the spirits talk of reincarnation. In 1856 Rivail was entrusted with Celina Japhet’s scripts, correlated the material by a number of questions and published it without mentioning the name of the psychic medium.51 In both accounts the receptive sensibilities of women, who are perhaps ‘frivolous’, are put to ‘good use’ in the hands of Kardec, the lawyer-educator.

The Spirits Book has become the recognized textbook of Spiritism, differentiating Spiritism from Spiritualism by having as its main principle that spiritual progress is achieved through a series of compulsory reincarnations.

Fodor goes on to say that: Outside France, the doctrine of Allan Kardec

was opposed by British and American Spiritualists. One of them was the psychic medium D. D. Home who wrote: ‘I have had the pleasure of meeting at least twelve Marie Antoinettes, six or seven Marys of Scotland, a whole host of Louis and other kings, about twenty Great Alexanders, but never a plain John Smith.’ (…) On the other hand opposition to Kardec’s philosophy in England was not unanimous and he had some followers. The theosophist Anna Kingsford, one of the first English female doctors, an advocate of women’s rights, precursor of eco-feminism and vegetarianism translated many of his books. She believed herself to be the reincarnation of the Virgin Mary, while her follower Edward Maitland believed that he had been St. John the Divine. 51 Spiritism’s belief in reincarnation then, allows for the excavation of ‘genealogical’ flatteries, endowing individuals with new social perspectives in a kind of private rite of symbolic investiture, power and authority.

Allan Kardec disdained physical manifestations of psychic mediumship and encouraged automatic writing. His main input to spiritualism was one of bureaucratizing it with a functionalist vision of the ‘other

world’ subordinating it to a ‘social contract’ to achieve a full naturalization of ‘hierarchy’ - since hierarchy stems from divine laws it must therefore be entirely justified.

Both Spiritualism and Spiritism differ from occult movements such as the Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn, in that spirits are not contacted in order to obtain magical powers with the single exception of obtaining power for healing. To be precise, in Spiritism, living persons do not initiate contact with the spirits but remain in the position of receivers of a call. While alchemy was meant to provide a limitless control over nature, Spiritism seemed to serve as consolation to the disenfranchised modern subject. She or he is on a path to slow Enlightenment.

The Florist from Beyond the Grave52

Séance-based Spiritism became fashionable in Brazil in the 2nd half of the 19th century. Newspaper articles from 1853 in the state of Rio as well as Pernambuco and Ceara write that in Paris, “you can’t walk into a tea parlour without seeing the high society sitting around a table, each with their little finger resting on their neighbour’s little finger, all waiting in silence for the table to turn”.53 In 1865 the first Brazilian Spiritist centre was established in Salvador and its leader received the first psychographed messages from the “Brazilian Angel”. Alan Kardec’s ‘book of the spirits’ was published in Brazil in April 1873. Spiritism, Kardec’s blend of rationalism and romanticism, came to be a practice carried out by a significant social group in Brazil - namely the middle class.

Materializations, ectoplasm and handicraft made by the dead during séances were carefully photographed and distributed in several ways. Among these ways was a book titled The Work of the Dead54. Not freed from the need to work, the dead produce handicraft. Besides spirits caught on camera, the book contains several photographed items made by Anita, the florist from beyond the grave.

According to the census of 2000 there are 2.300.000 declared Spiritists in Brazil, but anthropological studies calculate the number of sympathizers to be around 30.000.000. The anthropologist Bernardo Lewgoy suggests that the public structures of Spiritist assistance have a huge capacity to enable effective participation without asking for nominal identities. He remarks that ‘there are practices within and outside Spiritist centres which do not ask for an exclusive identity commitment.

There are declared Spiritists who align themselves with those without religion. Spiritism is totally fraught with sub-representation.’55 As an example of participation without nominal identity56, Lewgoy cites practicing Jews who eventually take part in the activities of Spiritist centres.57 In Lewgoy’s words: Spiritism is one of the first religious alternatives

which are properly modern and able to channel the dissatisfaction of the emerging classes of Brazilian society – the military, free thinkers, civil servants – who wished to free themselves from Catholic tutelage but didn’t see themselves as atheists, were able to adopt a language of science, reason and progress – the hallmarks of modernity. Besides, Brazilian Spiritism evolved over 100 years to incorporate many Catholic notions such as charity, redefining its limits and objectives, therefore winning many Catholic sympathizers.58 Lewgoy points out that the FEB (Brazilian Federation of Spiritism) was for a long time run by people associated with a missionary vision for the nation state, such as doctors, military officers, engineers and lawyers. Hence throughout the 20th century, Spiritism was a religion involved with the historical cycle of nation formation and its theological transformations are nearly a carbon copy of the key moments of State history since the First Republic. For example if Spiritism was liberal and universalist in its beginning, in the 1930 it courts the authoritarian and nationalist thinking of the period, and its references, beyond Allan Kardec, were rooted in national signs, in large part due to the work of Xavier, the

symbolic figure for this type of approach.

Bernardo Lewgoy suggests that one of the defining elements of Brazilian Spiritism is its emphasis on medical and therapeutic practices, having psychiatry as one of its main adversaries. Eventually this therapeutic domain became the only legitimate area of action within Spiritism, after materializations were discouraged for giving too much room to truth-or-forgery disputes.

And while Xavier stated in different occasions that his task was the book and not the cure59 the main protagonist of Our Home is in fact a doctor.

The Doctor, his Right of Intervention and a Poisonous Black Substance

Throughout Our Home the notion of investiture is touched upon, particularly with reference to the narrator’s rights (or sufficient knowledge) to be a doctor. The narrator realizes that as an earthly doctor his ‘right of intervention’ was based on the references to academic sources (‘known books’) and on the titles he acquired, but in Our Home he is demoted since he does not yet understand bodies.

The minister tells the narrator: How could I appoint you to treat spirit patients, when on Earth you insisted on limiting your professional observations to the physical body?

I do not deny your capacity as an excellent physiologist, but the field of life is much wider. What

would you think of a botanist who based his definitions on the mere examination of the dry bark of a few trees? A great number of earthly physicians prefer mathematical conclusions in their anatomical work. Now, I quite agree that Mathematics is a most respectable science, but it is not the only one in the Universe. As you are already aware, a doctor cannot draw the line at diagnoses and terminologies – he must go deeper, and scrutinize the innermost recesses of the soul.60 The narrator then rejects the skeptical positivism (or the ‘soul murdering’) of his generation and gains spiritual consolation (‘mystical consolation’). Now he is a doctor who knows that the soul is not dead, but he still works as an assistant at the correction chambers of the Ministry of Regeneration, which appears to be a mental hospital. The narrator speaks of ‘vast inter-communicating wards crowded with carcass-like human forms’ where a ‘strange clamouring filled the air - groans, sobs and plaintive phrases uttered at random. Ghastly faces, bony hands and monstrous faces bore witness to their terrible spiritual misery’. He walks ‘between numerous rows of well-kept beds’ and notes ‘unpleasant smells which filled the place, caused … by the mental emanations of those … dominated by the low vibrations of in-

ferior thoughts.”61 Some of the patients lay in continuous deep sleep for years, plagued by ‘sinister nightmares’, and when treated with ‘passes’62 they vomit a fetid and poisonous ‘black substance, a dark and viscous matter with cadaverous emanations’.

The narrator’s first service at Our Home is the outcome of his voluntary assistance in cleaning these poisonous and fetid substances. He speaks of how he intuitively picked up the ‘hygiene tools’.

All these monstrous bodies and physical and psychic impurities, fetid smells, dirt and materialized nightmares urge that something be hygienically cast away before progress can follow. But what?

For Xavier, the extent to which the body is a mere vessel for a spiritual soul that transcends human differences would seem to specifically negate race. Not wash away, as something dirty, but render it unimportant.

Unlike Schreber’s Germany, obsessed with the purity of the body-politic, Xavier’s Brazil is precisely obsessed with the mixing of the body politic which is supposedly, if not actually, transcended, once by the state and then again by the spirit (or perhaps, in Our Home, they are the same thing.)

But more to the point, the impure matter one must get rid of is neither the body nor race; one must get rid of ‘impure thoughts’. The proof that ‘thinking is doing’

is to be found on the ‘fetid dark matter’ produced by mental habits. One must get rid of ‘nasty’ ideology and its poisonous fumes, one must overcome the pull of the drives. What this utopian city-state of work and learning provides is an environment conducive to cleansing one’s mind from self-harm and from injustice to others – an infinitely benevolent view of state ideology and its hygiene.

Mesmer (circa 1779) treating a patient with ‘magnetic passes’

The factories where workers toil away to the sound of music are only a few hundred metres away from the Regeneration chambers.

Gobineau’s Carnival, Sheila the Healer, Meimei and Civilization

Lighter than his mother’s black skin, Xavier’s skin was eventually understood as white, due to an accumulations of fashion, discourse and demeanour.

Colour lines in Brazil are blurred, and perhaps this has to do with the way the Portuguese went about their lives in the colonies. Instead of segregation as a principle, it seems that the Portuguese formula for spreading the empire was to be carried out in bed.

During the slave trade - a trade which the Portuguese had the dubious honour of inventing - the mulatto children born out of the liaisons between the Portuguese and local women in West Africa served as the go-between from the white fathers in the coastal towns to the inland communities of their mothers. Mixed blood children were of vital importance in bringing

slaves from inland to the coast. No, it was not segregation as in the British colonies. The Portuguese were keen on bodily contact with their colonial subjects.

Feeling somehow implicated in the chain of power implies one is less likely to have a clearly antagonistic relationship to the ones in power. Nepotism being a veiled norm, the possibility of eventually gaining power due to blood relations, even remote ones, makes the issue of who feels white and who feels black obscure and hard to ascertain. Internalized racism is a force we will have to contend with for a long time to come.

Eugenics gained force among the Brazilian elite in the 1870s. Its theories were elaborated upon by, among others, the French aristocrat Comte de Gobineau, 63 who after publishing four volumes titled ‘An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races’, landed in Brazil during Carnival in 1869 to fulfill his diplomatic function as French ambassador. During his fifteen-month stay in Brazil he amassed enough ‘evidence’ to support his claim that Brazil was undergoing a process of���� degeneration due to racial mixing. 64 When eugenics gained currency in Brazil, psychometric tests were applied to measure the aptitudes of different segments of the population, especially black and mixed blood groups. Religious practices of African influence were one of the main targets for psychiatrists

and doctors with eugenic sympathies. As well as a sign of inferiority, their practices seemed not only to represent a threat to Catholic morality, but were also viewed by the medical profession as posing a ‘sanitary hazard’ to the mental health of subjects already deemed to be predisposed to insanity. Primitive manifestations were not welcome in a country aiming at fast development.

The question implied wasn’t whether Brazilians were ‘civilized’, but whether they were ‘civilizable’, that is, taking as a premise that it was a ‘mixed blood country’, could it ever catch up with ‘advanced civilizations’.65 The practice of magic and religions other than Catholicism was not only condemned but actually persecuted in Brazil since its inception as a colony. But even if the Portuguese Inquisition visited at least three and possibly four times between 1591 and 165066 ���������� Brazil became known as a laboratory of religious syncretism.

Yet despite syncretism and religious tolerances, Spiritism wanted no connection with Candomble (an Afro-Brazilian practice). Besides differing religious beliefs this differentiation also marks divisions of race and social class.

Xavier’s books and TV appearances in the late 1960s and 1970s helped to establish a pietistic form of Kardecist Spiritism as one of the main religions among the middle class in the Brazilian South East, establish-

ing not only Spiritism but also Xavier as a respectable figure.

Was the docile pietism and saintly humbleness associated with Xavier the only approaches he could have followed to be both socially visible and acceptable in Brazil? He might have ‘become’ white but he lived in near deprivation having donated the large profits from his book sales to charity.

Looking through the portraits and the names of the spirit messengers who spoke through Xavier, one is surprised, or perhaps not, to find they were all white and in large part European, or else had been doctors, lawyers, judges and nurses. Sheila, the healer whose presence was preceded by a strong smell of roses, had been a German nurse who died during WWI. At first I thought of the kind of self-hatred this must have implied. Then I thought of blond Sheila as a kind of aspirational vector, pointing to an idea of ‘becoming’. Like becoming ‘Meimei’, a woman who’d died of tuberculosis in her youth. Perhaps this ‘becoming’ is to be thought of as an alchemic process - a self, in transit, from lead to gold.

A Spiritist Reading of the Left, a Materialist Reading of the Spirits

After the death of Alan Kardec in 1869, the most prominent figure of the French Spiritist movement was Leon Denis. Among the books Denis wrote is a small volume titled Socialism and Spiritism where he considers that the two should complement each other.

While in Brazil I spoke with a few members of the Spiritist community who were not so clear on the necessity of that connection. I was told the necessary changes were not expected to come from governmental legislation but from individuals who, in their path to Enlightenment, would open themselves to others through acts of generosity.

What both Xavier and the Left had in common was a desire for a rupture in time - what Xavier called ‘redemption’, and the left ‘revolution’. Looking for where the two movements had met, I found mostly signs of their separation and mutual dislike.

So I talked to Salvio Penna, Xavier’s nephew and left-wing militant. Like her brother Xavier, Penna’s mother was a Spiritist leader and brought up her children reading Xavier’s Our Home at bedtime and insisting on their participation in Spiritist meetings.

During the military coup of 1964, which overthrew a socialist-leaning government on the premise of protecting the country from the threat of Communism, Penna, along with all those who participated in churchled social work, was arrested, interrogated, and then released. This was enough to mark the beginning of a gradual process of political mobilization which eventually led to a plan to take up arms.

Penna said the military coup pushed him into political militancy. He was arrested for a second time in 1970 and detained for 3 years-by the political policeduring the hardest years of the military regime and its practice of torture.

This is not to say that all left wing activists were Spiritists. On the contrary, if there were a religious group which was clearly apolitical at the time of the military dictatorship it was the Spiritists. Catholic priests, on the other hand, were polarized into clearly political positions of either right wing conservatism or extreme left wing activism. Since the church secured some immunity to the priests on the basis of its relative independence

from the state, priests were able to conduct political opposition in a way that most other citizens couldn’t.

Eventually some of the priests involved in underground organizations understood themselves as Maoists. Some were removed from office, some killed at gunpoint by the political police and some abandoned the church to take up further political action.67 A friend asked me if the politicians in power were ever afraid of what the spirits would tell Xavier - what if he spoke with a left wing spirit who would reveal something like torture and murder? No such revelations appear to have happened or if they did they weren’t made public. Xavier had peaceful relations with the politicians in government during the military rule.

At a séance in the state of Minas Gerais I spoke with a psychographer known for receiving messages from the now deceased Xavier. He said Spiritists had long known that political militants who died or disappeared between 1964 and 1985 in Brazil were reincarnations of revolutionaries from earlier times. He mentioned the Paris Commune as one of those ‘times’. He said although this was known, they didn’t want to make this knowledge public, because they didn’t want to incite violent behaviour. He also said some had reincarnated again or else made better peace with the world and the order of things.

Divine Flights of Tenderness, Sovereign Passivity and The Weaker Sex

In his struggle for a position of existential and social legitimacy Xavier mobilized his efforts in opposite directions. He gained ‘legitimacy’ by being the spokesperson of the illustrious deceased, but he also accentuated his role as ‘dominated’ and ‘subordinated’. This subordination is made visible not only through his religious devotion, piety and extreme humility but also by the ‘feminized’ public persona he adopted. I propose three readings for this. The first interpretation would read this ‘feminizing’ as an allusion to the idea that spirits only speak to women.

While Our Home discusses male privilege it doesn’t necessarily speak against it. Some ministerial posts are occupied by women but the woman who looks after the narrator ‘like a mother’ in Our Home talks of the

rash feminist movement (as) a grievous offence to the true attributes of the feminine spirit. Women aren’t meant to set themselves up as rivals to men in offices, an in the different professions and business departments, which are adequate fields for masculine activities. Nevertheless, we are taught here in our colony that there are many dignifying tasks outside the home which are compatible with the feminine sensibility, including nursing, teaching, textile manufacturing, communications, and all kinds of occupations which require patience.

Gender differences are categorized in the following terms: women gravitate towards the ‘creative inspirations of life’, while men strive for achievements towards the common progress. The narrator speaks of women’s ‘divine flights of tenderness and sentiment towards the higher planes of Creation.’68 Moreover, �������������������������������������� women ‘have had, up to now, the advantage of being submitted to a much sterner discipline.

In transitory earthly life, they are oppressed by (male) tyranny and made to bear our impositions. Here (we) learn that we are never really free until we learn to obey.’69

And it is on these ‘divine flights of tenderness’ and the ‘freedom to obey’ that Xavier appears to base his gentle and docile demeanour. The abjection usually associated with powerlessness does not seem to deter him.

Xavier’s ‘femininity’ is one of ‘receptive’ channels (for hearing the spirits), ‘forgiving’ capacities (towards humankind) and ecstatic surrender to be found in ‘service’ (to humankind, to the spirits, to a divine legislator) - ultimately a body of subaltern bliss and ‘invincible vulnerability’70 precisely because the pursuit of mastery, authorial and authoritative power has been relinquished.

Even if renouncing power ultimately turns him into a victim to power, if we halt for a moment, before final calculations are made, we can see his defiance of force by means of passivity.

Speaking of Schreber’s mutation into a ‘woman’71, Santner quotes Daniel Boyarin on the theological necessity of Jewish transvestism among Talmud scholars. On a heterosexual model of desire, an intimate of a male God should be female. 72 In direct contrast to Roman accusations that circumcision was a mutilation of the body that made men ugly, the Rabbinic texts emphasize over and over that circumcision removes something ugly from the male body. According to Boyarin, in the context of rabbinic Judaism a man comes

to have a body that matters, a body whose ‘matter’ is holy, a body inscribed by the divine Word, by way of feminization.

In an essay on Jewish male masochism Boyarin concludes: In the Greco-Roman world, the deeds that would render a man a suitable erotic object would have been phallic deeds par excellence, deeds of valour of one sort or another, while for the Rabbi these deeds are precisely anti-phallic. Where the ‘Roman’ had to show that he had a phallus to win a woman, the Rabbi had to show he has none…

This male subject learns to recognize himself… not through an image of ‘unimpaired masculinity’, but rather through an image of masculinity as impairment, as what would be interpreted in another culture as castration.

This feminization is in tandem with the task of the psychic medium - one of sovereign passivity – a necessary condition for automatic writing. Eric Santner speaks of Kafka’s world as populated by semi-human copyists, secretaries, and assorted servants. ‘Such figures’, he says, ‘partake in characteristics of animal and machine, occupying an uncanny ontological domain’ which he calls

the subaltern sublime.

Through a relative measure of feminization, Xavier found a way for his singularity to be imbued with the state, to become a part of it, finding his sublimity in bureaucracy in an elevated form of note taking, precisely one involving being filled by the words of others by way of automatic writing. As the unmediated scrivener for the dead, the ‘non-author’ of hundreds of texts, he is somewhat like the automaton-machine sparked with jouissance. And here I sketch out an argument – a hesitant and half suggested question: Could the notion of a porous body be a remainder of what is not-reconciled in the subject’s negotiations with modernity? - An open body rather than the hermetically sealed, autonomous body of the Enlightenment. Despite his political equivocation and his apparent siding with the law, by insisting on the subject’s dependency on the other and vulnerability to the other73, Xavier resists, perhaps by accident, the temptations of distorted notions of autonomy, and the intrinsic violences of choosing camp in a time of political extremes.

The second reading allows for Xavier’s ‘feminization’ to be understood in relation to his probable homosexuality – it is not a simple task to ‘come out’ in a country where gay cross-dressers are shot from moving cars on the streets of Sao Paulo. Xavier both revealed

and kept his sexual orientation a secret by insisting he was celibate.

On the 1971 TV program mentioned several times in this text, Xavier was cross-examined about Spiritism and its world-view. When asked how the doctrine accounts for ‘homosexuality and sexual disturbances in general’ he replied that in his conversations with Emanuel he had been told that homosexuality, bisexuality and asexuality are states of the human soul and should not be interpreted as shocking facts, to be attacked and ridiculed. Those who benefit from a so-called ‘normal’ sexuality as well as those who possess homosexual or bisexual feelings are entitled to our greatest respect. And we believe that human sexual behaviour will drastically change in the future, because we will re-classify from a scientific point of view all those who are able to procreate and all those who are sterile. The human community is called not only to physical fertility/procreation but also to spiritual fertility. When we have children in the process of a so-called ‘normal’ sexuality we are also called to spiritual fertility.

We are not talking about sexual addiction or of a sexuality out of balance but about states of be-

ing of human souls reincarnated in the body. The subject deserves a lot of study and we should go back to it in the future (…) Lets say if all our various sensory apparatuses (which he calls sensory potentialities) were given to us to the purposes of education and deeds consecrated to God and the light, why would sexuality in its various manifestations be sentenced to the darkness.74 His defence of homosexuality was an extremely bold gesture in the context of Latin American machismo, particularly during the military era.75 Spiritists believe that a person reincarnates at times as a woman and at times as a man. Xavier’s effeminacy is often remarked upon but Spiritists take pains to affirm that having sublimated and channeled his sexual drive towards the love of humanity Xavier was celibate and not homosexual. As a general rule his supporters punctuate their commentary with ‘it was not important what he was or wasn’t. What matters is the gift he left for humanity’ – a remark that barely conceals homophobia. Others concede that perhaps Xavier ‘suffered from homosexual tendencies and struggled to overcome them.’76 The third reading is brief but potent: it takes into account the possibility that Xavier plays ‘weak’, that he

plays ‘dead’, to signal to the ones in power that he is not dangerous. Xavier embraces a ‘feminized’ role as a sign of vulnerability, to downplay his ‘illegitimate’ assertion of knowledge-power.

While the first reading deals with what could be considered the task of the medium, the second sketches a political cause and the third speaks of asymmetries and former dependencies, both prolonged and contested on the actual and symbolic forms of violence which are part of the ‘Brazilian way of life’.

These three readings of Xavier’s feminization, sum up the intricacies of his life and work: as a kind of renegade theologian, as a passive and quietly militant voice against discrimination, and as someone who, in the end, submits to his subjectification, all the while believing that he had done so for the greater good of humanity. It is in these three readings that we can begin to see his complex role as a mediator of history, as a subject of modern Brazil, and as a universal figure of the convulsions and asymmetries of modernity. He does, in some way, fulfil the promise of a left-wing spirit, one who would champion the causes of the oppressed, marginalized and neglected. Yet, at the same time, he can only do so in the name of an authoritarian state, to which he pledges his body, his love, his soul. He exists in that fragile instant between rebellion and submission, the

solitary space where renouncing the role of master can either mean the liberation of all or the enslavement to another.

Notes

The love in question is perhaps best described as agape and caritas. Xavier was well known for his charitable work, his kindness and for a life of material deprivation. His biographers write that all of the profits of the estimated 25 million copies sold of his books, were ‘channeled into charitable organizations’. ( Jussara Korngold & Marie Levinson, Endearing Gems from Francisco Xavier, New York: Spiritist Alliance for Books, 2004.) In the introduction to one of his books, Xavier writes on behalf of his guiding spirit: ‘I speak to you as an anonymous friend, in this anonymity which stems from brotherly love.’ (Francisco Candido Xavier/dictated by the spirit Andre Luiz, Nosso Lar (Our Home), Brasilia: Federaçao Espírita Brasileira, 2006, pp. 56-59. I am using the 56th edition of the book.

2 That is Reading as differance in Derrida’s sense. The French word différer means both different and differed, or defer and differ.

3 According to Povos Indigenas no Brasil http://www.socioambiental.org/pib/portugues/quonqua/quadro.asp (accessed April 30, 2007) 4 To be discussed further on the section on ‘feminization’.

1

I am indebted to Soyoung Yoon for this reading of Althusser.

6 ht t p : / / w w w.y o ut u b e . c o m / w a t c h ? v = _ nxXJ0iAeiM&feature=related, the late TV Tupi program footage can also be found on a DVD released by the Brazilian Spiritist Association.

7 Schreber marks the onset of his mental breakdown with the observation ‘Furthermore, one morning while still in bed (whether still half asleep or already awake I cannot remember), I had a feeling which, thinking about it later when fully awake, struck me as highly peculiar. It was the idea that it really must be rather pleasant to be a woman succumbing to intercourse’. (quoted in Freud, S., The Schreber case; Penguin Classics, 2003, p. vii). During the course of the several years he spent in psychiatric institutions what Schreber understood as his mutation into a woman fully developed.

8 Max Nordau’s Degeneration [Entartung], 1892, quoted in Eric Santner, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity, Princeton University Press, 1996, p.6.

9 Jeffrey Needell, ‘Rio de Janeiro at the Turn of the Century: Modernization and the Parisian Ideal’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Feb., 1983), pp. 83–103.

10 João Cruz Costa, ‘O positivismo na republica. Notas sobre a história do positivismo no Brasil’, Sao Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional. Serie 5a. da Biblioteca Pedagogica Brasileira, Vol. 291. (1956), p. 203.

11 But Comte’s positivism is not the only French import of 5

the period. French culture and more specifically Parisian culture had a large role to play for late nineteenth century Brazilian elites, who modelled their own culture after the Parisian model. Needell speaks of a desire to make over the pátria, especially in its urban symbol, the capital, à la francaise. As Needell put it, ‘the message was “modernization”- and Brazilians spelled it out in French’ (…) ‘French culture had figured in Brazilian life since the colonial era. In the late eighteenth century, it embraced Enlightenment thought and matters of lifestyle, and by the latter half of the nineteenth, not only the elite but also the well-off among the urban middle sectors generally enjoyed French styles in dress, furniture, literature, luxuries, and even schooling.’ (Needell, p.6) 12 ‘It was repeatedly mentioned in visions that the work of the past fourteen thousand years had been lost’. (Schreber quoted in Santner, p.56.)

13 Quoted in Santner, p.57.

14 Where a nepotistic God blesses his country with natural resources, good weather, a benevolent culture and ‘beautiful people’. Or, at any rate, a people willing to parade clad in nearly nothing, available for lust, love and loving.

15 Santner, p.xi, referring to the work of William Niederland, The Schreber Case: Psychoanalytic Profile of a Paranoid Personality (Hillsdale, N.J.: Analytic Press, 1984) 16 Of the writing down systems, Schreber writes: ‘I cannot say with certainty who does the writing down. (...) I presume that the writing down is done by creatures given human shape on distant celestial bodies after the manner of the fleeting-improvised-men, by passing rays for the purpose of making them write

down, so that later rays can again look at what has been written’. (quoted on Santer, P74) 17 Eric Santner, ‘My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity’, in Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (eds) Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’, Stanford University Press, 1998, p.55.

18 Susan Sontag, ‘Walser’s Voice (foreword)’, in Robert Walser: Selected Stories, New York Review Books, 1982, p.viii.

19 Santner p.82.

20 Whose cause of death is diagnosed in the book as syphilis, cancer, exasperation, wrath, harsh manners and lack of selfcontrol.

21 Our Home, pp. 56-59.

22 Ibid, pp. 61-65.

23 Ibid, p76.

24 Maria Celina D’Araujo, A Era Vargas, Sao Paulo: Editora Moderna, 2004.

25 José Luis Bendicho Beired, Sob o signo da nova ordem: intelectuais autoritários no Brasil e na Argentina, 1914-1945, Sao Paulo : Edicoes Loyola, 1999.

26 D’Araujo, p.10.

27 Salgado obviously had a drastic change of partnership after 1922.

28 And if heavily inspired on Nazi-fascism, Salgado insisted on racial fusion and cultural assimilation rather than racial purity. Stanley E. Hilton, ‘Ação Integralista Brasileira: Fascism in Brazil, 1932-1938’, Luso-Brazilian Review, University of Wisconsin Press, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter, 1972), p.12.

29 On a video posted on the Integralista website in 2007, a

small group of men gathered at Plinio Salgado’s grave and a spokesman spoke of the one million adepts of the movement in the 1930s in what he describes as ‘a civic and spiritual apotheosis’. http://www.doutrina.linear.nom.br/index. htm Hilton notes that the actual number of voters for the Integralista Party in the mid 1930s was only 170,000. That number did rise to 850,000 registered members in 1937, though not all of them were legal voters.

30 My translation for “Nunca, em todo mundo, incluindo o futurismo de Marinetti no fáscio italiano, incluindo as teorias árias do nazismo alemão, nunca se escreveu tanta idiotice, tanta cretinice, em tão má literatura, como o fez o integralismo no Brasil. Foi um momento onde maior que o ridículo só era a desonestidade. Plínio Salgado, führer de opereta, messias de teatro barato, tinha o micróbio da má literatura.

Tendo fracassado nos seus plágios de Oswaldo de Andrade, convencido que não nascera para copiar boa literatura, plagia nesses anos o que há de pior em letra de fôrma no mundo. É a literatura mais imbecil que imaginar se possa.”

In the 50s, Mourão Filho achieved the rank of general.

During the presidency of João Goulart (1961-64), he became a key figure of several conspiracies. In the first of hours of March 31, 1964, General Olímpio Mourão Filho, in charge of the 4th Military Region, headquartered in Juiz de Fora, Minas Gerais, ordered his troops to start moving towards Rio de Janeiro, thus initiating the movement of troops which deposed João Goulart and inaugurated 21 years of the military dictatorship which ended in 1984. In September 1964 he became minister of the Supreme Military Court, a post he 31

occupied until his retirement in 1969. �������������������� Information on Olím����� pio Mourão Filho retrieved from the online sources of the Center for contemporary Brazilian history research http:// www.cpdoc.fgv.br/nav_jgoulart/htm/biografias/Olimpio_ Mourao_Filho.asp, assessed on 18/05/09 32 ‘The president quietly and indirectly bolstered the party wherever he could, an obvious fact that led opponents to protest the “complicity of the Federal Government in the Fascist movement.”’ Camara dos Deputados, Annaes [. .. ]1936, vol.

25 (Rio, 1937), 628. quoted in Hilton, p.17.

33 Hilton, p.24.

34 Ibid 35 Juracy Magalhaes to Vargas, June 27, 1935, quoted in, Minha vida publica na Bahia (Rio, 1957), p90, quoted in Hilton, p.7.

36 Our Home, pp.140–142.

37 Foucault’s analogy for the modern world drawn from Jeremy Bentham’s Panopticon building project - where the possibility of permanent visibility would ensure obedience and the functioning of power – indicating how a sense of ‘invisible omniscience’ underpins modern disciplinary techniques and institutions for measuring and supervising abnormal beings.

The Panopticon is not a dream building, but a diagram of power reduced to its ideal form. It perfects the operations of power by increasing the number of people who can be controlled, and decreasing the number needed to operate it. It gives power over people’s minds through architecture. As it can be inspected from outside, there is no danger of tyranny. (…) The panopticon was destined to spread throughout society. It makes power more

economic and effective. It does this to develop the economy, spread education and improve public morality, not to save society. The panopticon represents the subordination of bodies that increases the utility of power while dispensing with the need for a prince. Bentham develops the idea that disciplines could be dispersed throughout society. He provides a formula for the functioning of a society that is penetrated by disciplinary mechanisms. There are two images of discipline: one) the discipline blockade—an exceptional enclosed space on the edge of society; and two) the discipline-mechanism—a functional mechanism to make power operate more efficiently. (…) These tactics aim to increase the docility and utility of all elements of the system.

38 Santner, p.91.

39 An interesting parallel could be made here with Gramsci’s rather conservative ideas about education & discipline. See Harold Entwistle’s, Antonio Gramsci: Conservative Schooling for Radical Politics: http://books.google.com/books?id=JV 4VAAAAIAAJ&printsec=frontcover&dq=gramsci 40 David Baronov, The abolition of slavery in Brazil: the “liberation” of Africans through the emancipation of capital, ���� Missouri: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000, p.145.

41 Hendrik Kraay, ‘Transatlantic Ties: Recent Works on the Slave Trade, Slavery, and Abolition’, Latin American Research Review, Vol. 39, No. 2, June 2004, p.193.

42 Ibid 43 Dean, 1976, p.72, quoted in Baronov, p.147.

44 Martha Knisely Huggins, From Slavery to Vagrancy in Brazil: Crime and Social Control in the Third World, Rutgers,

1985, p.75, quoted in Baronov, p.160.

45 Baronov, p.160.

46 Kathleen J. Higgins, ‘Licentious liberty’ in a Brazilian goldmining region: slavery, gender and social control in eighteen century Sabara, Minas Gerais, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999, quoted in Kraay, p.184.

47 Eric Santner, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, University of Chicago Press, 2001, p.47.

48 Our Home, p.236.

49 Ibid.

50 From Anna Blackwell’s preface to ‘The Medium’s Book’, http://www.spiritwritings.com/kardec.html Assessed on 22nd April 2010.

51 Nandor Fodor, Encyclopedia of Psychic Science, 1933, http://www.spiritwritings.com/fodorr.html Assessed on 22nd April 2010.

52 The information collected on the origins of Spiritism in Brazil is an amalgamation of information retrieved from various Internet sources and from Nogueira De Faria, O Trabalho dos Mortos, Rio de Janeiro: Livraria da Federaçao Espirita do Brasil, 1921.

53 The upper class of northern Brazil was hugely wealthy due to the production of rubber. Initially rubber trees only grew in the Amazon basin. The Brazilian monopoly on rubber production was disrupted when the British India Office and Kew Gardens jointly commissioned Henry Wickham to smuggle large amounts of rubber seeds to the Royal Botanical Gardens in London. In 1876 Wickham delivered 70,000 seeds for cultivation at Kew. The germinated seeds were success-

fully grown into rubber trees in Ceylon, Singapore, Malasya and South East Asia. Before the loss of their monopoly the rubber oligarchy of Northern Brazil was said to be so wealthy an anecdote has it their laundry was washed in Paris. Paris as a laundry was a flamboyant allusion to Paris as the centre of their aspirations in general. The interest in Paris tea parlours is to be understood in this context. For more information on the smuggling of rubber seeds see Lucile ������������������������� H. Brockway, “Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens” in American Ethnologist, Vol. 6, No. 3, Interdisciplinary Anthropology. (Aug., 1979), pp. 458 – 459, retrieved from JSTOR electronic database.

54 Nogueira De Faria.

55 Bernardo Lewgoy, O grande mediador: Chico Xavier e a cultura brasileira, online interview, http://www.antropologia. com.br/entr/entr31.htm, accessed on 25/05/09 (my translation) 56 The notion of effective participation without nominal identity is perhaps useful in the understanding of identity politics in Brazil, or lack thereof. More than clearly racially demarcated identity groups it seems that ‘temporary identities’ or ‘identities on loan’ inform the popular imaginary in Brazil at least at a surface level. But if this Brazilian social imaginary bets of the complex, unexpected, and sometimes surprising social ties which bound master and servants and all shades colour in unpredictable ways - ambiguities pointing to the impossibility of bringing these relationships to a neat and tidy conclusion - the sensibility towards the fluidity of social relations cannot be upheld at the expense of acknowledging

structures of domination and subordination.

57 Lewgoy, Civitas, p154. (my translation) 58 Lewgoy, O grande mediador.

59 Xavier, C. and Emmanuel, Dos hippies aos problemas do mundo, Sao Paulo: Lake, 2003, pp. 30-31.

60 Our Home, pp. 94 -95.

61 Our Home, p.173.

62 A magnetic pass is a healing procedure where the healer does not touch the patient but ‘sweeps’ the contours of the body at a distance, to redirect its energy flows.

63 Gobineau was an essayist, novelist and a man of strange passions who, according to Wikipedia, elaborated on racial purity regardless of the fact that both his grandmother and the mother of his children were of Creole origins.

64 André Luis Masiero, “Psicologia das raças e religiosidade no Brasil: uma intersecção histórica”, in Psicologia: ciencia e profissão (online psychology journal), March 2002, vol.22, no.1, p.66-79. http ://pepsic.bvs-psi.org .br/scielo.php ?script=sci_ arttext&pid=S1414-98932002000100008&lng=pt&nrm=iso (accessed may 1, 2007) 65 Ibid 66 Carole A. Myscofski, ‘The Magic of Brazil: Practice and Prohibition in the Early Colonial Period, 1590-1620’, History of Religions, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Nov., 2000), p.155.

67 Elio Gaspari, A Ditadura Escancarada, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002, pp. 243-270.

68 Our Home, p.129.

69 Ibid, p297. One the chapters called ‘A woman’s sacrifice’,

the narrator discusses the notion of individual freedom with his mother and she says ‘the soul can’t claim unlimited freedom unless it fully understands its duty and performs it.’ Ibid, p.307.

70 ‘Invincible vulnerability’ is a term used by Antony Hegarty to refer to Boy George. Quoted in http://www.guardian. co.uk/music/2009/jan/03/antony-hegarty-and-the-johnsons 71 ‘The two symptoms of Schreber’s delusions singled out by Freud in his study are the fantasy of messianic calling and the imperative to undergo, by way of divine miracles, a process of gender transformation for the purpose of repopulating the world with the issue of his divinely inseminated body. (…)

Freud sees the messianic salvation as a secondary symptom arising to endow with sublime purpose the condition of abjection and degradation of his gender transformation. Such was Freud’s horror for the feminine.’ Santner, p.25.

72 And feminization as pre-condition for God’s intimacy is the case in Christianity as well. The Gospel of John says the church is to be the ‘bride of Christ’ collectively and people ‘his bride’ on an individual level.

73 And here I am indebted to and quote Soyoung Yoon who made this notion brilliantly clear to me in conversation.

74 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb8LmH5ep7Y&feat ure=related (my translation) 75 The idea of being reincarnated, sometimes as a woman and sometimes as a man, seems to turn Spiritsm into a vehicle for speaking about homosexuality in ‘acceptable terms’. Curiously, the first message channelled by the organizers of ‘depar-

ture and arrival: life in two planes’ a Brazilian blog to discuss Spiritism, is from a spirit asking for his homosexuality to be accepted without prejudice.

76 http://www.partidaechegada.com/2007/07/ no-sou-assim-por-opo-juninho-eugnio.html http://www.revistaladoa.com.br/website/artigo.asp?cod=1 592&idi=1&moe=84&id=4188 and http ://br.answers .ya ho o.c om/question/ index?qid=20070521114722AAaouaE Assessed on 18th May 2009.

Bibliography Baronov, David, The abolition of slavery in Brazil: the “liberation” of Africans through the emancipation of capital, Missouri: Greenwood Publishing Group, 2000.

Beired, José Luis Bendicho, Sob o signo da nova ordem: intelectuais autoritários no Brasil e na Argentina, 1914-1945, Sao Paulo : Edicoes Loyola, 1999.

Brockway, Lucile H., “Science and Colonial Expansion: The Role of the British Royal Botanic Gardens” in American Ethnologist, Vol. 6, No. 3, Interdisciplinary Anthropology. (Aug., 1979), pp. 458 – 459.

Costa, João Cruz, ‘O positivismo na republica. Notas sobre a história do positivismo no Brasil’, Sao Paulo: Companhia Editora Nacional. Serie 5a. da Biblioteca Pedagogica Brasileira, Vol. 291. (1956). Source: The Hispanic American Historical Review, Vol. 38, No. 2 (May, 1958), pp. 289-290.

D’Araujo, Maria Celina. A Era Vargas, Sao Paulo: Editora Moderna, 2004.

De Faria, Nogueira, O Trabalho dos Mortos, Rio de Janeiro: Livraria da Federaçao Espirita do Brasil, 1921.1 Freud, Sigmund, The Schreber case; Penguin Classics, 2003.

Gaspari, Elio, A Ditadura Escancarada, São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2002.

Higgins, Kathleen J., ‘Licentious liberty’ in a Brazilian goldmining region: slavery, gender and social control in eighteen century Sabara, Minas Gerais, University Park, PA: Penn State University Press, 1999.

Hilton, Stanley E., ‘Ação Integralista Brasileira: Fascism in Brazil, 1932-1938’, Luso-Brazilian Review, University of Wisconsin Press, Vol. 9, No. 2 (Winter, 1972), pp. 3-29.

Huggins, Martha Knisely, From Slavery to Vagrancy in Brazil: Crime and Social Control in the Third World, Rutgers, 1985.

Korngold, Jussara & Levinson, Marie, Endearing Gems from Francisco Xavier, New York: Spiritist Alliance for Books, 2004.

Kraay, Hendrik, ‘Transatlantic Ties: Recent Works on the Slave Trade, Slavery, and Abolition’, Latin American Research Review, Vol. 39, No. 2, June 2004, pp. 178-195.

Lewgoy, Bernardo, ‘Representações de ciênciae religião no espiritismo Kardecista: Antigas e novas configurações’, Civitas, Social Sciences Journal, v. 6, nr, Porto Alegre, 2006.

Masiero, André Luis, “Psicologia das raças e religiosidade no Brasil: uma intersecção histórica”, in Psicologia: ciencia e

profissão (online psychology journal), March 2002, vol.22, no.1, p.66-79.

Myscofski, Carole A., ‘The Magic of Brazil: Practice and Prohibition in the Early Colonial Period, 1590-1620’, History of Religions, Vol. 40, No. 2 (Nov., 2000), pp. 153-176.

Needell, Jeffrey, ‘Rio de Janeiro at the Turn of the Century: Modernization and the Parisian Ideal’, Journal of Interamerican Studies and World Affairs, Vol. 25, No. 1 (Feb., 1983), pp.

83–103.

Santner, Eric, My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity, Princeton University Press, 1996.

Santner, Eric, ‘My Own Private Germany: Daniel Paul Schreber’s Secret History of Modernity’, in Bryan Cheyette and Laura Marcus (eds) Modernity, Culture and ‘the Jew’, Stanford University Press, 1998.

Santner, Eric, On the Psychotheology of Everyday Life, University of Chicago Press, 2001.

Sontag, Susan, ‘Walser’s Voice (foreword)’, in Robert Walser: Selected Stories, New York Review Books, 1982.

Xavier, Francisco Candido/dictated by the spirit Andre Luiz, Nosso Lar (Our Home), Brasilia: Federação Espírita Brasilei-

ra, 2006.

Xavier, Francisco Candido, and Emmanuel, Dos hippies aos problemas do mundo, Sao Paulo: Lake, 2003.

Online Resources Bernardo Lewgoy, O grande mediador: Chico Xavier e a cultura brasileira, online interview, http://www.antropologia. com.br/entr/entr31.htm, accessed on 25/05/09 Brazilian Integralista website: http://www.doutrina.linear.nom.br/index.htm Blogs with questions and answers on Xavier: http://www.revistaladoa.com.br/website/artigo.asp?cod=1 592&idi=1&moe=84&id=4188 http ://br.answers .ya ho o.c om/question/ index?qid=20070521114722AAaouaE http://www.partidaechegada.com/2007/07/no-sou-assimpor-opo-juninho-eugnio.html Center for contemporary Brazilian history research: http:// www.cpdoc.fgv.br/nav_jgoulart/htm/biografias/Olimpio_ Mourao_Filho.asp Povos Indigenas no Brasil: http://www.socioambiental.org/pib/portugues/quonqua/ quadro.asp

TV Tupi program footage of Xavier’s1971 interview: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_ nxXJ0iAeiM&feature=related http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tb8LmH5ep7Y&featu re=related

Tamar Guimarães A Man Called Love: Reading Xavier Published by Capacete Produçöes and Forlaget * [asterisk] 2010 Layout by Tamar Guimarães and *[asterisk] Printed by Aldgate Press, London ISBN 978-85-63537-01-0 www.capacete.netwww.forlagetasterisk.dk