O que é isso, Caetano? Révolution, corps et désir dans les mémoires de la résistance de Roberto Schwarz et de Caetano Veloso contre la dictature brésilienne

Building upon the polemic that has brought poet and musician Caetano Veloso and literary critic Roberto Schwarz to the forefront of the cultural debate of the Left in Brazil, I discuss how the tension between an engaged, Revolution-driven attitude, and the counterculture agenda of the sixties may be still alive. Rooted in the struggles against the Brazilian dictatorship, such a tension can help understand how artists and intellectuals are haunted by the necessity of a historical synthesis, and how they face the challenge of imagining alternatives to a world whose end can neither be defined nor achieved. In order to address the meaning of those tensions around the open-endedness of history, topics such as consumerism, politics, desire, sex, the body, and the arts, are discussed in the light of the dispute between Veloso and Schwarz.