LUTO IMPOSSÍVEL E LITERATURA DE TESTEMUNHO:

DELEUZE, FREUD E THALES RIBEIRO

Abstract

This article proposes a reflection on the role of testimonial literature in the face of impossible mourning, as provoked by historical violence such as the Holocaust, military dictatorship, and structural racism. Drawing on Freud’s (2013) contributions on mourning and melancholia, Deleuze and Guattari’s (1997; 2021) concepts of becoming and minor literature, and Thales de Medeiros Ribeiro’s (2020) proposal of testimony as resistance, the discussion centers on how the act of writing can take shape as an ethical, political, and aesthetic gesture. The analysis focuses on If This Is a Man (1988), by Primo Levi, in which literary testimony functions as counter-information and subjective reinscription in the face of trauma and pain. It is argued that, by performing minority becomings, this literary narrative resists the interdiction of mourning and the capture of memory, creating spaces where desire escapes and life reinvents itself. The article concludes that testimonial literature, understood as a speech act and a gesture of becoming, can produce an ethic of becoming that restores to pain a possibility of meaning and of life.