To be (and not to be) the sick man, the bad man and the unpleasant man: notes on Notes from the underground

Abstract

This article comments and analyzes the strategies and narrative path of the anonymous protagonist of Notes from the underground (1864), by Fyodor Dostoievski, in order to highlight the relevance of a critical-clinical reading about the novel, with a view to the study of symptomatologies and the dialogue with Gilles Deleuze's thought that concerns literature as becoming, the writer's role as a physician of civilization and the larval subject of micropolitics that acts on the effects of the real and on the potency of the impossible. The text also aims to raise the essay hypothesis that the underground man experiences transcendentally an effective movement between illness and health in the world, between good and evil and, finally, between negative criticism and the affirmation of desire in life, always on the way to overflowing all these limits. For this purpose, some central observations concerning the work and/or philosophy of Dostoievski's time, carried out by René Girard, Bakhtin, Nietzsche, Sergio Givone, among others, are also discussed. From a differential reading of the novel to the reading of contemporary literary theory, the article uses the Memoirs as an intensive place for disputes over the meaning of writing, mimesis as a primordial poetic technique and the textual genre of confessions, or rather, correctional punishments that conjure by aporias.

Keywords: Memoirs from underground; literary becoming; symptomatology; Deleuze.