Rui Nunes, or the brief story of gestures

Abstract

In Portuguese contemporary literature, Rui Nunes (b. 1945) stands out for the unclassifiable singularity of his writing, in which the crisis of representation (what it means to be human, to have an identity, to understand one’s body) is taken to a limit zone. In fact, a radical genological crisis and the physical weaknesses of the author himself turn indiscernible: due to his progressive myopia, Rui Nunes exacerbates the monstrosity of detail, discontinuity and fragment, in detriment of textual, organic or metaphysical “great cohesions”. From objects to characters, his world is a wasteland, made of “havoc” and “ruins”, bringing the human back to the absurdity of his “flesh”, emptied of any ontological foundations. This writing-look is at the heart of this essay, exploring its connections to “the random occurrence” in literature according to Jacques Rancière, the poet Henri Lefebvre, a poem by Rilke, the contemporary “palliative body” according to Byung-Chul Han.