Comissão das lágrimas: o horror é representável?

Abstract

In the novel Comissão das lágrimas, by Lobo Antunes, the character Cristina stays in a psychiatric clinic in Lisbon, writing, remembering the horror of the so-called "Comissão das Lágrimas" ("Comission of Tears"), the name given to the massacre of the dissidents of Agostinho Neto's political system in Angola from 1977 to 1979. Her voice is made up of multiple voices that build the narrative in a fragmented way. This paper aims to think about testimony and its constituition, establishing a dialogue between the novel and the thought of Blanchot, Rancière, Didi-Huberman and Agamben, and trying also to articulate answers to some questions. Is it possible to represent what seems to be unrepresentable? How can a literary text witness and represent horror? This text's hypothesis is that testimony will be expressed as vibration that keeps it far from literature, but bestows on the unimaginable the status of hyperimaginable.