Memory and document: Gonzaga Duque’s diary

Abstract

This study aims to understand how the biography of Gozanga Duque, available at his official site at the Fundação Casa de Rui Barbosa, is structured and how it is similar to the narrative of the Traditional History. In this way biography meets a place of legitimacy as a discourse of “truth”. This study seeks to understand how history and biography maintain a relationship with “reality” and fiction. Theorists like Jacques Rancière, Juan José Saer and Nietzsche help us on the issues on the relationship between “truth” and “appearance”, fiction and no-fiction. Rancière understands that the “real” needs to be fictionalized to be thought; Saer shows a dual character of fiction: the empirical and the imaginary; and Nietzsche breaks the boundaries between “reality” and “appearance. We can develop a notion of biography and history without resorting to the old discourse of “truth” and we can think about art objects without the opposition between the fictional and the no-fictional.