EMBRIAGUEZ E INSURGÊNCIA: NIETZSCHE, BOAL E A ESTÉTICA DA RESISTÊNCIA

Abstract

This article establishes a critical dialogue between Friedrich Nietzsche’s tragic philosophy and Augusto Boal’s Theatre of the Oppressed, based on the hypothesis that both, in distinct contexts, formulate insurgent forms of aesthetic resistance to the hegemonic rationality of the West. In The Birth of Tragedy Nietzsche diagnoses the downfall of Dionysian art in the face of the triumph of Socratic reason, advocating the rehabilitation of intoxication, the body, and illusion as affirmative ways of confronting suffering and modern nihilism. Centuries later, Boal conceives a theatre that breaks with the passivity of the spectator, instituting the “spect-actor” as an active subject in the creation of possible worlds. On a transversal plane, the presence of Shakespeare — especially in Hamlet, read by Nietzsche and critically reenacted by Boal — operates as a symbolic link between the Dionysian chorus and the insurgent stage, revealing the persistence of the tragic in modernity. By bringing these universes closer together, the study investigates the constitution of an aesthetics of resistance that, rather than seeking reconciliation or redemption, reinscribes conflict, pain, and gesture as creative forces. It thus analyzes how intoxication and insurgency, in distinct senses, operate as ethical-aesthetic cores capable of restoring to art its original power of symbolic transfiguration and transformation of the sensible.