nanopolitics handbook - Minor Compositions

Because they want to make omelettes without breaking the eggs, that is tochange society without changing themselves.’ 5Like lots of people in Brazil, I came across Soma through reading Freire’sbooks and got hooked by his writings. My favourite book is Utopia e Paixão– A politica do cotidiano, (Utopia and Passion – The politics of everyday life),published in Brazil in 1984, and written with Fausto Brito. The book was bornfrom hours of conversation between the two authors: Freire, temporally blindas a consequence of tortures suffered during the dictatorship, spent most ofhis time in hospital talking to Brito. Reflecting on their hopes, they foundthat ‘there’s light even in the darkness’, and wrote a poetic invitation to bringpassion into politics and utopia into everyday life. They were two militants incrisis by the time the military regime approached its end: they had struggledto not die; now, almost survivors, they had to find a new way of living! And tolive is more than just to survive, because ‘love, not life, is the opposite of death’!When we are completely safe, there’s no risk, no change, no movement!Risk is synonymous with freedom. Power is established in the searchfor security. A person who likes risk and adventures has to accept insecurity,because she has her own utopia, she lives for satisfying, at anycost, her need for pleasure. The highest form of security is slavery. Beingslaves, we are someone’s property, we do not run any risk so long aswe obey the fundamental rules of slavery: to not be free, to not have achoice. 6His other books went on to deepen this search for freedom and love insocial and personal life, keeping a confessional tone through which readerscould follow his struggles, contradictions and discoveries. Sem tesão não hasolução – Without tesão there’s no solution – created a big polemic in the late1980’s, with some newspapers refusing to write the word tesão in their reviewsof the book. In the dictionaries, tesão was defined as sexual excitement. ButFreire captured the semantic transformations of this word, linking them to the60s spirit of rebelliousness and love, when young people started to use tesãoto describe something or someone that brings out the experience of beauty,cheerfulness and pleasure. These three elements are, either together or alone,parts of Roberto Freire’s proposition for the meanings of the word tesão in Brazil.‘In its current use, the word tesão seems to have turned everything somehowsensual. Sensuality is the biggest honesty, that which really matters, it’sthe most clear and intense, the most sincere and real sensation of being alive.’ 7Based on tesão as a practical analytical tool for a politics of everydaylife, Freire found that there are two kind of tendencies with in dominant97