Saturday, July 22, 2023

Olavo de Carvalho in English

Olavo de Carvalho was a Brazilian journalist, essayist and philosopher who single-handedly created the Brazilian right wing, allowing for the election of Jair Bolsonaro in 2018. As such, he is of some international interest, especially given the parallels between the Bolsonaro election in 2018 in Brazil and the Trump election in 2016 in the US. But international researchers may be hampered by their not knowing Portuguese, the language in which Olavo de Carvalho generally spoke and wrote – with the one notable exception being his debate with Aleksandr Dugin in 2011, which was written in English. This is where I come in, chiefly by providing access to translations of his works, and works about him.

One of the best photos of Olavo de Carvalho, taken by Josias Teófilo.

Note that in Brazil, we call him “Olavo”, not “Carvalho”, which is a custom that I will follow here. This is akin to how Elon Musk is referred to as Elon, and Kanye West is referred to as Kanye – the first name is simply more unique and distinctive than the last name. When writers form derived words from his name, they derive them from the first name, such as in “olavismo” and “olavista” (referring to Olavo’s thought and its followers, respectively), as well as in “olavete” (sometimes spelled “olavette”), which refers to fans of Olavo. (The suffix is standard in Brazil, where most famously, fans of the soccer player Neymar, especially but not necessarily the female fans, are called “Neymarzetes”.) I had attempted to introduce the practice of calling him Olavo into the material I added to his Wikipedia article, but another editor thought it was too informal and changed it all back to Carvalho.

Secondary material

First, I’ll cover works about Olavo in English, which are not many; after that, in the “Primary material” section, I’ll cover works by Olavo.

Biographical information

No one has tried to write a serious biography of Olavo de Carvalho. As of now, your best bet is Wikipedia; I have contributed to that page and helped provide summaries of the biographical information that is scattered throughout various journalistic profiles of Olavo. Still, a lot is missing from there.

Overviews of Olavo’s philosophy

The only secondary source on Olavo de Carvalho written for English speakers is War for Eternity by Benjamin Teitelbaum. The content is accurate, but naturally focuses a lot on Olavo’s only writing in English, which was the debate with Dugin, as well as on Olavo’s relationship with the Traditionalist School, which, although important, was never emphasized by Olavo himself – only the most involved of his fans know much about it. In Brazil, however, there have been more attempts to introduce readers to Olavo de Carvalho.

Books

There are some books about him by other authors, the most notable one being Conhecimento por presença by Ronald Robson, and a couple others. The book A tirania dos especialistas, by Martim Vasques da Cunha, although it is rather about broader cultural topics, also contains some coverage of Olavo. However, none of this is translated yet; this section just highlights a lacuna, for now.

Covers of some books about Olavo published in Brazil.

Articles

Some people have also attempted to write articles, or essays, for blogs or newspapers, with overviews of Olavo’s thought and ideas. None of them could promise to be comprehensive, since Olavo spoke and wrote so much stuff. I have translated (what I think are) the two most prominent ones, and the translations are linked below.

You may notice that Ronald Robson and Martim Vasques da Cunha are the main secondary writers on Olavo de Carvalho. Such is life. Ronald Robson, who edited many of Olavo’s books, is much more sympathetic to Olavo and less critical of him than Martim Vasques da Cunha, who is just some random journalist, but who has nevertheless clearly read a lot of Olavo’s works.

Primary material

The primary material available in English is linked below, divided by topic.

Traditionalist School

If you’re coming to an interest in Olavo de Carvalho from having read War for Eternity by Benjamin Teitelbaum, you may be curious to get deeper into Olavo’s relationship with the Traditionalist School. Olavo’s main written engagement with that school was in a roughly 8000-word essay titled The Claws of the Sphinx – René Guénon and the Islamization of the West, which, as you may have guessed, accuses René Guénon of trying to Islamicize the West. Victor Bruno, a Brazilian scholar of Olavo and of Traditionalism, has written an article defending Guénon from this charge, which I have also translated.

Olavo also taught a five-lecture course on esotericism, which covered Guénon and Schuon to some extent. Transcriptions of those lectures have been published, but only in a physical book, which I have yet to scan in order to translate.

Cover image of Olavo’s course on esotericism, available from his website.

His course handout Notes on Symbolism and Reality is also of some interest in this connection.

Political philosophy

If you’re coming to an interest in Olavo de Carvalho due to his influence on the political landscape, you may be interested in the texts he wrote about his political ideas. On this topic, the 2011 debate he had with Aleksandr Dugin is actually an important source. Besides that, there is also the following.

First and second edition covers of the Portuguese translation of the debate with Dugin, which was originally in English.

The Minimum

The Minimum You Need To Know So As Not To Be An Idiot, usually just called the Minimum, is a famous collection of Olavo’s journalistic columns. In Brazil, this is Olavo’s most famous book, and any fan of Olavo has read at least this book. I have translated it only partially up to now, since I thought the parts were disconnected enough to be publishable separately. The parts that are currently translated are linked here, and this post will be kept up to date as I translate more.

Promotional image from the publisher, commemorating 100,000 sales of the Minimum.

Olavo’s Trilogy

Three of the books that Olavo wrote were considered a “trilogy” by the author, and they are his most famous books in Brazil besides the Minimum. I have translated all three.

  1. New Age and Cultural Revolution is about the New Age movement, which Olavo saw as represented by Fritjof Capra, and Antonio Gramsci’s ideas about “cultural revolution”. Olavo opposed both, and saw them as opposite extremes to be avoided.
  2. The Garden of Afflictions, subtitled “From Epicurus to the Resurrection of Caesar: An Essay on Materialism and Civil Religion”, is Olavo’s most ambitious and comprehensive written work. The title is a riff on the “Garden of Delights” of Epicurus, in which Olavo could only see afflictions. A documentary on Olavo’s life was named after this book, although the content is not related.
  3. The Collective Imbecile completes the trilogy by analyzing some then-current events in Brazilian intellectual culture, which Olavo saw as symptomatic of deeper cultural ills. The title is a riff on the Gramscian notion of the “collective intellectual”.
The trilogy, with a limited edition of The Garden of Afflictions pictured in the middle. The more common edition has a red cover.

Theoretical philosophy

Olavo had ideas about all sorts of topics in philosophy, and his oeuvre on the subject is vast, and constitutes the majority of what he wrote and spoke by far. His main course, the 585-lecture Online Philosophy Course, was almost entirely dedicated to theoretical philosophy. His works on the subject that have been made into English are listed below, divided by literary genre.

Books

Short books on other philosophers’ ideas:

Collections of philosophical essays:

Astrological books:

Olavo sitting next to many of his books. The white ones in the middle are a large, multi-volume collection of his columns, known as Letters from an Earthling to Planet Brazil.

Course handouts

These are short works which Olavo wrote as handouts to students in his courses, and which were not meant for wider publication. Olavo produced dozens of these, and I have only translated the ones that I have wanted to translate up to now, which are all linked here. They are in chronological order of translation, which is unrelated to their actual chronological order, or to any particular guiding principle. This page will be kept up to date as I translate more.

A comic strip by a fan of Olavo makes light of the name of Olavo’s largest and most famous course, COF, which stands for Curso Online de Filosofia (Online Philosophy Course), by proposing that it came from Olavo’s coughing due to his frequent smoking.

Transcribed courses

Some short lecture courses that Olavo gave have been transcribed, and the transcriptions were published as books. I have translated some of those.

These transcripts were translated from professional publications, so they include, as chapters or appendices, some written texts by Olavo relating to their topics.

Image advertising many of Olavo’s short lecture courses.

Other stuff

I have not covered audio or video content here. There are videos of Olavo speaking English, and at least one of his lecture courses (Conhecimento e Moralidade) was given with a live interpreter translating everything he said to English. (Which I do not recommend, to be honest; I think the interpreter did a poor job.)

I have translated one of his newspaper columns by itself, unrelated to anything else here, because I think it’s very funny: “How to Become an Intellectual Hunk”. I also translated his column “Study Before Speaking”, because it has useful instructions about studying communism.

Posted by at
Labels:

No comments:

Post a Comment

Subscribe to: Post Comments (Atom)