Livro

«Pneumatóforo» by Boaventura de Sousa Santos

Almedina, 2018

Synopsis

The title of this book comes from a botanical designation: pneumatophore is the designation established for the respiratory roots of some plants that develop in wetlands where the soil is generally quite poor in oxygen; these roots stem from others that exist in the soil and grow vertically emerging from the water and their pores allow the absorption of atmospheric oxygen. Like these roots, the texts included in this book were written over thirty-six years in a very variable context, but their common denominator was a transverse lack of oxygen: political and cultural oxygen. Writing, therefore, in this particular case, and beyond all metaphors, is an inordinate form of breathing in a Zeitgeist characterized by an increasingly global and suffocating domain of neoliberalism.