EXCERPT It is first and foremost a question of knowing what not to write in the prefatory atrium of this pantophagic text in which a seemingly austere French professor of philosophy, an international authority on the work of one João Amadeu Pinheirinho (aka Johann Gottlieb Fichte) enters into a creative state of schizoid delirium when faced with the impossibility of domesticating the ‘Brazilian condition’ through the concept, setting off on a wild divagation starting from a famous hallucinatory episode suffered by the Iberian Jewish heretic Bento Espinosa, only to meltamorphose it into the trance state of Descartes as depicted in Paulo Leminski’s 1965 metaphysical novel Catatau. Then the author begins to shoot barbed arrows left and right, just like one of those mythological archers in indigenous tales who only hit the target when they are looking in another direction, in any direction except that in which their prey lies. Sometimes the arrows miss their mark, a doubly necessary outcome of every errant text. But often they hit the bullseye, when the archer looks in the right wrong direction. They miss to hit, they hit when they miss. But nobody emerges unscathed from this fantastic anthropojaguaromachia. Least of all the Brazilian nation, that European idea materialised into a monstrosity that cannot be circumscribed by the Cogito, and which here ends up being de-totalised, in carnivalesque fashion, into a Brazil−1. The Brazil of the European gaze, be it that of the Europeans who came here to check it out—the preferred but not exclusive targets of these anti-christophoric arrows—or that of the many Brazilians who ‘have eyes, but do not see’. Us. The others. And many another ‘us’ that we may or may not be bound to.…