Procedures that regulate the authorship of two books by Ailton Krenak: a debate from the foucaultian perspective

Abstract

Since Michel Foucault shifted the question “what is an author?” to “what does it matter who speaks?”, discussions about the procedures by which the speaking subject erases themselves in the text to become the author did not cease. In this sense, the objective of this article is to discuss the mechanisms through which the indigenous leader Ailton Krenak configures himself as an author of books, investigating the institutional, textual and discursive procedures that regulate authorship in his works. To this end, we will analyze two of these works published with his signature, which are “Ideias para adiar o fim do mundo” (2020) and “Futuro ancestral” (2022), the result of speeches given by him at the request of educational and research institutions from Brazil and Portugal. To this end, we anchored ourselves in Foucault’s (2001; 2007a) discussions about the author, in the reviews of these discussions carried out by Chartier (2012) and in authors who dialogue with such thoughts about authorship in Foucault’s genealogical perspective. We concluded that Krenak is constituted as an author by the procedures of transcription, retextualization, commentary, discipline, truth willing and linguistic mechanisms that, instead of erasing the subject who speaks, refer to him empirically.