Luiz Amaro de Araujo Fortes

This project proposes a comparative reading of the tension between speech and writing in the works of Jean-Jacques Rousseau (Essay on the Origin of Languages) and Davi Kopenawa Yanomami (The Falling Sky, co-authored with Bruce Albert). Both authors defend the primacy of speech over writing, although they strategically rely on the written word. The research uses this paradox to investigate how such tension carries ethical, political, and philosophical implications throughout the history of Western thought, reemerging in dialogue with Amerindian cosmologies and other perspectives. The analysis will draw on classical and contemporary commentators, such as Derrida, Foucault, Lévi-Strauss, Bento Prado Jr., and Luiz Roberto Salinas Fortes, among others, and aims to contribute to current debates on language, representation, and power. Writing will be addressed as an ambiguous tool, capable of serving both domination and resistance, depending on its strategic uses and limits. By placing Rousseau and Kopenawa in dialogue, the project explores convergences and tensions between Enlightenment thought and Indigenous knowledge systems.