This interview grows out of a long-standing desire to listen to Denise Ferreira da Silva. The conversation took place virtually in April 2026. Portuguese emerged organically as the language of exchange between two Brazilians. What follows is a translated and edited version of that original conversation.
What is offered here is the result of a generous sharing: a conversation that draws worlds together and works through impossible questions. The interview is situated within the project Notes on Repair, which addresses demands for reparation and decolonization, modern juridico-political structures, and the question of the irreparable.1 I also took the opportunity to extend the conversation in other directions: Denise’s personal trajectory in Brazil, from liberation theology to social movements; the project of undoing the Kantian infrastructure of knowledge; the audiovisual confronted with the impossible; the place of sound; and her confluences with Brazilian intellectuals and activists of her generation.
—Juliana Streva
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Juliana Streva (JS): In a style close to the interview you did with Hortense Spillers, and if you feel comfortable sharing, I would like to hear about how your personal trajectory informs your work.2
Denise Ferreira da Silva (DFS): When I was born, my parents lived on Morro do Pasmado, near Botafogo (a neighborhood in Rio de Janeiro), close to Sugarloaf Mountain. Their shack had a view of Botafogo Bay, which I often say is my right: I was born with the right to all that beauty. Before I turned one, the local community was removed to Vila Aliança, in Bangu, just as the people from the Praia do Pinto favela were sent to Cidade de Deus, and others to Vila Kennedy.
That project was the second or third slum clearance [projeto de limpeza da cidade] project in Rio, which took place within the framework of a soft imperialist agreement between the United States and Latin American countries known as the “Alliance for Progress.” Indeed, the name of the neighborhood where I grew up, Vila Aliança, took its name from that program, and Vila Kennedy from John Kennedy.
A few years later, when I was thirteen or fourteen, I began attending meetings of the youth group at the Catholic Church. The priest, Dom Bruno, was part of the progressive wing of the church from liberation theology. While preparing for confirmation, I became a “leader” in this group: the person who transmitted the ideas and critiques of the liberation church to the others. I was the leader of my street, which meant that I led classes and workshops, and participated in training sessions. They also held workshops outside the neighborhood that brought together young people and adolescents from different parishes—courses on the history of the working class, of labor struggle in Brazil, on the Catholic Church informed by the critique of liberation theology.
That also meant I had the church’s library at my disposal. And our library had Gramsci. It was a politically sophisticated library, alongside the writings of bishops and archbishops. So, I had access to critical theory and Marxism before entering university. There came a point when the training I received at the church took me out of the church, because I extended the critical intervention into a context where it could not be exercised. I had a conversation with Dom Bruno, and said, “Fine, I understand everything, but the mystery of the Holy Trinity simply does not make sense, it just doesn’t.” He replied: “It’s not supposed to make sense. It is faith: either you believe or you don’t. This is not an intellectual exercise.” And so, I left the church.
Through the neighborhood association, I ended up being recruited by the Communist Party of Brazil, where I remained for two or three years, until I enrolled in the IFCS (Institute of Philosophy and Social Sciences at the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro). In the party, I was a political secretary, which meant that I conducted the ideological instruction of the group. There came a moment when I was exhausted from reading the party documents from the early 1960s. I left the Communist Party but continued in the neighborhood association, which is where I found the Black movement and the feminist movement in the early 1980s. It was a moment of emergence, at least of the Black movement. The founding date of the MNU (Brazilian Unified Black Movement) was July 1978. Alongside all of that, there was also that entire reconfiguration of the 1980s, which came to be identified as “identity politics” and “cultural politics,” delineating and identifying political actors in a different way than political parties, trade unions, and the working class. This transformation, which began in the 1960s and ’70s, only fully consolidated, from the standpoint of a sociological analysis, in the ’80s.
So, I belong to a generation that believed in revolution and also to a generation that no longer believed in the possibility of a revolution, from the standpoint of the critique of police brutality, of the state, and of law. This critique of the state reflects the political formation that occurred under military dictatorship [1964–85], both in the church, in neighborhood associations, and in the Communist Party. It carries that Marxist content and orientation, but also has an ethical orientation.
The emphasis on the police, of course, has to do with where I grew up. My generation in primary school was the one affected by the influx of heavy weapons and cocaine into the favelas of Rio. It was my school classmates who were first killed by the police. That’s where it all started. When I was a child, the boys in the neighborhood were fighting over control of the marijuana trade. I remember a duel that had been announced to take place in front of my house. My brother and I were standing inside the gate … everyone was watching. One guy comes with a .38, another with a .38, and both run off in opposite directions. But then they both laughed it off and made it into a joke. Now I think back on that moment with saudades (nostalgia), because after that, everything became far more lethal, and the police also began to act in an explicitly genocidal manner.
I grew up with the police in the neighborhood arresting Black men who were at the bar or the tavern without IDs. I went there several times with my mother, carrying my father’s work permit, to get him out of the police station because the officers had taken him in. But later, in the late 1970s and early ’80s, in addition to the moral violence there was the total violence: the police coming in to kill young Black men. For example, the first version of my text “No-Bodies” was actually a piece of creative nonfiction about a police operation that took place in Vila Aliança, which I witnessed. It was the first time I’d seen an occupation involving a caveirão [heavily armored police vehicle used in Rio’s favelas]. When I was growing up, that did not happen.
From this critique of the state, I developed a critique of both cultural politics and Marxism, as well as of theoretical critiques of law that did not take the state into account. I believe that one of my contributions in life is this: There can be no critique of law without a critique of the state, because the law does not operate in a vacuum, and the limits of law are also found within the state. So, all the pieces, all the threads come not only from the place where I grew up, Vila Aliança, but also from the political and theoretical transformations and circumstances of that moment.
JS: It is very thought-provoking to hear the context from which you developed these contributions. I’d like to connect your critique of law and the state with your recent work on ancestral claims.3 Within your broader project of the complete destruction of the Kantian program,4 where do reparations stand? Destruction and reparation—are both modalities implicated in your conception of re/de/composition?
DFS: That question is impossible to answer because you are bringing different worlds together. These are movements that take place at different moments and with different vectors. But let me begin with the destruction of the Kantian program. I can identify two fundamental lines—although a third, aesthetics, is also important. Setting aesthetics aside for a moment, there is the theoretical and ethical implication to the Kantian program. People of my generation were trained within a formulation of the theoretical and critical question raised for philosophy, one that, in a certain sense, privileges the ethical dimension. I am thinking here of Gayatri Spivak, Hortense Spillers, and Silvia Federici. So when I speak of destroying the Kantian program, I am pushing to critique the inseparability of the theoretical and the ethical, informed by Blackness and anti-colonial thought.
Modernity places “I think” inside and outside of everything simultaneously. Without this individualizing statement there is no knowledge and no truth, because the conditions of possibility for statements with objective validity are mediated, in the last instance, by the it. This is what made the occupation or enclosure of everything possible. So, on one hand, if we want a thought that is not organized and composed by the apparatuses of the occupation of the world, then it needs to explode that very apparatus. This includes the categories, methods, concepts, and movements of thought that are Kantian and that continue to obey the demand for unity, dealing with the problem of identity. Unity is quantitative, identity is qualitative. But if the question is not about the thing-in-itself, then you cannot arrive at identity. The other two elements of the Kantian infrastructure of thought are efficacy [eficabilidade] and formality. This is what I discuss in Unpayable Debt (2022). On the other hand, from an ethical standpoint, there is another distinction which is practically foundational for European modernity: the division between what pertains to nature and what pertains to the human, which became the distinction between science and history.
From my perspective, the political project of decolonization is an impossible project, or it remains impossible if conceived from the standpoint of our way of thinking. It would include not only the program of returning the unreturnable, but also the dis-occupation of all that exists, or an onto-epistemological dis-occupation, and the identification and dissolution of categorial and historical enclosures. This dis-occupation occurs at the level of discourse, both in grammar and in its components.
But, it must be more; it must go deeper, even beyond the molecules, down to the elementary particles of thought because of the centrality of time in “I think.” The “I think” is not that which continues. Think about how power responds to demands for reparation and decolonization: I was not there; it was not I who stole the lands; it was not I who enslaved. So why then do I have to pay, or why do my descendants have to pay? That was a long time ago. How can you keep blaming the slave masters for what is happening to young Black people today? “I was not there” and “it was a long time ago” are both arguments relating to causality—fundamentally, the causality of the effective and efficient, which I call “efficacy.”
I want to emphasize two ideas of time: One puts things in relation to each other, while the other sees things as they develop. The centrality of these two modalities of presenting time, in our thinking, including our most everyday thinking, is a Kantian inheritance. This causality was not in thinking before him. That is why Hume advances the critique of the necessity and universality of scientific statements. The destruction of Kantian thought is, in my view, ultimately the destruction of this time, this temporality.
To answer your second question about re/de/composition, in Unpayable Debt I offered an expression of what exists as 1 + ∞ − ∞. This is what gives re/de/composition. These are elements for thinking that do not carry time in terms of locality, of efficacy, or of development. The important thing about the problem of time is that there is an image of existence that this temporality cultivates, because we keep repeating it, and that image is what operates in the disqualification of demands. It operates through sequentiality, separability, and determinability. So for me, the destruction of the Kantian program would be, in the final analysis, the destruction and erasure of that line, that linearity.
The image that comes to my mind, one that might cultivate a sensibility capable of appreciating demands for reparation and decolonization, is what I call corpus infinitum. It is literally the image of the propagation of heat. Just imagine the phonons: As something changes, as the temperature rises, the phonons leave and begin to form part of what is cooler. It is not an image that presupposes any kind of transcendence. It is purely material and totally immanent. In that propagation, the particles and elements being irradiated enter the composition of what is already there, which are themselves combinations of other re/de/compositions that enter into the re/de/composition of other things. That is what I call “deep implicancy.” It is not an image of a relation between things, which would be Kant again, but rather an image of the constitution itself.
JS: The arguments against claims for reparations and the immanent image of composition lead me to your conceptualization of ancestral claims. In a conversation with Patrícia Ekpo you remark: “We need a different point of departure for making the demands. We need a different context for situating the demands.”5 And in your recent article, “Ancestral Claims,” you mobilize the notion of “ancestral” beyond its commonly invoked meanings, situating it within a quantum and elemental dimension. In that same article, ancestral claims are contextualized through the Indigenous struggles of the Xico community, located on Lake Chalco in Mexico, and the demands for water, understood not as claims to ownership (economic value) but as ancestral claims. Reading that passage, I immediately thought of the work of Antonio Bispo dos Santos, particularly when he mentions that, from the Quilombola perspective, “the land did not belong to us; we belonged to the land. We did not say, ‘This land is mine’; we said, ‘We are this land.’”6
I revisit these citations to ask: What would this “different starting point” be with regards to the demands for reparations? It is particularly difficult given the tension between ancestral claims and the modern legal-political structure, which works to translate those demands into a liberal framework, thereby reproducing the (neo)colonial apparatus.
DFS: Absolutely—it maintains the modern juridico-political structure. I think about reparation from the principle of irreparability. From the standpoint of decolonization, that is, what must be returned is everything: everything that made the accumulation of capital possible. What must be returned is everything. But, of course, everything cannot be returned, because everything must be returned, and everything that must be returned must be returned to everyone—as the dead of the second Zapatista Declaration put it. It is an impossibility because all that was extracted and expropriated is constitutive of everything, and doing so would mean the total dissolution of everything. On the other hand, this extraction and expropriation has effects in the future perfect and in the future, in the past and in the continuous past, in the sense that what could have been had it not occurred, what could have happened or existed, would have been entirely different from what is, and that cannot be restored or repaired. Those are two material impossibilities: between what exists or does not exist and between the possible and the impossible. One in terms of existentiality, the other in terms of possibility. Thus, irreparability.
The state must be held responsible and must act to recognize the irreparability. But it must also acknowledge its responsibility: to do everything possible to approach the impossible. All measures are measures to compensate for the loss. Since what could have been is not and will not be, I have to do everything possible to make the world as close as possible to what it would have been if what happened had not happened. And it’s all articulated in a way that does not impose causality. After the forced enclosure and displacement of people from the African continent, those regions of Africa were changed forever. The Atlantic Ocean was transformed as well; it ceased to be what it might otherwise have been. The bodies that remained behind and the American continent itself—everything became something else.
So, you can’t say that this led to that, or that led to that. No. That which did not exist, that which could not happen, and which is therefore also outside of time and space, is what should drive decisions. So, that’s it. I think of reparation as irreparability.
JS: After your first film in collaboration with Arjuna Neuman, Serpent Rain (2016), you mentioned that “the film is the tension of trying to do the impossible.”7 How do you view the relationship between academia and the audiovisual arts in the face of attempting the impossible? I’m thinking here in broader terms about the relationship between conducting research and making a film, between theory and art, in the face of the impossible?
DFS: Regarding Serpent Rain, it was a creative challenge, because the format of film is one of linear time, where one thing follows another. But the subject of the film was a critique of linear time. I believe that artistic work is at its best when the person standing before the work feels the ideas that orient it, because those ideas are in the form, not articulated in a description of the work. That is how I think with the image in general, not only with film images. Our solution was to draw on the elements in their quotidian manifestations: fire, water, earth, and air.
What the film allowed us to do, in this exploration of the impossible, was precisely to create moments that betray the viewer’s expectations—the “I think” mindset—which expects linearity and appreciates the work because of that linearity that must be provided. So, what did we do? For each element, we have two or three minutes where, ostensibly, nothing happens. I remember that, while we were editing, I’d say: “Arjuna, people are going to hate us. They’ll be waiting, waiting, waiting.” We wanted to take people out of their comfort zone, and if they developed negative thoughts about us, that’s fine, as long as time and linearity didn’t take over the film. So, this becomes possible at the level of thought.
If we expand the horizon of the possible, more possibilities open up for a way of thinking without the Kantian apparatus of temporality and its enclosures. And it must be experimental. It cannot start with propositions but rather has to begin with “what if?” It must be about expanding the realms of the possible, which is precisely a matter of approaching the impossible.
JS: You’ve spoken in the past about your reflections about the image. These are undoubtedly important issues, but they do not delve into the dimension of sound and the act of listening. Can you expand on this?
DFS: I think my interest in the image also has to do with how sound exists in my life. After all, I’m Brazilian, right? We have a special connection with sound: It’s something that touches my body. Let’s call it the “soul.” Not in the spiritual sense, but in the philosophical sense of the term. I hadn’t thought about sound theoretically until I started working with Arjuna, for whom everything is sound, and we started working with sound to sabotage the power of images. In the films, you’ll see sound coming in and disrupting any moment of affectivity that is marked by the image. This is interesting because I’m still working on what I call “material aesthetics,” which began with explorations of dark matter and touch. I’ve also been thinking about hearing as a way of being touched; it’s the resonance and vibration in and of itself, and the fact that the particle of sound and that of heat are the same: the phonon. This also highlights this “affect,” which is a physical, material affect.
I’m currently working on an experiment in collaboration with Moor Mother, who organized an event in Berlin and asked me to be part of the music program.8 Since I couldn’t travel to Berlin in early January, I recorded myself reading a few pages from Unpayable Debt and made a video. I recorded it with overlaps, so at some points you hear one, two, or three voices and pages being read at the same time, which led to some discoveries. The first is that, though I recorded the pages on the same day, because I made three off-the-cuff recordings on my phone, they all sound very different. The second thing I discovered was that, as I begin reading, the voices start to appear, layering themselves over one another and settling into place, and there’s a certain effect when those voices come in. There’s a sense of spatiality that escapes the linearity of the text, something you can achieve with sound, which is kind of incredible. Because if I had read straight through, there would have been just one voice, and it would have been linear; but since it’s me multiple times, the linearity of the text was broken by the sound.
JS: That sounds like a fascinating experiment! I’m curious to see (and hear) the video. Going back to the first question about your trajectory, where you talked about your relationship to political parties and social movements in the 1980s, did you cross paths with either Beatriz Nascimento or Lélia Gonzalez in those years?
DFS: I met Beatriz and Lélia and all those people who were at the forefront of the Black movement. I was at the IFCS, and after I started my master’s program, I worked at the Centre for Afro-Asian Studies as a junior researcher on a Ford Foundation affirmative-action program aimed at training top-tier researchers in the social sciences in Brazil—specifically Black researchers. Later, Marcia Lima joined as a research assistant, and the team grew a little, but not by much.
The director of the Centre for Afro-Asian Studies at the time was Carlos Hasenbalg, who had been active in Brazil for a long time and was part of the Black movement through various alliances, particularly focused on highlighting the existence of discrimination and racial inequality in Brazil. Since Carlos lived in Brazil for a long time and was the ethical figure that he was, he felt uncomfortable occupying the position he held, so I ended up being the representative of the Centre for Afro-Asian Studies in the Black movement. Whenever there was a major event in the Black movement that was of interest to the Center for Afro-Asian Studies, Carlos wouldn’t go, but I would. That gave me the opportunity to get to know everyone. On the other hand, the Centre for Afro-Asian Studies continued to be a supportive space for various national initiatives on racial relations—“the racial question,” as it was called at the time. Beatriz, Lélia, Ney [Lopes], Gilberto Gil, everyone was always hanging out there.
At that time, I was twenty-three or twenty-four years old. Among all those big names who were hanging out there, Beatriz was the only one who paid attention to us, who talked to us. Marlene Cunha, who died in 1988, was also part of the group. She was a member of André Rebouças’s working group and was studying anthropology at USP (University of São Paulo). I think she was the first Black student to earn a PhD in Anthropology at USP. Marlene and Beatriz would talk and chat with us, but there was no structured training program. At that point, Beatriz was already in the process of expressing all the violence she had endured. She had made the film; we got a glimpse of Ôrí.9 She was writing more poetry, no longer in academia.
On the other hand, I had a critique of the social movement, one that I still hold today. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Bahia Pêlo Negro?10 That text reflects something I was thinking about at the time I was following the Bloco Afro: the differences between the emphasis on culture, which came to dominate in the 1980s, and the emphasis on the revolutionary Olodum. For me, it set the tone for how I was being positioned as a child—someone who was supposed to stay quiet and in my place—at that moment in the Black movement. And it didn’t help that, in May 1988, the Jornal do Brasil ran a cover story for the centenary of abolition. Tim Lopes wanted to interview Carlos Hasenbalg about Black people in education, but Carlos said: “Not me, interview her.” So Tim interviewed me. And my photo appeared on the front page of that issue of Jornal do Brasil, on the Sunday before the thirteenth, May 8, and it was a photo like this, my face, a photo this big.
After 1988, I was somewhat on the inside, so I was able to see how things actually worked, and all the problems. The time came when I decided to finish my master’s thesis, which was, I think, in 1990 or late 1989. Then I left, and here we are. But, to really answer your question, for me, I think the influence of the Black movement at that time was precisely the opportunity to be right in the thick of it, to witness that political moment up close, and to observe what that turning point made possible, as well as what it hindered. And by the time I left Brazil, we were already at the moment when the human rights agenda emerged and political organizations became NGOs. And for me, that was the end. It was over. The neoliberalization of everything. I witnessed that happening.
Notes on Repair is a project I initiated during my postdoctoral fellowship, with support from the Institute for Global Law & Policy (IGLP) at Harvard University, 2025–26.
Denise Ferreira da Silva and Hortense Spiller, “Sending Language into Battle: Interview with Hortense J. Spillers,” Boundary 2 51, no. 1 (2024).
Denise Ferreira da Silva, “Ancestral Claims: Negative Accumulation, Deep Implicancy, and the Case for General Emancipation,” Cultural Dynamics 37, no. 3 (2025).
Denise Ferreira da Silva, Unpayable Debt (Sternberg, 2022).
Denise Ferreira da Silva and Patricia Ekpo, “We (Don't) Want the End of the World: Blackness in the Scene of Psychoanalysis,” Parapraxis, no. 2 (2023) →.
Antonio (Nego) Bispo dos Santos, “We Belong to the Land,” Futuress, April 12, 2023, trans. Brena O’Dwyer →.
Denise Ferreira da Silva, “A Q&A with Denise,” Mosaic 55, no. 1 (2022).
“Time Travel Hear Today” at Neue National Galerie, 2026.
Ôrí (1989), directed by Raquel Gerber in collaboration with Beatriz Nascimento.
Denise Ferreira Da Silva, “‘Bahia Pêlo Negro’: Can the Subaltern (Subject of Raciality) Speak?” Ethnicities 5, no.3 (2015).
