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THE TEAM
CONTACT
He was once again confronted with a critical situation and considered accepting the University of Brasilia's invitation, among several other teaching positions he had been offered outside Europe. However, decades after his removal from teaching, he won an international tender and was able to resume his teaching activity as head of the Department of Portuguese Studies of the University of Amsterdam (1971-1974).
He continued to visit France regularly, all the while securing active collaboration with Portuguese newspapers and journals, having taken a keen interest in the work of António Vieira and the Baroque. The findings of his research were published regularly in diverse publications, and several years later were compiled in Brazil under the title O discurso engenhoso [The ingenious speech] (1980). In the highly inspiring 1960s, he also published mainly literary criticism essays in acclaimed journals in Paris (Temps Modernes, Annales E S.C, Poétique). Additionally, he prepared other works among which the updated reedition of the 1953 book on the Tribunal do Santo Ofício [the Inquisition Court] which was published under the title Inquisição e Cristãos novos [The Inquisition and the New Christians] (1969), his new and resounding editorial success. In the first edition of this book, his discussion of the objectives and mechanisms of the Inquisition had been approached from an economic viewpoint and, surprisingly enough, this was not altered in the second edition except for a timid hint at Freudian analysis. This may be seen as a remnant of the old Marxist paradigm he had abandoned in other analyses and theorizations in the same decade. This edition rekindled the former deadly feud with his fierce intellectual opponents. This conflict was re-launched in (May-June) 1971, at the time Saraiva, as already mentioned, had already left Paris for Amsterdam. This increasingly impassioned debate, in the form of successive venomous responses, greatly enthused the readers of Diário de Lisboa. Whatever opinion one may have on the matter today, in essence the epistemic distinction between an authentic document and a true document, the hegemony of the economic factor and the relevance of other levels of the social process, Saraiva’s book, when analysed from the viewpoint of the Weberian “ideal type”, is particularly striking for the vigour of its arguments and plasticity of its writing. This is yet another of his unequivocal masterpieces.
Around the same time, in the wake of the publication of Maio e a crise da Civilização Burguesa [May and the Crisis of Bourgeois Civilisation] (1970), another resounding controversy emerged within the circle of Portuguese intellectuals and militants still staunchly loyal to Kremlinian Marxism or other such variants.
