Politics & Power Quote by Jose Saramago

Detachment, for Saramago, isn’t a posture; it’s a kind of moral amnesia. “I can’t imagine myself outside any kind of social or political involvement” reads less like a boast than a self-diagnosis: to be a writer is to be implicated, and to pretend otherwise is a convenient fiction sold as “artistic purity.” The phrasing matters. “Can’t imagine” frames engagement as instinctive, almost bodily. It refuses the liberal fantasy that politics is a hobby you pick up and put down. In Saramago’s worldview, politics is the weather system you’re already breathing.

The subtext carries his biography and his century. Born into rural poverty, shaped by Portugal’s long dictatorship, and openly aligned with the Communist Party, Saramago watched institutions - church, state, market - insist on their own innocence while distributing suffering with bureaucratic calm. His novels don’t “take sides” in the simplistic sense; they stage moral stress tests. Blindness turns civic order into predation. The Gospel According to Jesus Christ retools sacred narrative to interrogate power’s appetite. Even his fables about death or elections are really about how systems metabolize human beings.

There’s also an implicit rebuke to the writer-as-brand: the idea that you can float above conflict and still claim authority. Saramago’s intent is to collapse that distance. If language can dignify the excluded or naturalize their exclusion, then every sentence is already political. He’s not asking whether art should engage. He’s admitting it always does - the only choice is whose reality it serves.