The displacements between the imaginary of work and leisure in Chico Buarque of Hollanda’s poetry. The contrary side of life, the contrary side of pain

Abstract

This article seeks to do a “cutting” of the work-leisure imaginary in our culture. In the world of work, locus of deep transformations in the last decades, work and leisure converge and are opposed, showing rich displacement aspects, in the psychoanalytic sense of the term. We applied the methodology of discursive analysis for thematic redundancy, to the song “Good Time”, by Chico Buarque de Hollanda, detailing its relationships with the symbolic-imaginary dimension. We observed that in this poetry, just as in the remainder of the author’s work, the categories time, place and repetition are found. The theoretical reference that gives support to the research includes, among others, Maffesoli, Durand, Castoriadis, Barbier, Vernant, Freud and Lacan. They were evident the wealth contained in the myth-poetic imaginary of the popular music and the importance of the approach of the leisure from that point of view and the interpretations of the tensional dynamics contained in the pair work-leisure and the worker’s physical manipulation, of his time, of his body. From his point of view, the poet, when exalting leisure, when accusing the search of the “Good Time”, allows the construction and the manipulation of the symbolic-imaginary dimension. Let us keep, firmly, the space for the hope, let us imagine that there “comes a good time”.