In 1927, Brazilian modernist Mário de Andrade encountered in the Amazon a perceptual state provoked by malaria. The malarial gaze was a type of enduring, inactive, and embodied gaze that he imagines as a mode of resistance against capitalist modernity – a trope that finds its way into the critical discourse on national identity. Dialoguing with film theory and queer phenomenology, the article closely reads three scenes of looking in Andrade’s Amazonian photographs and travel notes, in which such a perceptual state is evoked and unravels a processual entanglement between capitalist modernity, the Amazon, and the modernist subject. The article shows how the inactive malarial gaze emerges through a mediated queer experience of the filmic image that gets suppressed in favour of a pure immediacy of the tropics, arguing that at the core of Andrade’s ambivalent politics of looking lies the problem of the impossibility of a “critical” national project. Fleshing out the political potentialities held by perception, the author suggests through Mário de Andrade a film-political constellation to understand the critical stakes of being an inactive spectator in the (geo)politics of extractive, peripheral capitalism.

1927年，巴西现代主义者马里奥·德·安德拉德（Máriode Andrade）在亚马逊河遇到了一种由疟疾引起的知觉状态。疟疾的凝视是一种持久的，不活跃的和具体化的凝视，他认为这是对资本主义现代性的一种抵制方式–一种进入国家身份批判性讨论的手段。在与电影理论和酷儿现象学进行对话的过程中，这篇文章仔细地阅读了安德拉德的亚马逊照片和旅行记录中的三个观看场景，其中唤起了这种感性状态，并揭开了资本主义现代性，亚马逊与现代主义主题之间的过程纠缠。这篇文章展示了如何通过对电影图像的中介酷儿体验来表现出消极的疟疾注视，而这种体验却被抑制了，转而支持热带地区的纯粹直接性，认为安德拉德的矛盾政治思想的核心在于“关键”国家项目不可能实现的问题。作者充分体现了感知力所具有的政治潜力，并建议通过马里奥·德·安德拉德（Máriode Andrade）电影政治团体来了解在采掘性外围资本主义的（地缘）政治中不活跃的旁观者的关键意义。