Real life and form-of-life: a reflection on the relation between art and life in Giorgio Agamben and Villa-Lobos

The relation between art and life is, for Giorgio Agamben, a poetic question as much as philosophical and political. This paper proposes a reflection that links Agamben's ideas on this subject and the way in which the life and the work of the Brazilian composer Heitor Villa-Lobos are portrayed in his first and most important biography. The thesis on which such reflection is constructed is that the way in which Villa-Lobos's life and work appear united in this biography reflects a political-artistic posture that should not be neglected, because it comes from the composer's deep desire to become singular or, in Agamben's terms, to exist only as a form-of-life.