Not Exactly Sex and Drugs: Reinaldo Moraes’ Pornopopéia between monadology and the partition of the sensible São os ossos do orifício. […] O Senhor é meu credor, tudo me cobrará. Reinaldo Moraes, Pornopopéia Fabio Akcelrud Durão Literary Theory Department State University of Campinas, Unicamp I The field of literary studies is founded on the underlying premise that works of literature may be treated as vehicles of knowledge. Trends in literary theory can – and should – be judged not only by their own philosophical stance, their conceptual content and internal propositional coherence, but also by the kind of knowledge they derive from literature. This article proposes a reading of Pornopopéia, a recent Brazilian novel that received much attention in the media (e.g. Pécora, 2009), but not in academia (an exception is Paz, 2012), according to two different models, the monadological one, as exemplified by T.W. Adorno, and that of the partition of the sensible, developed by Jacques Rancière (e.g. 2005). The underlying motivation is that such double interpretation may prove fruitful both as a means for confronting these hermeneutical perspectives through the mediation of the same object, and as a way of illuminating an otherwise elusive literary piece. The knowledge yielded by a monadological interpretation has as its foundation a strict separation between the artifact and its surroundings, such as the author’s intention, the reader’s reception or its immediate social context. Considering a text a monad helps the constitution of the aesthetic as an autonomous sphere, but in the same gesture functions as an obstacle for its social relevance. From a philosophical perspective, such severing of the work from its environment should be viewed both as symptom of, and an attempt to deal with a deep crisis of thought, precisely insofar as conceptual, systematic knowledge became suspicious in a reified totality ever harder to be totalized. It was not without a sense of faut de mieux that