Contingência e Necessidade

The narrative: between fate and chance

Two figures can represent contingency and necessity with regard to the literary imaginary. They are, respectively, chance and fate. Figures that capture and organize temporality. It is about showing that the narrative, as a time-configuring machine, works simultaneously with the contingent event and the causality that blurs it.
As such, the narrative configures the lived, by articulating the actions, and gives them an order of succession over causality that strips the event of its random dimension. If the fictional opening to possible worlds explores the relationship between the contingent and the necessary, the narrative whose referent is the real is not entirely exempt from these modes of configuration.
Narrativization as well as the temporal fragmentation considered as de-narrativization are, therefore, discursive strategies that give us different ways of looking at human actions. It is in this context – between fate and chance – that we propose to problematize the textual regimes whose preponderant function is none other than the configuration of subjectivity.


PhD in Semiology, in 1981, from the University of Paris VII and Aggregated in Theory of Culture, in 2011, by the University of Minho and currently retired, Maria Augusta Babo was a Professor in the Department of Communication Sciences, Faculty of Social and Human Sciences, at Universidade Nova de Lisboa, since 1981. There, she taught several curricular units, of Degree, Master and Doctor, in Communication Sciences, and in the Master in Studies on Women. He belonged to the Scientific Councils of the inter-university PhDs in Gender Studies (FCSH, ISCSP, FLUL), created in 2018, and to the PhD in Communication Studies: Technology, Culture and Society - FCT (UM, ISCTE, UBI, Lusófona and CIMJ and CECL da Nova) in Communication Sciences, created in 2012. He collaborated for several years with the Faculty of Fine Arts of the University of Lisbon, with the Multimedia Arts course at the University of Évora, with the Journalism course at the University of Coimbra and with the University Open, institutions where he directed short courses.
She is a researcher at the Instituto de Comunicação da Nova – ICNova. She has been President of the Center for Communication and Language Studies – CECL – since 2014.
She founded in 2016, with Jorge Lozano, the Iberian Association of Semiotics.
In 2018, she received the National Culture Center Award – An idea to change the world – sponsored by the President of the Republic and the UN Secretary General, with the project O Outro Sou Eu – collaborative platform.
She has participated and organized colloquia and conferences as well as publications, nationally and internationally, in her areas of expertise: Semiotics, Theory of Writing and Text and the Processes of Subjectivation. It is also in these areas that she supervises 6 ongoing doctoral theses.
Last book of which she is the author: Culturas do Eu – Configurações da subjectividade, Lisbon, ICNova/ Instituto de Comunicação da Nova, 2019; Digital ISBN: 978-972-9347-24-5; ISBN Print: 978-972-9347-23-8.
Of the most recent research, we highlight the coordination of the Glossary section of AFRICAN-EUROPEAN NARRATIVES; Programme: Europe for Citizens. Identifier: 589356-CITIZ-1-2017-1-PT-CITIZ-REMEM. Finished in 2019.
She directs the project We The People – Collaborative, Intercultural Platform, based at ICNova, in partnership with the Aga Khan Foundation.


At a time when the unexpected has shaken the certainties of modernity based on science and technique, thinking about contingency and its opposite, necessity, is thinking about the possibility that something happens, doesn't happen, or happens in another way, in the confrontation between the unpredictable and the providential, between the indeterminable and the constant. To banish the contingent, natural or historical causality is introduced, which depends on probability – as if the real were ordered – as well as its constant monitoring and surveillance. What is certain is that the contingent breaks out again and again, because the greater the control, the more the contingent emerges in its most brutal forms, that of accident or catastrophe, or lighter, that of failure or breakdown. The game of contingency and its control is one of the characteristic features of modernity.