The emancipational process of the peasant community of Alentejo is the central theme of Saramago’s book. In this process, which is present also in the very title of the novel, emerges from the opressed and silenced crowd the political subject, who aims to deconstruct and to rewrite the dominating structure. The present article follows the process of dissensual subjectivation of the political agent from the perspective of the political philisophy of Jacques Rancière. I demonstrate how the basic notions of Rancière’s political theory appear in the novel, taking into account the main concepts of dissensus, distribution of the sensible and disagreement.
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