Life and work of objects: an investigation on the powers of materiality based on the Sermon on the Holy Spirit, by Antonio Vieira rely fundamentally on the polysemy of the terms life and object to examine some interactional situations in which objects (modernly understood as inanimate) are invested with life, that is, with qualities and behaviours attributed in general to subjects (beings which move, act and have their own point of view). The dissertation proposes to apprehend the life of objects phenomenon through three paths which are intertwined. The first one consists in observing the manifestations of this kind of life in the most immediately present circumstance, contemporary to the researcher, in a daily and domestic register inside of which the very act of writing the dissertation happens. The second and main path leads to the 16th and 17th centuries: with the privileged intercession of the Sermon on the Holy Spirit, by priest Antonio Vieira, and also by taking as a background the cultural tensions involved in the colonization of the Americas and in the catechization of native populations, a punctual comparison is made between Amerindian conceptions and Euro-Christian conceptions of the life of objects. The third path is a speculation about the possibility of speaking of a life of the text, and for this purpose some assumptions contained in recent theories about the agency of material objects are applied to the strict domain of the words. By joining this efforts to the critical-reflexive efforts of other researchers, the dissertation expects to show a rich diversity of subjective features embodied by objects, a diversity that reflects different ways of living.