A recepção do conceito de necropolítica no Brasil

Abstract

The aim of this research is to outline a critic-analytic reconstruction of the reception of the concept of necropolitics in Brazil. To this end, I will address the concept of necropolitics starting from a preliminary investigation which I call excavation. This preliminary investigation consists in a detailed analysis of the debates revolving around the concept of biopolitics in Michel Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, as well as of Hannah Arendt’s discussion about race, racism and imperialism. Then, I will elucidate Achille Mbembe’s notion of necropolitics and I will focus on the paradoxical status of the innovative features of this political strategy. While in the past the State was the main responsible for shaping the spheres of life and death and for dealing with them, nowadays life and death are not managed by solid, fixed and stable groups, but by different groups across different social spheres. This means that it is not just the State who kills. Free-fighters, militias and paramilitary groups are examples of this new political arrangement, which Mbembe calls necropower and which places itself inside/outside power as it is conventionally known, conceived and normatized. Necropower both produces new worlds of death and extends the right to kill with inconditional voracity. Lastly, I will examine the reception of the concept of necropolitics within the contemporary Brazilian landscape, emphasizing the different features of the contemporary analytic contributions in our country. Against this background, I will claim that whiteness and the identitary categories specified as branquitude and branquidade are constitutive of the dynamic character of the ceaseless production of deaths of determinate people and social groups prompted by the State and by non-official powers. Within this framework, killing - either literally, psychologically or symbolically - became entertainment and routine. In the face of this extermination machinery, we need both to produce new critical questions and to find new answers and strategies that break with neo-colonialism and neo-imperialism. To this aim, we need to rethink and rediscuss the meanings of politics in the XXI century.