By LUIZ MARQUES*
Hallucinations today serve the interests of the extreme right, which always maintains an active distrust of cognitive rationality and the institutions of the Republic.
The first issue of the magazine Surréalisme au Service de la Révolution (July 1930) publishes the article “The Rotten Donkey” by Salvador Dali, with an original thesis on “paranoia”. At the time, people were looking for the “point of the spirit” to resolve the equation between dreams and material life. A concrete and creative way to situate oneself “between the hot water of art and the cold water of science”, to systematize the confusion and deepen a discredit of reality. The Promised Land lies behind the simulacra of terror.
Insights The artist’s observations reveal that in paranoid processes “the delusional interpretation of reality leads to a double image”. The “hallucination” challenges the psychiatric conception of “error” in judgment. I argue the possibility of the representation of an object being the representation of another different object. Internal logic is important. In such egology, the idea of the thing makes the thing itself true. Jacques Lacan speaks with the painter and writer to better understand the epiphany.
Hallucinations appear in messianic uprisings such as the Jacobina and Muckers movement in 1874 in Rio Grande do Sul; or the movement of Antônio Conselheiro in the Canudos War in 1896-1897 in Bahia. Today they serve the interests of the extreme right, which always maintains an active distrust of cognitive rationality and the institutions of the Republic. Deregulations in the economy gain a greater audience in the scenario of widespread skepticism about the regulation of personal and social virtues. fake news play the stimulating role of hallucinogens.
We still remember the scenes of delirium during demonstrations of the green-and-yellow rapture, during the gestation and proliferation of camps in front of military barracks. The collective madness permeates the prayers around a Tire; the same goes for the cell phones raised to the sky to ask the Extraterrestrials to help the Armed Forces replace the democratic rule of law with a regime of exception. The Tire and the ETs are not replicating allegories; they embody divinities.
Mockery should not obscure the understanding of individuals’ emotions. Psychopolitics based on “critical paranoia” (Dalian) or “paranoid knowledge” (Lacanian) implies a radical experience, separate from philosophical and ideological principles. The heart that beats in the chest of the communist beats in the chest of the fascist. The issue is to assume the anti-systemic condition with bravery and a program.
Diagnosing the pathological mode of defense in paranoia with thoughts and feelings of threat is to start at the end. The transition from paranoid fantasy to practice is an overdose of denial of realism. The desire to kill an elected president may creep into disaffected voters; but few make a plan for the lethal act. Rarely do they claim to be the owners of the story.
Patrimonialism
Delusions also permeate the “secret amendments” of the National Congress. The negotiation between the unconscious pusillanimous res publica in the Planalto Palace and corrupt parliamentarians of the Legislative Branch are at the origin of the dirt. The perks that are contrary to an ethic of responsibility are the natural unfolding of a governance vacuum. “I can’t do anything”, “I’m not a gravedigger”, “enough of mime”, “that's why the guy pays the woman less, because she gets pregnant, I mean?"
The invisible hand of the market endorsed by the discourse of modernization gives way to the visible hand of patrimonialism, which steals public money and hides the fingerprints of the gang of criminals to hinder investigations into the repeated assault on the Leviathan. The colonization of positions with decision-making powers in the state administration by agents without a restorative vision to correct the inequalities linked to the grammar of accumulation legitimizes the systemic pickpockets.
Unanimously, the High Court demands careful distribution and traceability for the release of the large amendments, in addition to an audit by the Office of the Comptroller General of the Union (CGU) on the transfers. Meanwhile, the Centrão negotiates the approval of the Tax Reform, supported by finances and unpatriotic speculation. In theory, in Brazilian democracy, it is enough to be a republican to be a revolutionary. However, the mockery for now moves the adventure of political reason towards neo-fascism.
The destruction of rights in the relations between capital and labor through outsourcing, wage squeezes and the weakening of unions due to deindustrialization opens the door to hell. Financial rentierism disguises itself as “investors”. Crime parades with the bragging rights of those who have a seat in impunity. The absolute market protects its acolytes on the path to laissez-faire. This is a system that cannot even guarantee food security for humanity, despite having the technology to provide a comfortable, dignified and happy existence for everyone who has become a pariah.
The regressive ideal is the privatization of monetary policy and public funds, natural reserves in forests and parks in cities, labor commitments and pensions. Contrary to formal labor, individual entrepreneurship is encouraged for involuntary servitude; instead of cooperation, predatory and insane competition that generates “the wolf man to the man”. Taken from a pre-Christian comedy, the phrase homo homini lupus It is updated by neoliberalism and appropriated by the cannibalistic clique of congressmen devoid of civic spirit and disguised with false patriotism.
It was up to a minister of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) to recover the obvious, the constitutional paradigm, by blocking the drain that flows billions of reais illegally into the pens of backwardness. The moral erosion of decorum serves as fuel for the old anti-politics. The opportunistic blackmail of the government intensifies, with a view to an alienated pact of submission. The delirium of power is evident.
Voices, genres, colors
Payment of R$4,2 billion in amendments is suspended due to a lack of transparency in the execution of the funds (“embezzlement”), and the Federal Police opens an investigation due to suspected irregularities in the allocation of funds (“disobedience to a court order”). The amendments seize R$52 billion from the budget. Due to the interest, annuitants pocket R$XNUMX trillion, which gives an idea of the extravagance. But the press incriminates the social contributions of the program that was voted on due to the blatant “fiscal imbalance”.
It is unreasonable and illegal for the share of the Gross Domestic Product (GDP) to be given to the clientelism of deputies and senators. It violates the Constitution and the presidential system, which the elites of the mongrels are hampering in order to avoid governing. With a gangster bias, the semi-parliamentary system provides society with police cases.
The media amplifies the market's paranoia. To calm it down, governments are burning US$25 billion in foreign exchange reserves. This is not enough to contain the US currency, which is jumping from R$5,80 to R$6,06 and R$6,31; on Google, R$6,38. The cost of reducing R$70 billion in spending on the poor, due to exchange rate pressure, gives speculators a profit of R$150 billion. As in the song by Chico Buarque: “time passed by in the window / only Carolina didn't see it” (read: Central Bank).
The delirious outbreak occurs in two frequencies. In one, it condemns the population's right to have rights, under the illusion of a caste predestination. In another, it evokes the protection of abandoned regions, as if it were protecting the little ones “against inflation”. The underground projects the angel and the beast (the angel and the beast) and enhances the exhaustion of communitarianism, in the symptoms of hallucination and its antithesis. Then the nation, hostage, is subjugated by nonsense of Dr. Simão Bacamarte at the “Casa Verde” hospice.
Social movements and progressive parties react in the name of sustainable growth with job creation and wealth distribution. However, the neutralization of the message transforms equality of opportunities (not results) into a panacea. In the dispute of narratives, social, ethnic and gender quotas become affirmative reparations and, at the same time, a mechanism of improvement to absorb challenges to the totalitarianism of the commodity. A ploy to reduce the popular achievement to fair and productive access to the sacred market.
Brazil requires from political analysis: (a) transdisciplinarity, borrowing the concept of paranoia and; (b) emphasis on the surrealist flame under historical lassitude, where the “paranoid self of civilization” oscillates in the correlation of forces between dystopia and utopia. Deconstructing the status quo is to put “at the service of the revolution” the plurality of voices, genres, colors. Reality is the kaleidoscope that rearranges new combinations or the “rotting donkey covered in thousands of flies and ants.” – You decide.
* Luiz Marques is a professor of political science at UFRGS. He was Rio Grande do Sul's state secretary of culture in the Olívio Dutra government.
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