By TARSUS GENUS*
The former president made an irony and mocked the powers of the State
Former President Jair Bolsonaro claimed in his testimony to the Federal Police that he was under the effects of morphine when he shared a clearly coup-like video, promoted at a time of great political tension in the country, generated by the escalation of a coup he led. If the use of this argument is true, it only aggravates your situation as a future defendant, because it is known that sharing was not an isolated action, but part of a continuous crime, committed in special circumstances of mental health and in moments of full lucidity, in the last two years of his hallucinatory mandate.
But there is a second and a third hypothesis. If your answer – second hypothesis – was just an orientation of your defense, to mitigate your criminal responsibility, the argument can be taken as an appeal for the reduction of a future sentence, to be fulfilled in establishments for the recovery of people affected by severe psychoses, who become serial killers of democratic politics, when they are able to plan their actions.
There is, however, a third hypothesis that, for me, is more likely: Jair Bolsonaro made an irony and only mocked the powers of the State at that moment, in the presence of the Federal Police that he previously sought to co-opt “from above”, for a conspiracy of coup and fascist nature. He thus continued to despise the rule of law, which he hates for two fundamental reasons: first, because manic depressives do not accept being contradicted; second, because paranoids hate even the forms of tolerance that democracy devotes to its executioners.
Before “closing” the idea of this text, a basis for reflection: Jorge Luis Borges is to literature what Hans Kelsen is to law, by worshiping the empire of forms that both cultivated, albeit through different conduits and channels. The anarchic subjectivity of Borges’ genius establishes the false formal “purity” of literature, whose central architecture – in his texts – was exhausted in the relations between word and word, which came out of their animistic state, alive only in the nexuses given to them. , in the text that was being written there.
Regardless of the meaning of his current language, Jorge Luis Borges forged literature in a “pure state”, in which the dialectic of forms – as if by magic – was separated from the real movements of life and only the word appeared as sovereign, to project the the author's innermost feelings, for which the presence of real life and the feelings of others did not matter: everyone is too small, except the English of his lineage, to deserve another, more generous kind of enchantment.
What is the analogy between Borges and Kelsen? It lies at the heart of Hans Kelsen's pure theory of law, before the great turn it took, when he began to recognize that the Nazi State was not a State of law, whose ethics and morality would presumably be present within its system of norms. , just because it was consistent with itself. Nazism would thus be, for the last Kelsen, a system of power without law and without morals, which enslaved society by brute force, which the law – at the same time as it would regularize – stopped and organized through fear.
Hans Kelsen's subjectivity, before this turn, gave static and bureaucratic stability to law, saying that it is - as an organic form of the State - the logic stripped of emotion that everyone should worship from the fundamental norm, which can come from both God as of society. Hans Kelsen's forms were entitled to a dignity presumed by the internal coherence of the system and Jorge Luis Borges' forms gave beauty to his literature, “pure” of any political concept, through the harmony that linked words endowed with new meanings.
In this way Hans Kelsen formed the concept of the “state”, in an apparently “scientific” way, where the relations between words must be scientifically resolved: they acquired their meaning as norms (composed of words), not as the discourse of art. in Borges. In Hans Kelsen, the words “superior” give meaning to the words “inferior” and it is in this imputation that law assumes its scientific neutrality, outside and above “ideologies”. The words chosen by science in Hans Kelsen, were already stripped of classist or religious ideologies and, in Jorge Luis Borges, they became art due to their aesthetics of arbitrary contents.
See how literature and law can acquire universality, from particular episodes that, at the same time, incorporate more singular or more universal moments: a singular episode is, for example, the moment when a tortured person perishes in the hands of the torturer – legal form of inquiries medieval times in the Inquisition – particular legal moment common at the time, which told by a talented novelist can universalize the redemption of modern heroism, merging law with the great humanist literature of critical realism.
Borges says that when Gabriel Rossetti read Wuthering Heights, he wrote to a friend: “the action takes place in hell, but the places, I don't know why, have English names”. The sentence fantastically summarizes the entire impasse of Bolsonarism, in the current historical period of resistance to fascism, in a country of heroes and martyrs, such as Brazil, where European reverence for nobility and royal families bathes in irony and where retired captains due to mental problems, which would have horrified Ernesto Geisel and Castelo Branco, they became leaders of a significant part of the nation.
By revealing that he was drugged by morphine, in that police interrogation that should have been studied in depth for us to understand the subconscious and the unconscious of Bolsonarism and Brazil, the press, the powers and the parties, who were not appalled by the statements of the former president , Jair Bolsonaro warned us. His words introduced us to the profound Brazil, closer to hell than to the English – closer to chaos than to the collective idiocy that devastated us, which can restore here models closer to concentration camps than to Borgian metaphors: closer of the reality of death than of words strung together only as beauty, which sometimes court the joy of reading, sometimes court the disaster of collective mortality.
*Tarsus in law he was governor of the state of Rio Grande do Sul, mayor of Porto Alegre, Minister of Justice, Minister of Education and Minister of Institutional Relations in Brazil. Author, among other books, of possible utopia (Arts & Crafts).
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