By Eugênio Trivinho*

Response to neo-fascist necropolitics: communication, politics and ethics in times of widespread threats

We believe there was once a color like gray but it wasn't very serious and escaped into the wind.
Paul Violi (2014, p. 27)
Pity is my last sword.

Yi San^g, korean poet
(apud IM, 1999, p. 11)

Foreword

Evidence that has long been scattered indicates that oppositional thinking in Brazil, as it is expressed in the political, academic, cultural and journalistic spheres of the left spectrum (to use an incredibly reinvigorated term, as a reference for positioning and action), urgently needs to be carried out. shift of vision – structural, deep and joint – about the strategic confrontation of the current national reality. This displacement implies raising oneself to the social-historical macro plane of a more serious, intense and long-tail hybrid and unison combat. More than twelve months of perilous neoliberal redesign of the Brazilian State only strengthened the urgency of this multilateral task. Several politically sensitive voices have drawn attention to it, inside and outside the parliamentary sphere and Universities, especially in the alternative and progressive digital press, with an open and more inclusive radar. If this fact mitigates the originality of the emphasis on the referred call, new may be the argumentative way of reframing it, in due social-historical tone, in compatibility with more defined justifications for the urgency of the cause. The following reflection is a contribution in this sense, equated in the collective and gradual construction of an anti-fascist horizon, as a form of unconditional defense of democracy as a universal value.[1] The study brushes, against the grain, all forms of disenchantment (in particular the nihilistic one), hasty and/or hesitant analyses, petrified convictions in anti-gregarious reluctance and, above all, pessimistic surrender beforehand. Due to the context, pessimism, along with the first three factors, constitutes a prior and unconditional gift to a dangerous opponent: he is served a hearty dinner, at an address, table and time determined by him – the helpful gesture, the bowed head – , having in the rusty tray the well-tempered historical rights of all the betrayed multitudes.

So much for so much, then they became more attached to us,
for drinking revenge.
Guimarães Rosa (2001, p. 84)

A few decades ago, the unspeakable delirium of the extreme right of a resentful Brazilian, now a senior, residing in the US state of Virginia, silently triggered a narrative and pragmatic war against all segments of the left (orthodox and heterodox, affiliated to political parties or not, with or without a mandate) paranoidly identified as contrary to the economic model of status quo, which has been in effect for over 200 years. A significant civil lineage of militants from social movements and parties, urban and rural workers, the homeless and landless, students, artists, intellectuals, trade unionists, teachers, researchers, etc., fit into the “cultural scale” of this target. and, with them, all the social, civil and political, labor and social security rights recognized by the Constitutional Charter of 1988 – rights that all forms of opposition to the status quo never tire of performing with genuine panache. Obviously, the target has, at best, physical propensities; and in this case, in the center of the crosshairs, are selective bodies.

Stealing fundamental theses from Antonio Gramsci, the Bolsonarist extreme right, as uneducated as it is violent, inspired by the hallucinatory tune of the pseudo-avatar from Virginia, also strategically inserted this war into the register of culture, seen from a socio-anthropological point of view. The political vector (or, if you like, more precisely, micropolitics and nanopolitics, in the most reducible and informal filigrees of everyday life) is just a structural ingredient of this approach – a priority, but just an ingredient. Culture as a warring circumscription of day-to-day disputes spread across all social sectors is thus rescaled at the level of the civilizing process, with progressive moral-pragmatic consequences, starting with the present day.

Not by chance, with more rapid strides in that direction, these neo-fascists, sewing caudillo populism, emotional drag and historical immediacy, supported the corrupt Brazilian right (and desperate for self-defense) to wage a life-and-death battle in 2016, on the perimeter of a coup executive-parliamentary-judicial, aiming to gain control of federal political power; they expanded this power electorally in 2018, with the equipment of the entire main state machine, and now they are interns in the administered and networked deepening of all expanding multisectoral capillaries.

In preambular words, this is the operational state of the art – state of exception – of “neo-fascist progress” in Brazil, under the tonic influx of similar winds coming from Europe, the United States and Latin America: from the end of this decade, the extreme right, in an open arc of harmful solicitation, with internal cracks or not, must intensify actions to carry out, in a coronelist, nepotist and physiological way, all kinds of moral-fundamentalist disputes in the political dimension, official and not, in all fields echelons, as well as to spread the so-called “cultural war” and take full advantage of it in terms of occupying a wide range of possible spaces: from Pentecostal churches to the “Biblical Bench” in the National Congress and in state and city chambers [religion]; from the four-year federal governance (subcolonized by US interests) to the consolidation of the neoliberal, “lean” and socially indifferent state [politics]; from the large conservative media conglomerates to the marketing low ideological [mass communication]; from reactionary and militia social networks (especially in audiovisual contexts) to robotization online and easily influenced algorithmization [digital culture]; from the political-religious partialization of the judiciary apparatus to the blatant police judicialization of the electoral system [judiciary (under the anti-republican distortion of the lawfare)[2]] and from national and foreign megacorporations to the parasitic financial system [economy].

The passage of time conspired to multiply the segments of the list, which the analytical duty, demanding double breath, makes it clear that, by identical symmetrical extremities, they extend from the homicidal threat to the Unified Health System (SUS) to the heinous corrosion (already consummated ) Social Security [social welfare]; from the partisan politicization of the school system (with the fallacy of “teaching without ideology”, read in the dissuasion “school without a party”) to the privatist scabrousness “Future-se” [education]; from the demeaning and disdainful stigmatization (like never before seen in the country) of Universities to the underqualification of investment in research and innovation [science]; from the federal shelving of agrarian reform to the national annulment of indigenous [land] rights; from indiscriminate support to parastatal militias (“officialized” to “combat” organized crime and drug trafficking) to the noisy “Bullet Bench” in Parliament and the daily militarization of the population [public security]; from insolence in relation to legislation against racism, homophobia and xenophobia to the distorted investigation of violence against indigenous peoples, afro-descendants, women and members of LTBTI [gender] communities; from the inordinate release of pesticides to the new push for sale – loggers, miners and prospectors – of the Amazon and other natural reserves, with unofficial authorization to deforest and, if necessary, murder [the environment], and so on.

In the limit horizon of this “cultural war” of systematic dismantling of rights recognized by the Constitution and by specific legislation, it constitutes political naivety to forget that the mere bodily existence of opponents (and even non-aligned ones) is, for neo-fascism, a presence non grata in the world. The ideological existence of distinct mentalities tends to become more and more a priority public enemy, an object of humiliation by all the cynical and ironic forms of authoritarianism (playful or not), of “democratic façade”, while thousands of murders per year – from indigenous leaders and LGBTI communities, anti-racial activists and ecologists, etc. – will spread without any visibility in the media mass, under the leniency or continued omission of institutions (starting with the circumscription of City Halls), outside of official statistics and under the hateful applause of extreme right-wing “virtual bands”. Historical experience has never hidden that the neo-fascists will be able to come “up” – physically – from all the lefts (and not only in parliamentary and university environments) when they no longer have the possibility of a guaranteed quorum in republican votes, which they so abhor, and this even make the young and fragile tissue of democratic rules minimally consolidated in the country bleed to death, from the rubble of the civil-military-business dictatorship at the end of the last century, especially in the period between 1995 and 2016.

These quick strokes demarcate and project a resilient historical situation, as slow as it is insidious, under the assumption, unfortunately, of countless clashes – an eventual uncivilized source of unpredictable scourges (material and symbolic). However, weren't they, the haters, the criminals, their minions and flatterers who wanted it – asserts the convinced anti-fascist prudence –, with the discursive and procedural aggressions continuously perpetrated, inside and outside the Web, knife in hand?

II

Machine-gun posts defined a real stockade.
There was that white mist you get on a low ground
And it was deja-vu […]
Seamus Heaney (2014, p. 80)
the rock speaks:
If you are looking for fire, here it is
François Cheng (2011, p. 77)

Unless there is a more consistent discernment to the contrary, the diverse field of the left (characterized below), together with the democratic forces most sympathetic to the center of the traditional political spectrum (with or without gravitation in electoral disputes at all levels of the State), will thus remain – in order not to be victims of an attempt at an unprecedented sociopolitical sanitization –, the historical duty of retaliation in a procedural and cohesive block, through the consensual qualification of all possible areas of response – the sociofragmentary space of the daily “counterwar”, say the most eager ones – , structurally intensifying it in the register that the neo-fascists chose: that of civilizing ideals projected for posterity.[3]

The explicit goal of the “culture war” is not the “reconstruction” of the “nation” (this, in fact, is just a means), but the permanent ideological colonization of the future from a majoritarian, peremptory and repetitive discursive invasion – as pointed out before--in all spaces in the present. The neo-fascists, from the big ones to the seemingly tiny ones, have to be democratically defeated, one by one, in the shortest possible time, so that their political and moral potential dwindles and they fail to fulfill the ongoing promise: to massively infest tomorrow. The substantial reduction of this structural risk depends on the maximum urgent electoral dehydration of its seductive and opportunistic ascendancy over the imagination of the middle and popular classes. One of the main platforms of the war, in the faltering sighs of democracy in the country, is the multimedia web constituted by all the strategic channels (mass and digital) of participation and expression.

By heart and tonality of fencing, the progressive soul of the left forces has a lot to say and do in this horizon. It was they who, with fearless pressure in favor of political and civil freedoms (never reductive to economic freedom), built the republican West, in the most inhospitable historical conditions, weakening conservative and reactionary groupings, as well as the ties with political models of former regimes. . Is it not now that a horde of uncultured conservatives and reactionaries, with caricatured patriarchal outbursts in a tropical region whose elites insist on keeping it wild, will put an end to a millennial and transnational unstoppable targeting of all models of status quo linked to the incessant production of iniquity.

That the priority crucible of power for this message is the field of the left (and not the diffuse traditional spectrum of the center-left, opportunism being forbidden) does not need – already due to the broad indication above – an extensive explanation and justification. Since before the emergence of industrial capitalism as an economic system, the left represents, in Brazil and in Latin America, the authentic political heartbeat of the contradictory – both socio-phenomenologically and discursively-praxeologically – as a prime engine of challenges to the order of things . Even with largely cooled historical-teleological energy to overcome what exists en bloc, they are, without a doubt – due to the conviction of a humanitarian soul –, the fundamental depositary of political and ethical trust in carrying out the (inaugural and continuous) task of spreading of the antifascist disposition. They are socially configured as a broad political and cultural scope, as horizontal as they are internally nuanced, with drive and influence spread across the arteries and nerves of metropolises, cities and towns, in intersecting furrows, today fused with digital networks.

These notes are enough to highlight that, strictly speaking, the left, as understood here, preserve a strong political nature. stricto sensu (linked to political parties), but they are not captive of this important environment, of conventional clashes and disputes predominantly around the executive and parliamentary levels of the State. The left deserves to be thought along the way and/or under the prism of a richer and more comprehensive semantics, as an immanent and socially oriented opposition power – in reserve beforehand, due to stable ethical, political and/or cultural discontent, and/or suspicion a posteriori, expressed in the coherent spirit of justified contestation, with the permanent courage of refusal (total or considered, radical or flexible) –, in all sectors of human action: they extend from social movements to instituted parties and non-legal associations, from student directories to workers' unions, from NGOs to entities of professional categories, as much as they intertwine the field of science and the arts, cut religions and secularism, animate editorial projects, critical analyzes in economics and pedagogical alternatives, and so on.

The most important aspect of this expansion of understanding is the spirit and/or propensity of opposition. The political lefts are included in this range. Far, therefore, from constituting a mere recovered metaphor, pertaining to the metaphysical or abstract entity for the purposeful preservation of a dear signifier, the non-negotiable reference of the left, in the influx of the streets to the networks and vice versa, is the concrete positioning of a conscious and inventive contradiction ( programmatic or not, doctrinal or not) in relation to the foundations and consequences of the macro-irrational models and producers of socioeconomic inequalities in late techno-capitalist civilization, which covers all obscure political regimes, of an authoritarian nature, whether orthodox fascist, or of an alternative and competing nature , installed at the State and/or corporate levels, starting with its closest manifestation. This semantic resizing honors previous formal pillars of opposition and carries out a dialogue between them and the future of antagonism and contestation (today in and with communication networks), without omitting the pressing need for reinvention of the left-wing party-political segment. (Nobody, in any case, needs to say it: on the cold ground of the deepest self-recognition, she herself knows that she needs to embrace heterodox imaginaries at the confluence between micropolitical, if not also nanopolitical, impulses, parallel to the State, and macro-networks of anti-conservative affection and diversity, which, allocated in new streets and emerging corridors, no longer necessarily flow into the same urban squares, nor compete for the same political and social objects.) The proposed broadening of understanding obviously involves an endless legion of people without party registration. politicians.

The protagonism of representative strands of these scattered opposition forces – remember – impels (and sometimes inflames), as a whole, important movement and oscillation in history, although today devoid of dialectical vigor, in the midst of such diverse and simultaneous forms (material and immaterial) of accumulation, investment, preservation and transmission of economic capital within capitalism itself, inflated by the accelerated development of scientific and technological knowledge. This quasi-autopoietic function of opposition encloses, in its socially fragmented belt, the main epicenter of the possibility of groping in the most sensitive magmas of the political life of a society. None status quo remains or can remain without this immanent contradicto, under penalty of necrosis more easily in totalitarianism, explicit or occluded.

Such a condition of opposition needs to be widely optimized, both in socio-technological nature and in political efficiency and historical reverberations; it still remains to be better articulated and reinforced in view of the threats already announced. Under ballast in its propositional resistance content, one of its essential strategic qualifications is undoubtedly the most elementary (and, as incredible as it may seem, difficult): its self-composition in an inextricable and extended bundle - the union of all its forces internal, representative of their most available and proactive strata, categories or strands. Sympathetic progressive forces, similarly self-situated in the regular belt of some opposition, participate in this process of challenging the order of things when they elect for priority confrontation the political, economic and/or cultural trends that, whether voluntary, unaware, guarantee embrace (direct or indirect) to all kinds of human misery and abandonment of otherness, as well as to the freezing of political measures to overcome this situation, via the State and via organizations in connection with it.

Certainly, the far-right warlike principle introduces all opposition forces, especially those from the party and trade union side, into a dilemma that is strictly inconceivable without the proper decision as to whether or not to enter the spaces of the so-called “cultural war” , playing or not playing the game of executioners and criminals, in the arrogant and duelist chess they demanded. When Hitler forged, between the 1920s and 1930s, the Aryan-European expansion war, the democratic world, following secular resistance under the vital sieve of legitimate and necessary self-defense, did not hesitate to give him the deserved response, in military counter-repression to the height of the conflagration unilaterally triggered by invasions of other countries. We are all sons and daughters of this historical epic of fatal courage, which chose to protect freedom even under capitalism, in the wise adventure of avoiding an undoubtedly worse human atmosphere. History testifies to the rarity of peoples or towns that, when threatened and placed in an identical dilemma, chose not to react and unprotect their peers, opening a suicidal guard to the complete destruction of their own history and identity.

The “cultural war”, which is reactionary in every way, will mostly be waged in symbolic-discursive terrain, even though it has long had embarrassing and/or coercive effects – often criminal – in the practical world. It is far, however, from being a confrontation and, too: its fierce gunpowder has engendered physical deaths every day (as pointed out, of Indians, blacks, women, members of LGBTI communities, the poor, “peripherals”, militants, and so on), in a widespread way and without relevant official statistics.

Strictly speaking, splinters in the left-wing party-political field – arising from legitimate disputes, but today certainly in an inconvenient place and time – and the failure to reschedule the strategic vision to the level of a micropolitical dispute without deadline they only nourish the rival cannon. Never before, in the unthinkable situation of a burlesque and electorally victorious extreme right, has it become so clear how the continuity of the divorce or conflict between the leaders and progressive forces of the left is largely providential for the sinister itself to be dissolved. The adversary, always restless, hopes, with fingers crossed on the demon's forehead, for the permanent fragmentation of the opposing fronts. The historical gravity of the present, in a wound with no calcification in sight, precipitates the urgency of a multilateral and stable articulation in the face of the swampy abyss to be climbed. In parliamentary houses as well as in public squares and virtual networks, the task requires all the anti-fascist opposition forces, with the ever-attentive support of solidary instances of the international community, committed to the unconditional defense of human, social and civil rights, in particular with the freedom of thought, expression and organization.

Moreover, this strategic union obeys the simultaneous and fundamental structural trait of the problem: it is all the more justified because the monumental crisis in the country's political dimension represents, in the honors of a point-blank historic challenge, the chance - one must not forget – of reinvention, as much as possible, of democracy itself, starting from its rubble.

III

The response to the “cultural war” must, above all, attend to the logistics of the circulation of signifiers and meanings. This paradoxical task involves meticulous choice of words.

As much as contemporary democracies have been carved out of two long technological and world wars – nazi-fascism would have spread beyond Europe if it weren’t for the western forces allied in the last of them –, it would constitute a naive political-strategic and sign-procedural procedure, beyond (in other words, enrollment in an elementary counter-narrative course in contexts of acute social conflict), to use, under the pretext of retaliating at the height, a terminology that would greatly please the opponent's taste and rogue game - for example , using the word “counterwar” or, more exactly, “anti-fascist counterwar” or similar. Any strategic prudence that is minimally self-aware of its real fallibility finds itself in trouble the shallower the plan of approach. In an atmosphere fueled by propensities for war – from the open sky to select spaces, from streets and networks to parliaments, and the reverse route –, political practices and, specifically, micropolitics and nanopolitics, so accustomed to sparks and semantic fires (which is rooted in in the abyssal foam of meaning), they need to add scale intelligence, nourishing it with structure markers, not only with content ingredients (which sends them to the perimeter of the signifiers). Under such an arc, metrics and board functions prevail, not chess pieces; the normative pillars of the game are worth more, not the game itself; more the principles, not the empiricism.

The reasons are evident and their explanation relatively serene: the “culture war” of the neo-fascists is linked, from wholesale to retail, to a systemic necropolitics and, obviously, to the institutionalized, mediatic and aestheticized rationalization of obliterated hatred (unconscious and/or unconfessed) as leitmotiv within the scope of everyday political practices and interactions. The five subsequent thematic blocks detail the fundamentals of this perspective.

IIIa

And yet those who don't eat die, and those who don't eat enough
It dies slowly. During all the years that you die
You are not allowed to defend yourself.
Bertold Brecht (2000, p. 73)

The so-called “cultural war”, from its absurd conception to its totally irresponsible implications, represents, in recent Brazilian history, the reconfiguration of violence (in all its types, not only symbolic) as neo-fascist necropolitics[4], catapulted – as seen – into the macro-social plan for the future of the country.

Roughly, necropolitics (from the Greek necros, referring to dead body, cadaver), here taken in expanded semantics, names the socially articulated and decentralized set (that is, without a conducting center) of State and society administration techniques in which and through which accounting (programmed or osmotic) -random) of death in certain sections of the population, with evidence for the poorest, especially blacks, constitutes, explicitly or not, one of the matrix beams of the exercise of power. The science of necropolitics or necropolitology, in turn, studies the ways in which the articulatory value of death or the dance of thanactic forces (from Thanatos, Greek god of the branch) is inserted in the administration of the State and society, that is, in biopolitical language, the structural function of the forms of production and manifestation of deaths (material and symbolic) in the government of the living distributed in a certain territory.

Necropolitics, as it sounds ontologically with all phenomena and processes, presents two space-time planes: one, structural, related to its manifestations in the flow of history and in the soil of countries in particular; and the other, conjunctural, linked to the way and intensity by which this type of policy is configured locally and at each time. Confusing instances of government and instances of the State in a promiscuous bundle of basic institutional principles and wholesale executive, legislative and media practices, necropolitics sews together, on the macroeconomic level, the socio-structural and financial-conjunctural elements that interest and sustain it.

In general – all the more so in recent decades – it subordinates the production and distribution of social wealth to the prosperity of unproductive capital with a systemically parasitic function (rentier) and, therefore, shy in terms of support or investment in policies to generate formal employment and regular income. Concentrating ownership of the wealth produced in the hands of a few families or individuals, it engenders socially endogenous geopolitical segregation by predicting unequal occupation of city soil, with territories of opulence separated from pockets of misery and poverty.

Its consolidation, even if it discards conspiratorial conceptions of origin to operate primarily as a structural sociodynamics based on the administration of indifference as an implacable policy, involves an increase in socioeconomic difficulties for the majority of the population, especially in the impoverished and unprotected strata: Achaca, by extensive apportionment and comparatively indefensible, imposed on the most disadvantaged strata, while exempting or under-taxing large fortunes and inheritances transmitted in the affluent strata; and raises prices of basic goods to the sufficiency of collective life and the satisfactory formation of citizenship (food, medicine, school, day care, cultural goods, sports, etc.). The progressive impoverishment it promotes multiplies, as something “natural”, nomadic misery in cities – the object of an aggressive gentrification policy at certain times (such as sports mega-events, in which millions of foreigners are expected to boost the tourism industry and to trade) – as well as broadening ad infinitum the perimeter of sedentary poverty in peripheral areas. The sculpture of this inhospitable reality forces, in terms of age, the need for early entry into work activities aimed at survival, severely marking the path of millions of children and adolescents towards the acquisition of the normal standard of educational training later required by the labor market itself. .

In addition to modulating in this way the social, group and individual trajectories of access to qualitative housing, equipped hospitals, urban mobility, basic sanitation, higher education, technological leisure centers and so on, necropolitics attacks the social security system or depreciates its socio-structural value by postponing the legal protection of the State to the majority of citizens vis-à-vis when contracting the period of life under the usufruct of that acquired right; super-elite access to basic health plans and private pension programs; implements public security policies without counterpart investment in the school system, under the populist and immediate assumption that the strengthening of police repression of drug trafficking and organized crime in the poorer classes does not represent institutionalized racism, but an urgent legitimate solution, demanded by the majority of “good citizens”, definers of suffrages; and indulges (when not, plays a leading role) in the social asepsis of opposition to establishment through unofficial or informal prediction of assassinations of political leaders and militants or simply not computing or investigating such deaths. Apart from its structural sieve, necropolitics always sounds more evident and gloomy when it is covered with ethical and fundamentalist components and elects certain social groups to be objects of its obituary movement.

There is no necropolitics carried out or mediated by the State without previous historical ballast, in the form of a necroculture supported (spontaneously or tacitly) in the way of life of a significant portion of the population, either by voluntary discursive action (verbal or non-verbal), or by unquestionable habits from an early age, reinforced throughout the process of socialization and education (in the family as well as at school) and reconfirmed in and through consumption and leisure practices.

Equally, it does not hurt to register – at this point, by way of affirmation of historical evidence – that the social dynamics of capitalism, in any of its phases, if left loose to wild interests of the market, without the minimum mediation of a socially oriented State and complemented by civil society organizations aligned with democratic values, it is, by its very nature, necropolitics. This constitutive propensity – of interests lit at the local, empirical and immediate level, but totally blind at a macrostructural scale (of national and international reverberations) – not only calcifies, but also accelerates dismal results when the policy that regulates the State is shaped according to identical necropolitical foundations, aiming to fulfill them as the only truth, as in the case of neoliberalism. Further, moreover, it should be recognized, if you like, that anyone, aware of the multiple fringes of the concept, wants to assert that necropolitics is, in fact, older than one imagines, transcending, in a long retroaction in time, the capitalist experience in history: necropolitics precedes, from barbaric terrain, the warrior-expansionist antiquity, sewing together feudal and imperial structures spread around the world, expectorating totalitarianism and dictatorships on end and installs itself, like occluded mist, in the unsuspecting heart of modern democracies until it reaches the present in the procedural modality of neo-fascism. Certainly, the apprehension of spatio-temporal macroinjunctions through purposeful reiteration of the same prefix may be somewhat tedious, but it never fails with factual veracity: under all the risks of seasonal analytical misunderstanding, the category of necropolitics, along with the necroculture of whose homeopathic bucho thrives, does not fail to, as a panoramic prism of vision on human fortunes and misadventures, resignify history until now specifically as necro-history.

The lucidity of ancient Greek culture testifies that necropolitics, when not essentially plutocratic (from the Greek ploutos, wealth, meaning “government by the richest”), is at least a plutophile or a plutolater; and, it is not wrong to admit, as the ancients used to say, in the pro-aristocratic perspective of that time, it is not uncommon to deal with what the Greek historian Polybius called kakistocracy (of kakistos, superlative of kakos, bad, with extensive synonymy: ignoble, dirty, perverse, vile, pernicious, disastrous) – in short, the power exercised by the worst.

Political disgrace, when self-inflicted at the macro-social and historical level, does not skimp on sinister features: it conspires to spread misfortune through the most tortuous ways. Necropolitics contributes – intentionally or inadvertently, it doesn’t matter – to the constant generation of economic and social crises through the State itself to fight them later, in the cold, with the immediacy of the aforementioned public security policies, which victimizes – it is worth emphasizing –, with arrests and murders, the less favored population, in general Afro-descendants.

As can be seen from the previous notes, the necropolitical administration implies a diversified figuration of programmed death. The released sociothanactic trends range from summary deaths by police operations to the form of death processed in ultra-slow time, through permanent geographic segregation combined with lack of assistance from the State, abuse of public health and social security denial or negligence. In the meantime, systematic symbolic death appears, as an equally priority horizon, in two aspects: police-judiciary, media and/or moral persecution (with strong operating prejudice) or deprivation of liberty, with temporary or lasting imprisonment, legal or illegal, with res judicata or not.

IIIb

Was it wind off the dumps
or something in heat

dogging us, the summer gone sour,
a fouled nest incubating somewhere?
Seamus Heaney (2014, p. 34)

This last aspect – symbolic death – deserves specific unfolding from the angle of relations between social formation of subjectivities, journalistic production and reality. lawfare.

Without other essential propensities, systemic necropolitics forges and intertwines, in a way not previously devised, both the forms of subjectivity that conform (by status quo) which, in a vicious ontological-phenomenological cycle, correspond to their own social-historical reproduction, as well as the unreasonably coherent type of general result of state administration that moves and enriches the news and publicity machine of sensationalist mass journalism (especially audiovisual) , focused on robberies, murders, family and individual dramas, catastrophes and disasters, emotional losses, grotesque facts, etc. – finally, the alarming spectrum of the tragic or calamitous reduced to the deviation from the “normality of life”, as well as the social exclusion equated to death (physical or symbolic). This media-aesthetic strategy of concentrating misfortunes, fatalities and uncertainties in a single space of sign production (the screen), in the programmed modality of a propositional subjectivation of the world focused on terrifying threats and dangers and thus corporately offered as a specific hallucinatory commodity in the profuse realm of merchandise, the majority, closing the circle, turn to the mentioned forms of socially engendered subjectivity. Appreciation for the metaphor would not discredit the veracity of anyone who might claim tout court that necropolitics nurtures, based on incessant fatuities, mass communication guided by a “crow ideology” and that, however, needs to be, paradoxically and compulsorily, accepted as a legitimate exercise of freedom of enterprise and expression, under penalty of unreliable threat to democracy.

Such contradictory injunctions are delivered all the more when, unfolding the filigrees, the thematic context evokes that sensationalist journalism, due to its discursive staging of sign appeals, is explicitly equivalent to the fundamental symbolic production of necroculture. Being its direct and factual beneficiary, this news production not only honors the facts by accepting them for mass dissemination, but also reconstructs them under the pretext of making them a mere specialized reference. Simultaneously, he sustains it day by day by spreading it out as a normal axiological model of a practicalist view of the world.

Indeed, the mass sensationalist press does not correspond to simple aesthetic and publicity-functionalist adornments of necropolitics. The antithetical aspect of this alarmist and spectacular news branch is evident in the complementary features of the political dimension of its social performance. Equally populist, like all “modernizing” necropolitics, it incorporates, in its priority agenda, the paternalistic (and heterosexual) defense of the poorest and most vulnerable strata against what, coming from the public administration, compromises their minimal existence. Attentive to the expanded preservation of the audience, it obviously needs to defend democratic values ​​and freedom of opinion, as the crucial air it breathes, with each news item, to propose itself as a depoliticized consumer product. These characteristics, when taken as a mosaic, only show that the symbolic dimension of social life conditioned the structuring of such an ambiguous stage of informational trap that this necropolitical journalism stricto sensu, as a specificity of the historical-liberal project of symbolic economy in the field of opinion, ends up being strongly interested in the very maintenance of formal democracy, the same which, in turn, when or if instrumentalized, serves the affirmation of necropolitics.

The expression “necropolitical journalism stricto sensu”, far from implying exclusivity of connection with necropolitics, nor does it mean that mass news systems, national and international, taken together, as well as different modalities of journalistic production in this context, subtract from direct or indirect involvement in the process of constitution or social unfolding of necropolitics as a system. The expression aspeada, on the contrary, implies them. Although also beneficiaries of the facts socially generated by necropolitics (as vehemently happens with the ideological vehicles of the extreme right), the types considered “normal” of journalistic production (always more audiovisual than radiophonic and printed) – that is to say, those devoid of verbal raptures , extravagant impulses and propositional boldness, accompanied by emotional drag sound design to optimize the spectators’ rapture – self-disguise the sensationalist tendency of its news exposure in an aesthetic-technocratic performance of an alleged “objective”, “neutral” and/or “exempt” description of the facts.

In these cases of less explicit link with necropolitics, this multi-pressing reality, however, appears, ostensibly, in the mediatic and inter-resonant fermentation of a general atmosphere lawfare, that is, of banalization as comprehensive as it is reiterative of supposedly unquestionable “effects of truth” referring to news factoids sown in the area of ​​Law, when the professional interpretation of constitutional and legal principles on behalf of the State is established under hermeneutic- loyalists and official distortion of the exercise of public office. Immersed in the social bubble (political the capital market sector, equity side and debt side, in all the preparatory and executive phases for the issue and placement of financial instruments; sensu) created by this trivialization, in the news migration and reproduction circuit that oscillates from media from mass to media digital and vice versa, spectatorial subjectivities, faced with, for example, a persevering concatenation of actions by the Public Ministry, the Judiciary, the Police (civil or military), executive bodies and the daytime news, end up receiving as perfectly normal the selective, denouncing and persecutory media exposure (already, in all, a public trial) of isolated individuals or groups of people, companies, entities or brands, as a “legitimate” and anticipated form of application of criminal justice – which, strictly speaking, , would be exclusively up to the relevant constitutional sphere, in an expected judicial court and instance –, and this regardless of the side effect (intentional or culpable) of irredeemable ruination of the reputations involved and, with it, of distribution and imposition of symbolic death, already per se socially segregated.

the signic reality lawfare, of media-news landscapes tending to be more lasting than sporadic or ephemeral, softly harpending the oscillating framework of imponderable emotions of the masses – to the gradual point of contributing to the gestation of standardized and stigmatizing prior judgments, as well as dragging them indiscriminately and without consideration of (immediate or immediate) consequences –, randomly shapes a forced social and political environment that, at the extreme end of the judicial line, tends, despite the deliberate self-discourses of undue autonomy of the judges, to collaborate greatly for the populist condemnation (temporary or definitive) of subjects subjected to continuous multimedia hotline. This almost unconditional “truth effect” bubble, today benefited by the contest sine qua non and replicator of social networks, is configured in such a way that any decision-making step back in this regard, of an absolving or less than exemplary type, would be considered absurd and contestable by demonstrations in the public square. This is how, by surreptitiously and unplannedly absorbing functions of the Judiciary, the persecutory exposure in multimedia visibility converts, summarily, simple accused and investigated, defendants or not – therefore, without final judgment in an appropriate context – into convicts summaries.

The subtlety of this social process is compatible with the macrostructural scope of its occurrence, in various mediations, beyond the possibility of its apprehension by common sense, in the immediate scope of everyday perception. A terrestrial interpretation of this insinuates, in general, that the mass media (in all media) seek such collaboration, due to economic and ideological advantages for their survival as a business. Reality, regardless of any modus operandi mechanistic or easy, adds additional complication to what is already difficult to be socially admitted and frankly put on the discussion table. the accusatory conjecture beforehand that the great mass press, by immanent vocation to arrange itself according to structural and conjunctural trends of capitalism, seeks, invariably and always voluntarily, to participate in the systemic-necropolitical process of production of symbolic death via lawfare must be, strictly speaking, as discarded as, in the diametrically opposite compensation, one can never disregard this gigantic fact: the continuous spiral production of mass journalism, when synthetically apprehended by the set of inter-resonant reverberations of its non-resonant operation. concatenated as a socio-mediatic multi-corridor for the circulation of reports, images, videos and information, in fact, it competes to establish, on a macrostructural symbolic scale, the result described, with generalized damage to the functioning of democracy itself, paradoxically projected in its name and in its favor.

A lawfare, seen in this media atmosphere, demonstrates that the social process to which it refers is much more substantial than the mere mobilization of Law strategies and current legislation to pursue, through instrumentalization of the State, authorities, citizens and companies. Its apparently legal characteristic, nurtured by panopic news reiteration (by all media, not only by news programs), contributes, in turn, to the more fluent acceptability of facts and narratives in the individual scope and isolated from the redoubts of reception and consumption. In the non-conveyed warp of these injunctions (accidental or, at least, not autocratic, to the point of being confused, in the end, with a capricious and unfortunate coincidence), the great mass press only covers, in culturally pleasing action recursive, social expectations that it contributes to previously engender, especially in the wealthier income classes.[5]

IIIc

THOSE ABOVE
They joined in a meeting.
street man
Stop hoping.
Bertold Brecht (2000, p. 158)

I declare that the best man in the world
can become hardened and brutalized to such a point,
that nothing will distinguish him from a wild beast.
Fedor Dostoieffsky (1911, p. 229)

Evidently, the dance of death began to play a more pronounced role in the semi-legalist neoliberalism bargained for by neo-fascist necropolitics in Brazil. Late tail of the worldwide wave of draconian policies of a minimal state from the beginning of the last decade of the last century, this necropolitics took on specifically fascist overtones during and after the 2018 electoral process, whether by the victor and his team, or by niche. significant and more nervous among the millions of caudillo followers and random voters, the latter seduced by the rampant unawareness of the fictitious anti-communist appeal.

The specter of death, then fanned, weaves, from an axiomatic core, narratives and discourses (public and private, face-to-face or on digital networks, anonymized or not) with four well-known barbaric follies: (a) notorious racism (of the most encrypted , due to the current criminal law, even the most ostentatious and unpunished), in line with historically and technically unfounded positions against quotas for blacks and browns and in support of (or compliance with) recurrent and indiscriminate police operations, with deaths or not, within communities known to have a black majority; (b) convinced homophobia, with arrogant defenestration of members of the LGBTI community and depreciation of advances in gender politics (ideologically accused of “ideology”…); (c) veiled xenophobia (mixed with fundamentalist anti-communism) against Venezuelans and Cubans, and (d) unconfessed or unconsciously demonstrated misogyny in the use of rustic language, patriarchal or sexist common sense, in which women appear as instrumental and inferior beings, among other symptomatic symbolic ills. All these forms of protagonist intolerance, often combined, have – it cannot be stressed enough – produced serial deaths, on a daily basis, from north to south of Brazil.

Of course, in Western history, necropolitics has not always been neoliberal. Globalized neoliberalism, however, is, from the technocratic foundations to the megapublicity bottleneck, a systemic necropolitics subsumed in a political economy disclosed as a serious, competent and socially responsible worldview. Bolsonarism, in its mostly civil strand, in turn, as an emerging populist movement – ​​still with the programmatic vagueness that defines it, or perhaps because of this –, presents itself as a perilous variation of this necropolitics by hyperanimating it under restored fascist influxes. In the wake of salient quejandos in other quarters of the world, civil Bolsonarism does not cease to be, whip in hand, a continuum significantly reprogrammed and wide open of the systemic necroculture forged in Brazil especially in the course of 300 years of institutionalized slavery, the last horrendous exploitation (material and symbolic), among similar ones in past centuries, to assume formal (and cowardly slow) de-characterization by law, not yet fully incorporated and/or complied with in the profuse line of events of inequality observed from everyday neighborhood interactions to regular forms of selection and treatment in public offices and private companies.[6]

Since its deadly power tends to invisibly lead to death larger contingents (as stipulated in socially selected targets) in the patient historical compass of the long time and under the prerogative of the state instrumentalization of the population's tributes, the neo-fascist necropolitics does not fail to corroborate itself , in fact, as a sort of instituted and legalized thanactic socio-Darwinism, slower than its matrix version of the first half of the XNUMXth century and, thus, more prone to passing, in the common sense perception, as a type of “normal” government, as “life”, therefore, without ever being perceived as necropolitics – and, as such, escaping unharmed.

Explaining a more complex ballast of conjugated and historically closer factors, the necropolitics of Bolsonarism, barely emerging from a civil-military-business dictatorship of more than two decades, not by chance snubs, with scandalous rudeness, the United Nations (UN) and defends, mocking, human rights and their defenders, at the same time that it honors torturers and benefits policemen involved in repressive and/or death actions.

In this particular, it is impossible, moreover, not to recognize, and passant, that Brazil reaches, as of 2019, a post-1964 sociopolitical condition as unprecedented as it is paradoxical, in which gendarmes (civilians) of opportunistic careerism in the hierarchies and dependencies of the State, occupyable through universal suffrage or mandatory appointment, boast - by less from the discursive and formal point of view – more extremists than high ranking military, distributed in the three Forces and government participants in different strata. The country's leaden past makes, in fact, such a notation quite problematic, due to the uncertainties and inherent risks and, therefore, it must be placed with care and due context: whether by public statements and/or line of conduct that the great The press investigates mostly regulars, such senior military personnel, seeing each case under the welcoming exception of an opposing court (starting with certain controversial speeches by the Vice-Presidency), have not demonstrated, at least formally and openly, hostility to the Federal Constitution of 1988 , as well as, with the same significant remark (in which the rancidity of the anti-communist threat can be seen preserved), they fail to verbally and explicitly revere the republican and democratic regime.

More than three decades later, these soldiers, in a unique historical opportunity, who took advantage of this golden opportunity to completely “rebuild” the image of the Armed Forces in society as a whole, have signaled, without public criticism of the military dictatorship as a whole, abandonment strategic, as an ignoble chapter, of the official and umbilical link with the dungeons of torture, heinousness that, despite being known and supported by the United States, embarrassed Brazil in the eyes of the modern, free and developed world, especially in Europe. That is, the Armed Forces, which the strict positivist zeal for order and national security allocated to the right and extreme right of the traditional political spectrum, try, under the providential emblem of rationality, to redesign their own social image (previously linked to nationalization of the economy and political violence) through a tactical and tense comparison with a civil, silly and frantic extreme right (linked to indiscriminate privatization and sometimes related necropolitics).

For the sake of historical accuracy, it is impossible not to notice, vice versa, that several of these high-ranking military personnel of the Federal Government, state peers of the seniors involved in the then unprecedented dictatorial regime, appear, in the media visibility (mass and digital), as “moderates” when compared, in terms of behavior and political tendency, with the suffocated representatives (executive and legislative), to which they have been pledging support (without completely putting their “hand in the fire”), as a qualified and diversified technocracy.

[As soon as 2020 began, this high-ranking wing, obviously aiming to nullify national and international repercussions and stop damage to the image of the administration, the Armed Forces and the country, pressured the President of the Republic, in principle resistant, to summarily and urgently dismiss the Special Secretary for Culture, after the latter, the day before, had parodied an excerpt from a speech by Joseph Goebbels, a Nazi henchman, in an official pronouncement on YouTube, to announce notices of public funding for cultural production. The military negotiated this exoneration coincidentally with the immediate reactions of the Presidency of the Chamber of Deputies and the Federal Senate, as well as the Presidency of the Federal Supreme Court (STF) and the Brazilian Bar Association (OAB). The circumstance is an unequivocal seismograph of the silent dispute over models of society within the State's technobureaucracy: the uniformed right, apparently "discreet" and "critical", security "guardian" of the conservative "republican order", acting - until when? – to contain unwanted bloodletting, of gigantic media reverberation, planted in all Powers by the rants of the civil executive ultra-right. faux tip iceberg which, due to its depth, only hides an active volcanic complexion, the episode is also distributed to both ends of this thermometer: either it is an official factoid planned to test, as many times as necessary, the limits of the current democracy, through periodic verification of the state of the art of collective sensitivity to authoritarian novelties – state of the art given by the level of alertness and indignation of the most organized social sectors, as well as the general mood for the defense of democratic values ​​[and, in this case, the factoid integrates a series of scapegoats previously stipulated (like guinea pig “oranges”) for calculated sacrifice and retreat practice under strategic accounting]; or is it a fortuitous occurrence – who believes? – with epicenter in a hasty hyperaesthetic act of an eccentric neo-fascist member who, like a “scenic lymphoma” in the authoritarian fabric of government, can be extirpated “without problems”, in order to feed negative reactions and make everything return to the satisfactory armistice, as if nothing had happened. In any case, sowing structural uncertainty, the episode, terrifying and ominous (thus validating the first conjecture above), expectorated, in the most organized way so far, the viscera of the political proto-project of society, economy, culture and morals that it articulates, at least, the majority civilian strata of the federal government, especially those closest to or closest to the Presidency of the Republic.]

Tortured people, their families and descendants, as well as all those who disagreed with the institutional business of cruelty, in the aforementioned period of social militarization and even afterwards, in the country's police stations and prisons, have the right to assume that, given the past history of military involvement with torture – officers who, strictly speaking, should not participate in party-political games or government teams (civilian or uniformed) in any strata of the administrative hierarchy –, they, even taking a formal oath of respect for democracy and to the Constitution (two coefficients not always necessarily together), may one day fail to comply with it.

In its long history, Brazilian military culture has already offered the country everything from dictators with bloody insignia to convinced republicans, jealous of their constitutional functions of national protection against external aggression, among other destinations pertinent to a modern State. It bequeathed even notoriously socialist revolutionaries. It is hoped, with an open bet, that future history does not demonstrate, at its own expense and other people's risks, that the news that has been resonant for a long time about “moderate” military profiles falls within the list of ornaments of political naivety.

IIId

Ferox gens nullam esse vitam sine armis rati.[7]
Livy (apoud Pascal, 2004, p. 73)

For reasons that only logic confirms the evidence, neo-fascist necropolitics is inseparable from class, familial and personal relations of recurrent cultivation, silent or not, of hatred as an articulatory social value. Since it is impossible – as previously signaled and recontextualized here – for a phenomenon to emerge historically, configure itself socially and crystallize politically from nil, there is no neo-fascist necropolitics that is not essentially hateful, that is, deeply rooted in cultural humus spread since early interactions in primary socialization and, therefore, since the beginning of individual psycho-emotional formation, as a mentality of presumed stigmatization of alterity, as well as structuring ( simultaneous or deferred) of the model of society as the mirror of this violence.

The fact that, at a more reckless pace, the social harassment of hatred is a relevant ingredient of Bolsonarism as a political movement is also evident in trivial logic. Eager for a faster gallop on the back of the 2016 electoral process, this militant ideology, under the canine gossip – remember – of claiming to be “non-ideological”, culminated in enormously tightening the state of social conflicts anchored in healthy political polarization to lead it, in a rush, to a conflicting dynamics inflated by practices and angry attitudes of ideological polarization. Bolsonarism thus dragged the important pragmatic-narrative rivalry between the right, center and left, in force in the country from 1985 to 2016, to the unpredictable precipice of resentment, anger and revulsion – almost ethnic – of sectarian extremism.

The term “war” and its derivatives (including evocative gestures of literal war, civil war, guerrilla warfare, gunfire sounds, and the like) belong to the public repertoire of violence and hatred of neo-fascists and their sympathizers.

As we know, this hatred is not, essentially, a mere strategic phlegm staged for media effect, nor a simple calculated technique of marketing political to garner electoral success, much less any theatrical simulation to make a lasting public impression. Ultranationalist and reactionary, this hateful sentiment proves to be, save for a better psychological evaluation, genuine, that is, expressed with the factual veracity that only the spontaneity of character and behavior makes convincingly indisputable, without mediation of artifice or artifice, with support in vein profuse cultural, unconsciously rooted in the bosom of an empathetic and/or susceptible part of the population. Gested in the very dynamics of social relations and, therefore, effectively ascending over the individual sphere, it meanders as if from the depths of the viscera, with awareness (total, partial or null) of the subject, yielding manifestation from a latent state, of availability immediate.

Over the past few years, this hatred has gained increasing capillarity from various digital strongholds of media furniture, with which and as a result of which he acquired varied multimedia expressions, all of which fit into a typical identity mosaic, a hyper-aesthetics of vehemence, so to speak, whose supposedly infenseless sign contours adorn a greater impetuosity, clandestine, which in fact counts and around which the entire dynamic of government revolves, in the form of a competent and accelerated technobureaucratic destruction of all constituted rights. [The audiovisual production prepared by staff of the Special Secretariat for Culture, in the episode mentioned above, is just a symptomatic synecdoche of this neo-fascist hyperaesthetics. The President of the Republic appointed the secretary of the portfolio with full knowledge of the biography and political positions of the beneficiary. The President's hesitation to exonerate him, according to the news at the time, reveals – it should be emphasized – how much the State apparatus is, from occluded veins to the tentative mouth of the volcano, riddled with neo-fascism.]

The lines, the verbiage, the gestures, the facial modulations, the practices and attitudes, the calculated symbols and markers, the lies and inventions, the threatening outbursts and the blackmail etc., in images, videos, audios, texts and digital excerpts, with repercussions on media of conservative masses – all in a dragging spiral, as imposing and widespread as it is contagious, in clichés and prejudices (bellicose or deafened) –, alter-direct themselves to selectively pre-stipulated targets (ideologies, political and cultural practices, social groups, individual profiles, companies and NGOs, etc.), aiming to anthropomorphize complex social-historical processes into “scapegoats” for public punishment as quickly as possible, in the casuistic arc of State mediations, under idiosyncratic legal and procedural turning.

The schematic trends of this hatred – surveilling, blaming and criminalizing, in a word, potentially eliminating, not just neutralizing – are no longer exclusive to certain privileged classes of consumption and/or prerogative of a person, however much a populist and charismatic leadership is of little importance. to infuse it, catalyze it and/or radiate it socially.

The 2018 electoral process and the result of the election contributed, with renewed vigor, to the socially expanded rationalization of this hateful and ancient feeling as an organized and convincing narrative – “the left”, he says now, in a stigma systematized here tout court, “they are socially dangerous and criminal, they are so corrupt, morally decadent, exclusively blamed for everything and deserve severe punishment, with imprisonment or death”. A large portion of society, including the population (including the poorest), media of mass and market, assumed this discourse as morally true or politically useful. At certain social-historical moments, it finds favorable conditions to manifest itself in gradations of virulence, according to belonging to certain social categories, the general profile of the protagonist individuals or social groups, the targets chosen for victimization, the political atmosphere, the circumstantial reasons, the goals at stake, the presumed disputes, and so on.

The rustic repertoire of neo-fascist necropolitics has long been invoked, proudly and first (as it continues to be, officially or not, in newspaper articles, books, posts on YouTube etc.), by the Bolsonarist extreme right, from within the very building of democracy. The hostility began with the proponents of this necropolitics. Truculence (physical and/or symbolic) is part of their language. The desire for a “cultural war”, with its delirious and often bilious psychic justifications, lies among the molar ingredients of this necropolitical and hyperaesthetic imaginary. The vehemence of the expression – “culture war” –, its isolated noun and its social uses belong to the lexicon of this type of authoritarianism. These life options demarcate a face, stipulate a side, and this needs to be socially configured as exclusive to them, not someone else's (in political terrain, be it neighboring and temporizing, be it non-condescending opposition or non-negotiable confrontation). This is a fundamental point, to be subjected to a broad spotlight: Brazil is at war – endogenous war, war of self-flagellation –, and this by their exclusive volition.

Since there is no more fortunate alternative – it is convenient, therefore, to leave the endogeny of hatred with and for the hateful volunteers and to whoever wants it; and agree that their hyperaesthetic necropolitical production soon ends up opening war among themselves, until the perception of great misfortune one day resects this harmful political position on Brazil, reverberating for Latin America and for the world, with soot spread over their own acts individual and group.

XNUMXrd

This Babylonian confusion of words
Comes from what are the language
Decadent.
Bertold Brecht (2000, p. 31)

[…] revenge will be slow,
although my mind is eager.
BJALFASON, Kveld-Ulf
(apoud JELSCH, 2013, p. 43),
leader [chieftain] from XNUMXth-century Viking clan

The narrative and pragmatic propensity of neo-fascist necropolitics and hyperaesthetics is part of the list of incitements to violence, subject to restrictive legal treatment, in the form of established jurisprudence from 1940 onwards (cf. Article 286 of the Penal Code), and not institutional leniency, police and/or judiciary. Such unpunished phlegm, of visibly aggressive and opportunistic manipulation of the formal democratic beams of the contexts in which the neo-fascists operate and in favor of what ideologically sabotages them, demonstrates, in its entirety – from the assumptions of the authoritarian character at stake to the unconfessed intentions – what is neo-fascism and what it aims at.

This criminal humus of incitement to violence implied in the expression “culture war” and derivatives is perhaps enough to disallow, as something hasty and easy, the framing of an argument like the one present in a common linguistic-classificatory stigma, namely, as “political left”. and, too”, supposedly typical of an educated middle class and limpingly aligned with the trajectory of popular causes… Certainly, prudence as a permanent value, decanted in proven experimentation, without a fixed and exclusive level in the social pyramid, is the first irresistible and legitimate seduction of the strategy. No political resistance worthy of the name, however, should be watered down with platitudes or almond nectar, under penalty of betrayal of the previous journey of those who remained on the long road. Pools of blood never falter.

The recommendation follows a different path and without subtlety: the response to the “culture war” must be, by nature, tough, but antiwar, convinced, but not militaristic, fearless and intrepid, never belligerent, bold and creative, never armistic, tireless and irreversible without being martial. Due retaliation must act republican-democratic values ​​and educators. From its marrow and firmness, it needs to be politically emblematic: the example must come from the left. If it takes place in the name of or in the light of any war, it will fit into the pragmatic nomenclature of the rival – the so-called “cultural war” – and, therefore, into the linguistic-hyperaesthetic repertoire that is of such interest to neo-fascist necropolitics. By losing, in this way, the distinctive identity of a qualified opposition, it ends up abdicating its raison d'être, contributing to destine its foundations to the landfill.

It is worth evoking evidence: there is no need to have completed even an elementary discipline in military strategy to deduce that not every declaration of war deserves a response in the form of a counterwar, immediate or deferred. War cries emitted from verbiage (today in the media and perhaps via Twitter…) from buffoonish and irate leaders, when not in an alcoholic condition, did not even deserve – and deserve –, for example, more than pious official consideration.

The notion of due retaliation, which civilized virtues prescribe to be mediated by competent State bodies, does not compulsorily integrate the vocabulary and/or semantic imaginary of the war field. Even so, physical and/or verbal aggression, suffered for whatever reason, once unacceptable, ceases to deserve immediate counter-reaction, as much longer as necessary. Striking back, which may reliably amount, as the case may be, even to a responsive act of purposeful silence, is proof of worthiness, inadmissible if otherwise faulty or faulty.

This procedure is, strictly speaking, equivalent to a political rejoinder, which must be understood in the historical scale of recent political events in Brazil, before and after the enactment of the Federal Constitution of 1988, with an advanced democratic profile in matters of protection of human, civil, political, social, labor and social security. Right-wing and center-right forces, nationalists and populists, dominated the federal scene of power until the beginning of 2003, when then three votes – one already in the previous year and the others in 2006, 2010 and 2014 – guaranteed the coalition governments of center-left of Luís Inácio Lula da Silva and Dilma Rousseff until the removal of the latter, in 2016, on the occasion of an executive-parliamentary-judicial coup perpetrated based on arranged arguments and debatable evidence. The numerous public policies of the Lula and Dilma governments were a qualified response to the establishment economic-financial and cultural period. The victorious extreme right in the 2018 election represents a historically regressive and socially irresponsible neoliberal replica – vindictive, it is not wrong to say so – to the advances of previous governments in countless sectors of national life. Therefore, a counter-fascist rejoinder is due to legally vehement ultra-conservatism.

Furthermore, in predicting this rejoinder, the use of the word “war” and derivatives, however understandable and legitimate it may be, does not fail to reveal a phlegm similar to that of the voluntary rusticity of the opponent. Strategic lucidity catalogs this procedure as protocerebral. “Culture war” is not a set of “street battles”, however much the neo-fascist hyperaesthetics of several urban gangs want it to be and make it sound in their digital manifestations. The most average intelligence, except for insane and suicidal conspiracy with harmful collective effect, recommends common sense in the face of the desire to set fire to one's own house – in it, there are from children to pregnant women and the elderly –, to later resist it. Desire for the worst soon gushes against the arsonists themselves; and the scale of the damage is seen to be greater – with not a little self-betrayal – when the flames spread towards the poorest and most vulnerable population.

Such precautions are listed regardless of the lack of warning, in veiled hesitation, always self-surrendering in the face of the crudity of the truth: in general, from one extreme to the other of the conventional political spectrum, those who speak of “war” hardly know what they are dealing with, the what it really means historically and socially in matters of family and individual drama, and what it ultimately leads to – over years or decades –. This banal and truthful objection stirs the literary and universal sensibility of poignant millennia, punished by the viscous ghost of horror. Zuhayr (2006, p. 149, 151-152), a pre-Islamic Bedouin poet, seems, for example, to still speak to the present, with impressive relevance and prudent frankness, from the depths of Arab wisdom with a pacifist aspect (from the XNUMXth to the XNUMXth century d.C.):

What is war if not what you have known and experienced? And what does she become in these suspicious stories?

And further on, with apparent metaphors, annulled by the forcefulness expressed:

They quenched their thirst until it was dead, but then they took it to drink from immense wells, filled with weapon and blood. And they launched themselves to their own destinies, returning to an unhealthy and tasteless pasture.

Bearing in mind the totality of the previous explanation and until consistent proof to the contrary, the loyalty to the fight in favor of the consolidation of real democracy in the country - that is, tending to root it in the scope of interactions individual to individual, group to group, to from gender, ethnic and racial filigrees in everyday life – recommends that, in relation to the multiple type of violence implied in the form of neo-fascist necropolitics, the sculpture of due retribution does not make, at least for now and even reverse justification, programmatic use of the word “war” and derivatives, even in metaphor, for the purpose of expected resistance. As a counter-policy of social distribution of signifiers and signifieds, it is worth, in the long republican reconstruction ahead, to reserve the aforementioned terms for the inveterate rival, even so that, unchanged his obsession, they languish in his hands.

These cares with the origin and place of the contending lines, as well as with the social ordering and destination of the lexicon cover unfolded needs: while the “culture war” of the haters makes them consider all members aligned to the left as enemies, the republican precepts of the counter-fascist retaliation, in pedagogical respect for the rules of the democratic game and in the name of the controlled preservation and reconstruction of democracy, causes them to be treated as dangerous opponents, priorities in the finger count, the more they sew advances in molding the State according to the image of squint at your ideological mirror. "Words! Too much concession!” / "Better that way! Otherwise, things will get worse!”, claim, already in an altercation, the livers maddened in revenge, each pole for its share, hemoglobin in the irises. From this point of view, which jubilant immediacy rewards with seductive flattery, whoever asserts this is really right. On the other hand, the impassive dimension of history and the perspective of political education, along with actions in their name, always foreshadow, in the cerebral calculation, the ruinous fate to which, in political and social interactions, any and all hepatic foaming leads.

These notes, by the way, are in line with the famous recommendation of the Chinese general Sun Tzu (1993), who, since the 6th century BC, equated the essence and priority of the art of war with the special strategy of winning without the need for pitched battles. . Conflict (explicit or not) is already a mode of war, teaches the sage of the ancient Kingdom of Wu (hence, before, Sun Wu, famous Sun Tzu or “Master Sun”).[8] It sins against intelligence to lash out at misfortune. What is tactically valid for the signifiers must ethically be valid for the pragmatics: the vocabulary and procedural repertoire of active non-violence throws, justly and fatally – as indicated – the onus of the aggressive profile for the incivility of the adversary, which thus configures itself, by non-transferable responsibility, as the sole protagonist of the state of exception that, under subtle conformation – “normal life”, so to speak, with media and mass publicity colors – he wants to perpetuate in Brazil. (A witty interregnum recalls that the political need for retaliation also configures a “war foot” position, as an indication of mistrust beforehand and justified, prepared for the counterattack. The playful hyperbole, however, in the “tough” nuance, ceases at this point…)

IV

If you came in a coach
And I wore a peasant costume
And we met one day on the street
You would come down and bow.
And if you sold water
And I rode a horse
And we met one day on the street
I would come down to greet you.
unknown chinese poet
(apoud Brecht, 2000, p. 146)

By polishing marked internal differences and building the robustness of the common front-line agenda, left-wing democratic thought, progressive social movements and, in the expected ring, the political, academic, cultural and journalistic segments alike, have all the resources to fulfill , even on the razor's edge, its historical vocation and political mission, in the name of a minimum social balance, capable of guaranteeing consistent subsistence to the republican ideal, both now and for posterity.

In general terms, especially in the filigrees of the left field, the qualification of the anti-fascist response presupposes, in its complex pragmatic mosaic, micropolitical and non-violent combat guided by a ethos beforehand averse to absolute and irreconcilable dichotomies – that is, a procedural ethics and peer recognition compatible with the least possible endogenous damage due to programmatic disputes (which the moment makes small, without ever being unimportant) caused by polarized views and even dispensable stigmas. The very historical survival of oppositional thought depends, en bloc, on a ethos compatible with more and more Philia, to evoke the impulse of friendship for affinity of principles among the ancient Greeks – Philia here nurtured and guided by a pathos negentropic glocal, of reconstructive, anti-ruin effectiveness, namely, a strong and solidary feeling of sociopolitically directed responsibility, acted and shared in a hybrid and expanded way, from local or regional strongholds in electronic-communicational real time, in properly digital contexts the more diverse, aiming at both – Philia e pathos glocalized, that is, neither global nor local, rather the mixture of the two dimensions, glocal, in the hic and nunc (here and now)] –, the formation of multilateral blocs for the historical fulfillment of specific objectives. The qualification of the counter-fascist rejoinder presupposes political decoration of vigorous solidarity, elastic in a spiral here and elsewhere, with evidence in extended power.

Expressed from another angle, this rejoinder requires establishing, encouraging, fostering and perpetuating a multitudinous bundle of contiguous forces, mutualized in affection and programmatic cooperation, at least national in scope, capable of functioning flexibly as a broad decentralized network of resistance, in a united front of scattered symbolic barricade, with unfolded power of constructive contagion, both in the glocal fabric and outside of it (offline) – a response that conforms, itself, as a cultural, atopic and asynchronous macroenvironment (that is, without the need for each member to be present simultaneously in the same redoubt, under the same time zone), to the point of each one, participating in this plurieuphonic place , knowing where and from where you are, what to do to involve the opponent and (hopefully, convince or “win”) your supporters. In theory and in part, this pragmatic consonance has already been happening since the 2018 election period, if not before, since the executive-parliamentary-judicial coup of 2016. The necropolitical reality of neo-fascism and the intended civilizing scale of the “cultural war”, however, they require structural dynamics and more organized actions, vis-a-vis less spontaneous and random, and therefore increasingly co-strengthened and rooted in everyday life.

In programmatic terms, hospitable polishing, recognizing and celebrating differences, despite always being difficult and risky, needs to find, in this context, the safe path of a strategic alliance around common purposes and for a certain time – in this case, for the duration of “ culture war”, until the formal success in at least three or four major electoral cycles. The medium and long-term goal is the growing and profound dissolution, by universal suffrage, of all immediate expressions of neo-fascism within the State apparatus and, as much as possible, its progressive weakening in all the multi-capillary and media corridors that flow from the republican powers (especially, the Executive and the Legislative) for the common sense of the streets and residences, and vice versa.

These last surroundings testify, deep down, to the macrotemporal scale of the war process, demanding, beyond the metric of decades, the prolonged “athletic” effectiveness of an educational project for the construction of real democracy (not just legal and electoral rituals). ) and of a social nature, as well as for the production of compatible subjectivities, from the tender age strata. The greater political, institutional and legal urgency, however, consists in preventing the planned failure of the fragile Brazilian rule of law and in shielding conquests in terms of human, social, civil and labor rights carried out by the long historical pressure of leftist tendencies, in amidst the nepotist and physiologist savagery of big capital in the country. Simultaneously, this urgency implies consolidating and expanding the political, institutional and legal range of protection for all threatened bodies of struggle – indigenous, afro-descendants, women, homosexuals, “peripheral” militants, etc.: “opposition lives”, in the stigma cultural current –, preventing the debacle of deaths carried out by the conservative forces of order and their mentality blindly functionalized in favor of the status quo, both nourished by aberrant forms of normalized prejudice. Together, it is urgent to consolidate ways and legal instruments of punishment and prevention in relation to the different manifestations of extreme right-wing hatred.

Obviously, the horizon of the negentropic strategic alliance always distances any attempt or idealistic form of pragmatic agglutination based on identity imperatives, with harmfully homogenizing effects for leftist associations and political tendencies, capable of adulterating their traditional discourse and struggle profiles , obliterate singular ideological trajectories and obliterate historical achievements. It is not a matter of merging party lines (something, incidentally, impossible), but, rather, the juxtaposition of genuinely similar political, institutional, group and/or individual subjectivities – in short, of uncontested anti-fascists, removing all upstart, ambiguous forces and/or insecure –, in the same front line, with synchronized tone and consistent focus and direction. In a similar vein, interesting catalysis initiatives, either more to the left or closer to the center of the conventional political spectrum, have already been organized in some cities in the country. In order not to fail as quickly as they appeared (and tomorrow will recognize them as isolated political hiccups, representative of strategically correct intentions at the beginning), the battle against neo-fascist necropolitics, to be guaranteed necessarily by the main opposition leaders (in relation to both to the tendencies of the federal government, regarding the corrosive structural dynamics of the “new” status quo economic-financial), demands overcoming, suspension or, at least, relativization of all forms of centralizing personalism, of the “Latin caudillo” type or not (especially if lacking charisma or starting electoral amalgam power), mutatis mutandis nuanced and rescaled decals of the Brazilian colonel of Casa Grande, interested in the democratic exercise of mass paternalism. The adversary's dangerousness, even if obliterated in the apparent alienated normality of everyday life in general, justifies important symbolic renunciations and mutual concessions.

To remove any doubt, misunderstanding or semantic gap, it should be emphasized that, due to the nature of the retaliation at stake, this strategic and integrative condescension holds relevant significance even in relation to repentant and/or resentful members, as long as they are ideologically decided, coming from the wealthy classes and consort private institutions. The history of the left demonstrates per se the political validity and usefulness of, for example, self-denounced, testimonial narratives and/or “techniques” of YouTube influencers, economic leaders and prominent professionals identified as not belonging to the traditional field of the left. The vertical mobility of political convictions and propensities (the more so when they are authentic and continuous), in addition to constituting an undeniable social fact, has consequences (formation or strengthening of opinion trends, expansion or dehydration of votes, etc.) that cannot be neglected. Millions of people from the poorest or most disadvantaged categories cross over to the other side without guilt, without conscience and without giving explanations to anyone, suffocating – not infrequently, with unquestioned joy – neo-fascists and right-wing imbeciles, technocrats and neo-liberal minions, all socially insensitive . Conversely, the left in Brazil added, over the decades, a countless number of permanent and irreversible allies, especially from the intellectual and cultural categories of affluent strata.

Until the rules change, in the (little) republican pragmatics of the day, politics is, in the last count, convincing and conquering subjectivities and affections, via constant combat between discourses and narratives. As indicated above, it is necessary to promote, consolidate and expand, in all quarters, in Brazil and, more extensively, in Latin America, the broadest anti-fascist, anti-neoliberal and anti-technobureaucratic network, as a crucial axiomatic principle and beforehand, in order to avoid the claim of rights announced. Those who continuously play, if not in the field of the left, at least alongside them and in their favor, deserve a welcoming gesture and a stage of trust (under strict political monitoring) due to defined causes and agendas. (Strictly speaking, political sanity, for the sake of collective survival in the arc of freedom, advocates that the republican battle against neo-fascism should be everyone’s commitment – ​​as they say, “all of society” interested. at the same time, institutional and impersonal, should, in particular, tirelessly subsist as the great banner of oppositional thought, on the broad radar of ethos, Philia e pathos in favor of democratic values. The immanent complicators of this assumption end up making the moral accounting of the anti-fascist response have to be welcomed under necessary care, in a selective way.) those who do not have a political, academic, legal and/or journalistic tradition in this regard and wish to align themselves with the cause).

V

Nightcloud with the moon behind her
Paul Violi (2014, p. 28)

But it will not be said: Times were black
And yes: Why were your poets silent?
Bertold Brecht (2000, p. 136)

Evidently, every great plague – in an expression taken here as a metaphor, without the intention of social prophylaxis – usually has a long tail. The one officially in force in Brazil from the beginning of 2019, with legal and political roots in at least mid-2016 – an old plague in a tropically readapted strain – will continue to demand, among other virtues and strategic resources, historical patience, preparedness cognitive (including legal and technical), political training, emotional poise (i.e., zero hatred), high tolerance for daily dialogic confrontation (without rancor or resentment), accurate militant breath, firmness in judicious retaliation against any and all forms of intolerance ideological, personal hostility and physical coercion, and, if possible, good humor and a spirit of pity (never pity) towards the rather outdated level of the interlocutors.

The qualification of the counter-fascist rejoinder – in theory, pacifist, as said, but never lenient – ​​presupposes the adoption (educational, in the last analysis) of non-negotiable republican-democratic instruments and responses, capable of permanently constraining – without setbacks –, the reactionary forces suffocated to necessarily fit into the frameworks, rules and/or mechanisms of institutions consolidated based on and from the Constitutional Charter of 1988, while Brazilian society does not reach a more perfected magnum instrument.

The political history of affluent or underdeveloped capitalist countries since the end of the Second World War is explicit enough to expose itself to little or no doubt regarding the demonstration of how much the persevering defense of human rights, civil and political, social and labor laws contributed to containing anxieties and delusions deviating from acceptable civilizing guidelines, based on the democratic paradigm of society, State and individual. The admirable fighting spirit of the left and similar forces, so genuinely irreplaceable in character and truth of expression, participated and always will participate strongly in this process. Strictly speaking, it is the left-wing segments – from the streets and now from the glocal networks to parliamentary houses at all levels, and vice versa – that, using the only language that the nationalist-conservative economic and political elites understand, namely, the assertive language of insistent pressure (especially when moved by indignation or revolt), manage to extract, in practice, the maximum of the current institutions in the sense of institutionally establishing macro boundary lines and placing corrective clips in front of the indiscriminate necropolitical volleys that, otherwise, tend to to revive known forms of savagery and/or incite new, perhaps worse ones. [Psychoanalytical investigations of various Freudian strands have tired of attesting that one of the main functions of culture, for it to survive as such, is to educate (in the sense of shaping rules and purposes and/or appeasing through the sublimatory rechanneling of energies) the drive of death since the initial phase of childhood socialization...]

As freely deduced from the reflection of Steven Levitsky and Daniel Ziblatt (2018) on the ways in which democratic regimes are ruined, necropolitical social-historical regressions within the scope of national states throughout the XNUMXth century took on a larger body than the terribly imagined at the time not so much because little was speculated about the final point of its ultimate consequences or because the opposition forces were fragmented, but, rather, because there were, from the historically established institutional, political and legal bowels, stony barriers, insurmountable by any flexibility procedures – either that or deposition and exile! – and capable of ensuring, in the name of social, political and cultural diversity, due anti-entropic containment. Furthermore, the occurrence of these neo-fascist regressions shows, with a legacy of an equally fruitful lesson, not only how much such forms of containment, stuffed in self-deception, failed, but also at which points the respective weakness of perception in the face of the signs of horror lay. then present in the concrete trends that occurred in the following decades. Societies marked by a strong trunk of republican-democratic political, legal and ethical precepts, on the contrary, managed to neutralize or eject nepotist groups and physiologists with an authoritarian inclination (it is worth mentioning that they even represent privileged class mentalities with a historical profile that is still feudal or slave-owning). out of the executive apparatus of the State, also isolating them in majority parliamentary chambers.

In the circumscription of the imponderables of the democratic confrontation, it is certainly convenient to emphasize, by reangling emphasis, the mutation and expansion of the platform of conflicts. All the dictatorships of the second half of the XNUMXth century were, in general, huge beneficiaries of state and socio-communication mechanisms that facilitate interdictions (by censorship or forced self-censorship) to the production of content, inside and outside the media mass. The advent of the Web in the 1990s, in fact, subsequently conditioned the relatively uncontrollable worldwide explosion of difference, given in and by the conurbation of infinite voices from different political and cultural places of speech, through the spread of the so-called social networks. . This massive glocal expansion of the exercise of opinion remains regardless of whether the current algorithmization of spaces for action online filter all communicational flows and systematize the results of expressive freedom in standardized majority trends, which, in return, end up exerting significant influence over the entire symbolic spiral itself.

If the social-historical and technological nature of progressive political confrontation has changed profoundly, the same has occurred, in countless national soils, for any attempt to consolidate authoritarian yearnings. The reconfiguration of the engineering of the censor processes simultaneously disturbed the tectonic plates of the enjoyment of freedom. The ends of the line of manifestation of the voices of consistent contradiction experienced horizons never experienced before. The shuffling of the modes of incubation and maintenance of the ducts of silence was simultaneously accompanied by the digital resizing of the (irreversible) exercise of denouncing screams and irreducible contestations. Henceforth, the multitude of glocalized voices, even when predominantly tinged by ultraconservative and fearful biases – today shielded in robotic instrumentation online –, never fails to ensure that, between weights and counterpressures, the symbolic spiral of the digital and interactive instance of the social is necessarily computed by accounting for the technocratic power of groups that claim to be owners of the status quo (mediatic or not), with supposed rights to make it the monopolistic object of its prerogatives of rapprochement with the kings on duty, for the occluded imposition of subtle controls and/or overt police effects. The social and political potency of this socio-technical spiral made it impossible to exercise continuous contempt on the part of both the strategic intelligence services and the corporate-financial, media and market instances responsible for preserving the current order. Although this geopolitical macrodisplacement and unprecedented rebirth of the power of the popular give relevant encouragement to the democratic struggle, they do not contribute, as nothing obviously does, to guaranteeing certainties about the course of the democratic legacy itself and/or about the ways of social reconstruction based on its rubble.

The qualification of counter-fascist retaliation through an organized and strategic alliance between all left-wing strands, together with important forces sympathetic to the progressive cause (including, in this case, various bodies of mass journalism), only aims to strengthen the tendency to impose solid restraints , with an inexorable demand for withdrawal, in favor of the consolidation of a sociopolitical mesh of black-entropic blockades. The flattering ghost of barbarism is today so thick that drastic republican restrictions paradoxically play in favor of minimum guarantees of freedom, so that extreme right-wing mishaps (partisan, corporate and/or military) in matters of public administration are negligible while madness sanctioned by suffrage holds the last official pen of political power. The message of the nationally articulated anti-fascist movement must be vigorous, invigorating one of two itineraries: either unreason is molded to the forge of republican-democratic institutions without endogenous and surreptitious betrayal (within the State apparatus) and/or sabotage by aligned external forces (including international ones), and retreat for good, in a placid and anticipated paraphrase of the 1945 mirror; or they will be asked to step down in dishonor to the golden rules by which they rose to them. The due retaliation needs to be carried out in order to make clear to anyone who tries to destroy democracy that he will also have to deal with the braking institutes, starting with the protective devices of the Federal Constitution; and, depending on the seriousness of the disservice to democratic values, the penitentiary system will also [have to be dealt with], under pressure from organized civil society, on the streets, in parliament and on the networks.

In addition to these pragmatic horizons, it is worth remembering the need to dispute, one by one – with alternative and socializing proposals and projects –, spaces where neo-fascism (and not just Bolsonarists) wants to lodge (and, due to the multiple edges of the “war cultural”, will even be steep corners); impose divisions on the opposing camp, prevent its (apparent) cohesion and, in the process, conquer the largest annual number of supporters for the unconditional cause of human rights and public policies to repair social damage, incessantly caused by a model of socioeconomic development based on inequality as a “natural” vector of hierarchy and distinction. This aspect deserves to be underlined: as pointed out at the beginning of this text, any qualified counter-response attack – which is expected to be restricted only to the symbolic and most peaceful level possible – is and always will be in favor of democracy as a universal value and of the democratic world as a historically established civilizing achievement.

In the areas of education stricto sensu, instructional online, artistic, humorous, legal and journalistic – in parallel with the traditional walls of Universities, political parties, unions, etc., and obviously adding all these instances –, it is worth intensifying and diversifying actions of decentralized and continuous public clarification about the situation national policy, beyond the mere punctual and a posteriori to acts and occurrences carried out by neo-fascism, whether from a government source or from the bowels of civil society itself. Overcoming this state of socio-functional dependence, dangerous in every way – a political action if not at the mercy of the fatality of empiricism of the world – can be easily accomplished if sewn together by multiplying initiatives aimed at contextualizing previously confronted with the imminence of already evident horizons. Specifically, in this aspect – just as an evocative reinforcement – ​​it is worth strengthening the promotion of short political training courses, cycles of conferences and lectures, debate tables and conversation circles; the pluriauthorial forecast of repudiation notes, open letters and manifestos, public petitions and petitions; the thematization (online e offline) of the various facets of the problem in events (serial or sporadic) of scientific, political and/or cultural associations, as well as in reports, press articles and interviews with specialists; the direct approach or mention in shows, plays, songs, exhibitions and happenings artistic, satirical interventions and stand-up comedy, poetic soirées, imagery, videographic, radiophonic productions of Espaitec's etc. for pinning to digital addresses and broadcasting via social networks, and so on: busy all glocal streets – the hybrid public sphere – by asynchronously twinned intelligence in the imaginary of opposition to the banality of evil (not to forget the concerns of Kant and Arendt).

For the reasons set out above, the need for multiplication deserves separate attention. ad infinitum of anti-fascist glocal practices in digital and interactive contexts, through qualified political actions (that is, framed in the respective languages, in strategic form and content that are as innovative as possible) in all virtual spaces, using imagery, audiovisual, sound and/or written, which can function as tactical, ultra-flexible and articulatory media. This is – and will be for the future to come – a crucial aspect: the politically effective use, from the point of view of cognitive and educational combat, of digital technologies and networks to influence concretely, daily and decisively in the social filigrees of personal and everyday relationships.

Current trends provide objective and convincing reasons for such care. The social insertion of the digital and interactive variable in the space of political disputes around the State constitutes an irreversible historical fact. Since the North American electoral experience in the 2007-2008 biennium, in which the Democrat Barack Obama was the first president of African descent in that country, party politics at the international level established a massive shift towards the circumscription (unknown in this sense until then) of digital initiatives. The campaign with pioneering actions and the result of the elections drew the attention of political actors around the world to such an extent that it converted the virtual frontier of rhizomatic networks into the new stage of battles and fencing. This frantic and devastating glocal mountain range helped to elect, in the United States, the subsequent President, the populist billionaire Donald Trump. In Brazil, the hateful tendency of the extreme right has, since the early years of the last decade, caused this fierce political strand (of a predominantly unwritten nature) to flood, in a frightening diurnal spiral, all social networks, especially those with audiovisual resources. , with the help of robotics reschedulers online. Earlier, the anti-communist storm of 2018, strongly reverberated on social media (as it sounds projected towards an indefinite tomorrow), elected the current occupant of the Planalto Palace, which endorses, with militia gunpowder, the entire digital cauldron in favor of privatization neoliberalism, legitimate militarization and the necrofascist rewriting of the Brazilian State.

These succinct stitches, in the curvature of the avalanche of events covered, are enough to demonstrate that, for more than a decade, digital networks are no longer the extension of the streets: between one mass protest (face-to-face) and another, the networks are what became the (new) “urban space”. The process has also been reversed for a long time: technofacilitation mobile devices, linked to miniaturized ultraportability, transformed the streets into an extension of networks, revealing that, from the point of view of real-time communication (interactive instantaneity), in particular via cell phones, the political tension between the center (of the hurricane) and the periphery (daily life) ) had tectonic plates profoundly disturbed: as Paul Virilio (1984, 2002), a late French thinker, recalls, the center became the networks – and the center is called real time. There are several initiatives, veteran and in progress, of continuous and expansive population of these networks by leftist strands. They need to be infinitely multiplied and politically oriented in a unified anti-fascist perspective, more determined and with action – as suggested – necessarily decentralized.

Evidently, due to the social and cultural importance of mass media visibility in this process, the anti-fascist socio-political and ethical-cultural enterprise needs, by duty of strategic intelligence, to add, without prejudiced restriction or unjustified pruritus, the voluntary or osmotic adhesion of all channels and audiovisual and radio programs that are strictly averse to authoritarian and adventurous traits, in particular via journalistic, humorous, debate and/or interview layers, in real time or not. This point, despite being extremely sensitive, as problematic as it is essentially, is, at the same time, of paramount importance for the discussion table.

Fortunately or unfortunately, the anti-fascist macro-network, in view of its social-historical nature, will never be able to afford to discard beforehand – without the necessary approval of the best judgment of sequence – this influential symbolic belt of the industrialization of culture (where we arrived, by political necessity!), stuck in socially intertwined branches (and with non-centralized action) of daily printed newspapers, weekly magazines of information and radio and television stations, with day-to-day repercussions on the digital visibility of fixed or mobile terminals. That is to say, in addition to the more serene reception of the media (from political parties or other civil organizations), allocated on the Internet and/or projected via cable, the multitudinal anti-fascist movement cannot surrender to the very modest posture, so anti-strategic, of unaccompanied, as sympathetic and extensive forces, of all spaces and pores of conservative socio-media instances e with a clear vigilant function in relation to what, explicitly or in assumptions, attacks constitutional precepts, violates freedom of expression and opinion, the formal relationship between republican powers and their relationship with civil society, and collaborates for the destruction of civil rights. In theory, in these media environments, conservatism, when politically serious, culturally committed and historically aware of its program, is essentially anti-fascist, due to the fear of, suddenly or in the immediate future, melting legal prerogatives referring to business initiatives without guardianship by the State and/or governments and the circulation of opinion without prior control by any external bodies. To whom do not escape the discursive and narrative filigrees of media mass, the agenda of procedures in this corporate sphere, aiming to completely reject a disastrous omen, reaches the point of, in some part of its symbolic production, breaking even with the euphemistic and protopolitical cynicism of journalistic “objectivity” and “neutrality”.

In particular, the arc of counter-fascist retaliation must incorporate, as independent and consonant companies – in an almost militant parallel operation, now discreet, now overexposed, with a numerously deserved audience –, the salaried voices and progressive instances of this conservative media circle, holding a relative margin of convinced opinionated action, always sensitively hoisted and ready for courageous and direct denunciation, either in articulation texts, or (when possible) in editorials, or even in videos and/or audios of analytical comments.

Likewise, the counter-fascist macro-network needs to count on the tacit support of large contingents of the population (in the popular, lower-middle and middle consumer classes) concerned with overcoming the current historical circumstances of the country, especially and justifiably, the gigantic poorest portion affected their monthly income and their labor and social security rights.

The goal, which – remember – these circumstances prove to be transgenerational, must be, together with more organized and fruitful actions in digital and interactive networks, to condition the formation, without a monopolizing and conducting instance, of a broad media visibility of counter-pressure , in the political architecture of an internally differentiated and cohesive republican-democratic ecosystem in the programmatic cause, and that works as a social barrier of anti-fascist protection, of all types and coming from all sectors. And, after converting the national territory into a contesting semiosphere widely permeated by verbal, audiovisual and sound flows to safeguard democracy, it may let its guard down, in a state of prudence and attention, with a political success to be referenced to posterity and a multilateral conscience of duty fulfilled.

VI

And where have you seen it, read it ever
what knight errant has been brought before justice,
for bad homicides that hubiese committed?
Cervantes (2004, p. 91)

The social-historical scenario of this anti-fascist macro-combat – it cannot be forgotten – is intertwined with another edge of the relatively “normalized” post-2016 state of exception in which the young Brazilian democracy formally finds itself from now on. The thought of opposition to the majority tendencies of the current federal reality is firm in recognizing that, cumulatively to the authoritarian socio-mediatic atmosphere of the lawfare, the defense of democratic values ​​depends, paradoxically and equally, on the decisive rejection and urgent solution to the ostensible legal messianism of the judiciary, which, acclimatized in recent anomic and convenient political conditions, was consolidated in the country throughout the second decade of this century .[9]

From the first jurisdictional instance (in promiscuity of principles and functions with the agenda of the public prosecutor) to the most decorated echelons of the judicial system, a certain relatively concatenated hermeneutic-procedural segment assumed a hegemonic-mediatic role beyond the constitutionally admissible red line, to, in the transition of the decade, to carry out two legally atypical institutional actions: (1) the bargaining of attributions of the Legislative Power in the name of the fight against corruption between the State and big capital, under legal protection in almost unconditional freedom of investigation and judgment, as well as unprecedented ballast in productivism lawfare [it is worth specifying, systematic negotiation of media-journalistic factoids widely corrosive to the reputation of names selectively cited in official hearings, based on whistleblower agreements obtained via judicial barter for commutation of sentence (rule in a first degree court, with subsequent approval by the Supreme Court Federal Court]; and, by doing so, (2) the subordination of constitutional principles to occasional juridical-political interpretations that are as absolutist as they are dubious, above which rest only the same hermeneutics, along with higher instances that manage and apply them .

Legal and political interpretations to the contrary have not been sufficient, in terms of consistency and purposes, to sew a good consensus capable of preventing the realization that this self-proclaimed (and not-unanimously self-disgusting) judicial monarchism – with a legal and socially somewhat “sanitary” nature ”, someone could argue – it continues to undermine the democratic regime, on the pretext of being its “technical” safeguard, apparently free of party ideologies, throwing it as violently as silently into structural defection (far from the ideal key-trunk of healthy balance between the three republican Powers) by deepening the very state of exception that, strictly speaking, it was up to him to combat, as a constitutional duty.

VII

The drummer will talk nonsense about freedom
Bertold Brecht (2000, p. 143)

In unfolded recapitulation, the sociopolitical symptoms and expressions of neo-fascism in Brazil are, as seen, easily integrated into a coherent thread. Progressively squandering the competence of the State as an entrepreneurial agent, to shape it into a minimal dynamic skeleton with impaired power of economic interference, neo-fascist necropolitics juxtaposes the quick and noisy dismissal of socially restorative public policies to the legal and systematic dismantling of constituted social rights, in particular labor and social security, stamping out all successful regulation in favor of wage earners and the poorest. It mixes degrading verbal attacks against the 1988 Federal Constitution and talks of public promotion to criminals and executioners of Latin American dictatorships from the 1960s to the 1980s, to vilify, with bald truculence, all defenders of legislation aligned with the Universal Declaration of Human Rights . It sustains, with willful transparency, authoritarian chants, such as the copious discourse, with seasonal variations, that the formal injunctions and the rules of equanimity of the Rule of Law hinder the country's governability. For related reasons, it bombs media, news programs, reports and press articles, as well as cultural productions (films, videos, plays, etc.) in defense of democratic values ​​and/or with a critical position in relation to the Federal Government. Fulfill this script of ruin with the same acrimonious sting with which it suffocates official research bodies and the production of statistical indicators on the state of the art in various social sectors.

In addition, neo-fascist necropolitics grants emphatic support, in an open square, to parastatal militias and extermination groups, while, in special commissions in the National Congress, it forces, with obtuse harassment, the normative establishment of the “illicitude exclusion”, pompous “juridiquese”. ” macabre destined to bring the country to its knees before two uncivil feats perpetrated: (1) stealing, not without a euphemistic tartufo, the federal legislation that backs the project (not yet fully consummated in Brazil) of the Rule of Law; and (2) officially grant authorization for agents of state repression, converted into neo-bandeirante hunters with nervous hands on the trigger, to kill selectively, that is, tonally racist, with the additional claim of legitimizing escape from any criminal court. It thus invariably conditions fertile ground for the aggressive revival of Brazilian Integralism (readapted from European Nazi-fascism in the 1930s and 1940s), in the wake of the recent strengthening of the interventionist-military movement under a constitutional alibi, at the same time as repressive fundamentalist forces and obscure (State and informal, hand to hand) see themselves indiscriminately liberated, proud of themselves, with actions without remorse.

As it could not be otherwise, neo-fascist necropolitics intentionally exercises and stimulates the sectarian and dishonest stigmatization of the left, with collegially adulterated historical and social foundations: presenting them as “perverse”, “bloodthirsty” and “dangerous threats” to the democratic regime, spread an inhospitable political and media climate, based on repetitive disinformation, to generate cognitive insecurity and structural distrust, both with unconditional effect. It transfers, with this – not without primary dissuasion –, its own attributes to the lap of the enemy, in the eagerness to hide, under the smokescreen of imputations, what neo-fascists genuinely are, making it difficult for common sense and non-specialized public opinion to access to the perception that the haters and sympathizers are the ones who in fact constitute a threat to democracy, the same one that the neo-fascists, from time to time, show themselves obscenely bent to “watch over” to implode, as a great bomb of rarefied and progressive action, it little by little. Part of this tactical procedure, in line with the underestimation of the UN, the practices of injurious and infamous corrosion of the reputation of consecrated personalities of democratic history, in Brazil and abroad, knowingly aligned with progressive, socialist and/or popular projects of State and action policy. And so on.

To optimize the facts – it is not too much to explain –, the neo-fascist necropolitics, cunningly competent in exploiting convenient legal loopholes, adorns itself with current laws only to fray them, changing normative clothes according to the occasion. Confusing a democratic regime with the prevailing legal order, it gives everyone, because it is perfectly framed, the appearance of being harmless, so there are no sensible reasons for fear, for example, in relation to neoliberal policies, supposedly necessary in themselves. Such policies follow, however, markedly anti-social foundations insofar as they place themselves in absolute rupture with the principle of consistent reheating of the economy through productive, regulatory and intense participation of the State, guided by a project of society under the commitment of systemic combat to the socioeconomic inequalities and progressive generation of formal employability.

The great plague – it is worth noting – re-emerges more enraptured and self-confident (as with the justification of a resentment repressed in decades-long humiliations) not only through the legitimacy of an electoral cycle and/or the faltering gears of the Brazilian State of Law, but mainly under the populist pretense of remaining framed within them. Memory shades justice against pitfalls and lures: neo-fascism – it should be noted –, embryonic in everyday social relations, as a sneaky movement and with the power of dispute for control of the State, meanders, when victorious, ascension within it just to carry out the even sinister in a veiled and slow way, namely, eliminating more people through the sieve of a frighteningly indifferent technobureaucratic accounting. For strategic reasons, this necropolitics can even make use of institutional and discursive cynicism to “promote” the model of formal democracy in various media windows, only to, on the sly, accomplish exactly the opposite.

Structurally, the symbolic production of the mass media, especially with regard to the journalism of large corporations (television and radio at the forefront), ends up participating, unfortunately, voluntarily or osmosis, in this surreptitious and frivolous dissuasion of “ applaud" daily the centripetal neoliberal dismantling of the edifice of democracy with packages of "news service" about it, of "high technical quality", "objectivity" and "impartiality", as if to say - as concessions from the State that they are -, the against the will of their own blind eyes, which accept or tolerate anti-republican destruction as long as everything stems from the current legal order.

It should be underlined, moreover, that the great plague, spread glocally, reappears in every pore of society: in the streets, cameras in hand; in family and neighborhood groups, with plentiful food on the table or not; us and fur media mass media (printed newspapers and magazines, as well as TV and radio), by media and interactive niches (sites, Blogs, platforms, profiles, channels, etc.), by multitechnologies (Desktops, laptops, netbooks, tablets, cell phones), among other features. The great plague is technologically intimate with adherent bodies: it spreads all the more through communicational prostheses, the same ones that, due to the circulating myriad of comments e posts, also obsidia bodies that reject him on principle. Since there is no authoritarianism (of any kind) without the aid of communication (linked to a specific form of aesthetics), from now on neo-fascism comes from and through a glocalized reality in real time, from and through multimedia visibility, which it serves , while nailed to them (via Gadgets e devices), it wants to grow, guaranteeing its duration. Fake news constantly and systematically prepared by digital hordes (official or not), with media tactics, in virtual guerrilla practices, including operations in and from the Pantanal da deep web; robotic delegation online socially enhancing premeditated disinformation shocks; aggressive and repeated propaganda of the neoliberal booklet; press conferences with planned cheering; Deliberate official omissions and related characteristics – all these communication factors belong to the same political logic of the time.

Despite the series of media buffoonery that are only apparently spontaneous or accidental, which in fact do nothing but dissuade the deeper evil intentions, the neo-fascist necropolitics that emerged from the 2018 election is a “war machine” in rapid self-learning (especially on how to retro-deconfigure in total the social post-1988), in permanent internal readjustment and increasingly prepared for the organized siege (always denied, but effective) to the divergent discursive trends that – rain knives – tend to quadruple political, cultural and/or media influence in the coming decades . More oiled in the gears, it pretentiously completes its security projection both on the magmas of history and on its narrative facades, past and future.

It is not untrue to conjecture that, in a virulent and populist reaction to the social advances of progressive left-wing governments at the beginning of the century, fascist necropolitics, wishing to trigger the “cultural war” in Latin America, chose Brazil again (after more than seven decades) as a geopolitical guinea pig, in the wake currently protected by the nearest mirror, the American extreme right, for whose stripes and corporate stars only hounds and skirts (no conscience of embarrassment) salute in public.

VIII

Darkness extends but does not eliminate
star substitute in hands.
Carlos Drummond de Andrade (2000, p. 31)

burial waits at the door:
the dead is still alive
João Cabral de Melo Neto (1997, p. 169)

The discursive subtraction, as a State policy, of civilizing achievements and/or civil values ​​from the pantheon of evidence constitutes a major historical-cultural fact. When it becomes necessary to defend tooth and nail the chromatic diversity of some truism in force, the procedure, by its very existence, without the aid of any argument or content, reveals the size of the historical setback in political matters. As perplexing as it is today to an educated citizen of any economically affluent country from the second half of the 2018th century onwards, the political and legal restraint of ideas, speeches and practices that ruin the value of freedom of thought and expression, for example, passes, in post-XNUMX Brazil, due to the need to unconditionally defend the democratic experience in a version still old fashioned, formal, that is, state and abstract, anchored in institutional interactions of model Powers and electoral rituals. It is, of course, a minimal democracy, totally insufficient, far from the horizon of real democracy in everyday social relations, where, with periodic bumps and sabotage, Brazilian society seemed to be heading, until recently.

What, however, appeared for decades as an indisputable achievement, settled, with prosperity, for the next steps of economic and cultural development (as in the historical trajectory of several European countries), has returned to be urgent in national territory, as a sobbing form of resolution of a serious historical regression. That is to say, with all the damage and losses that already exist, of profound inequalities, largely due to the limited model of democracy in force – in fact, what is left of it in the country – the social-historical and political circumstances compel us to defend it beforehand, as a greater good, as the only way to avoid a worse situation, embedded in a more tonic exception. This mister corroborates the fair international chorus in progress, leaning over the recent political trajectory of the world: however chimerical the absurdity already is, it has become crucial to protect under seven keys the fragile legacy of institutional and multilateral advances poignantly extracted from empires and totalitarianisms , dictatorships and coups, in order to grant it an indefinite historical period, for free breathing, improvement according to local cultures and extended fruition, more consequential and daily than the one currently obtained, towards a democratic civilization – if possible, reinvented – involving the greatest number of countries.

Although projected by an ideological source susceptible of radical criticism and/or legitimate social and axiological revision – that is, the political modernity of the French Enlightenment –, the presumed democracies there, which resume the Greek-classical systemic experience, are too young to wither away. resilient necropolitical misadventures, such as neoliberalism and/or neofascism. The theoretical-practical validity per se this proposition is independent of the fact that, since the first social-historical emergence of the democratic experience, its current models have been the protagonists of serial wars (of self-defense, counter-attack and/or unilateral warmongering) throughout the 50th century and until the moment (two pitched world wars; a long “cold war”, of espionage and blackmail, which lasts; and a war against terror by fragmented fundamentalist movements, financed by counter-Western states). In Brazil and Latin America, this experience is no more than XNUMX years old.

IX

Tread hard on the ground of the night.
Leave it at the crossing
Armed stars marking the route.
It's not too late:

affected the hard journey,
the crowd will rise up innumerable.
Pedro Tierra (2000, p. 69)

Evidently, numerical success in universal suffrage within the democratic edifice will never guarantee the right to anyone and/or any social movement to bomb the pillars of the entire edifice. No successful electoral performance guarantees the proud triumphalism of leading the community to the mouth of the precipice.

Against the disaster announced by this social-historical regression, the ethos non-dichotomous, the Philia expanded strategic and pathos previously mentioned negentropic demands, as a fertile ground for combat, the development of politicized, multimedia glocal practices guided by democratic principles, especially in digital and interactive contexts, aiming at the discursive production of republican and anti-fascist transparency. From another angle, the clash between worldviews, ideas about the organization of society and political projects for the future of Brazil must be raised to the level of a dissecting visibility of hoaxes and mystifications and in favor of public clarification about and against ideological delusions of neo-fascist hyperaesthetics, with a priority focus on fake news and interpretations that, from history to science, from philosophy to politics, from education to the arts, distort, with reactionary and absurd intent, the logic of peaceful facts (despite their historical relativity) and engender structural misinformation. (In recent years, the extreme right's adulterations dared vainly ascend to specialized scientific paradigms, with repercussions rooted in the common sense mentality. The ultraconservative discourse attacked, for example, the theses of the Earth's circumference and the heliocentric system; tomorrow could be the instead of the law of gravity and other serene consensus... In the field of art, it was heard, in a video on YouTube, posted by the resentful Brazilian from Richmund, in the United States, that the German philosopher Theodor Adorno would have composed the songs of the Beatles... Remaining along the same route, this untimely misfortune will not be far from proposing that the electronic devices developed by political modernity can be kept or loaded with plugs fixed in human nostrils. , ends up taking care to expunge such ephemeris from the random path of history, referring to it in a simple footnote, with hilarious treatment.)

The glocalized discursive production of negentropic visibility constitutes collective sociocultural and political work of putting the neo-fascist catastrophe to light, of tireless production of dismantling transparency of all its excrescences (from the invisible to the gross), in an increasingly concatenated and extended rhythm, in and from all fields of knowledge and action (with urgency for those under attack or threat), through actions inside and outside the school and university system, in the line that extends from the sphere of work to that of free time, through movements or political, legal, cultural, academic, journalistic and similar segments, in an effort of radical republican-democratic thinking aimed at influencing the quality of socially produced citizenship and the critical education of people, both current and future, in all age groups , from an early age. The institutional and social construction of a political and cultural armor of anti-fascist principles, grounded in everyday life and in continuous expansion, is and always will be the best prevention, with glocalized mass protests and/or directly in the streets, whenever necessary.

As occurred throughout the 21 years of the civil-military-business dictatorship, artistic production guided by the politicizing intentionality of contradictories, in all branches (in music, cinema, video, theater, literature, photography, stand-up comedy etc.) and in all media environments, tends to play – together with the democratic jurisprudence and advocacy categories, with the (today threatened) community of educators and with left-wing social movements – an exponential role in the process of strengthening the structural field progressive and dynamic, internally diverse and, at the same time, programmatically unison in favor of the reorganization of Brazilian society. This fundamental cultural function is also placed in compatibility with the collective work, inside and outside political parties, parliaments and social movements themselves, in the streets and/or in the networks, of accurate monitoring of the historical process of rooting democracy in the country, with transforming effects (slow, but awaited) in the filigree of everyday social relations.

Following the example of the German “National Socialist” ideology of the second decade of the XNUMXth century, a precursor to the Third Reich and its secret police, the SS, and which made extensive use of the commercial radio technology emerging at the time, Brazilian neo-fascism, stricken with exacerbation signic-mediatic and politically excessive verbal abuse borderline, one has, in theory, to be victimized by one's own voracious mouth. The symbolic plane of culture, full of internal historical contradictions, in whose underworld neo-fascism was constituted and “planted” the so-called “cultural war”, must be, due to its total openness to plurivocal diversity and, why not, to the political saturation pro- democracy, the very antidote of this necropolitical movement.

Epílogo

[…] yet
there are songs to sing beyond the
men.
Paul Celan (1977, p. 64)

the endless street
goes beyond the sea.
Carlos Drummond de Andrade (2000, p. 20)

Either the progressive and more prepared forces of the left spectrum, catalyzing sympathizing and non-opportunistic differences – with eyes attentive to the nature and direction of alliances – collaborate vigorously to win the “cultural war”, on the social-historical and political scale in which it is projected in Brazil, or the neo-fascist necropolitics will softly swallow all the different and poorest (including the co-religionists and/or useful ones), causing them to wither little by little, with costly consequences for the myriad of aligned people that remain – even, who knows , the near future will seduce the most barbaric and cynical delights to install the vituperation of civilization in the living room of history, precisely through the laws, norms and rules that progressive forces have built, in the extension of the civilized world itself, to prevent the revival of the great plague.

A theoretical reaction (with a political background) to the current state of exception and its cauldron of nefarious inclinations, this text – as noted in the first footnote – certainly abdicated any novelty when it was written to corroborate the safeguarding efforts and the need to reinvention of republican-democratic values, as well as strengthening the foundations of the programmatic and permanent union of the social forces on whose shoulders the accomplishment of this historic task places its hopes today. In broad terms, the moment calls, deep down, for the alert competition of organized civil society and committed to these values. The poet's exhortation was none other than this, expressed in a dry and illuminating way, “when fascism became increasingly stronger”, in the transition from the second to the third decade of the last century:

Fight with us in an anti-fascist union[10]!
(BRECHT, 2000, p. 95).

The political and institutional unhappiness of the current social-historical regression in Brazil perhaps makes the temporal arcade of the present reflection, with an air as seen heavy – at the height of the responsibility and the call of the moment –, to cover, unwillingly scattered, the next two or three decades. The deep indignation of a significant portion of the population with the neo-fascist necropolitics hopefully tends to make the main message of the reflection, along with so many similar ones already published – here just a little more systematized and extensive and, perhaps because of this, in the extra verse, a stick of more convincing ember –, to place himself politically beyond the scene once described by Lacan, at the service of personal testimony, in a surprising metaphor, unfolded over almost two dozen pages:

I've always talked to the walls.
[…] is that, when talking to the walls, it interests some people.
The wall [the wall] can always serve as a mirror [wall][11].
Jacques Lacan (2011, p. 80, 99)

In the precariousness of certainties, the only thing that prevails is that the work of retaliation is always less strong when, in the course of strategies and procedures and, even more so, after it, if under effective victory, the comfort gained is discouraged for the more political lessons urgent and ongoing.

The defense, today as yesterday, dramatic, of democracy in Brazil just hopes not to live the displeasure of having to listen – how many times? – that the historical and identity differences in the political scope of the left are so great that the fight against neo-fascist necropolitics will have to be done according to the majority pattern of action until now, that is, segmented and/or fragmented, when not random. The opponent makes carrion bets; and, as is known, includes such a pattern in one of them. May the opposing democratic expectation have as a companion the refusal of oblivion, with a force capable of converting the memory of recent history into a collective and representative monument of honor to the voice of poetry that promised never to surrender to “easy verse”, in the person of Hamilton Pereira da Silva, unique heteronym Pedro Tierra ([1975], 2009)[12], Brazilian poet with a whole soul, political prisoner from 1972 to 1977, who geopoliticized the poem in finesse of origin – “my land” – and who, edging Brecht from the dark interwar phase (according to the epigraph to thematic block V), refused “the lily / of the weekly fairs of dead flowers”, entered the poem “gagged” and “ hands tied”, he offered him “bleeding (…) [his] fingers / on the cement of the cell” and, remembering that “poetry… / against all forms of death / flourishes”, he versed, also dryly:

No onslaught of death knights
will be muted.

And, under the cruelty of “chained moons” that wounded his “wrist / in a laugh of irons / compromised” (ibid., p. 175), he testified:

This poem is not a murmur,
is broken glass in the throat,
chewed scream
at the time of execution.

Art as the most refined decantation of freedom of expression is one of the first to suffer the rough pitch of the blade on its skin. In the wellspring of between the lines as in each painful verse, in each ground brushstroke, in each unfinished sculpture, only art, before, during and after the brutality of the facts, manages, in the deepest sensitivity of the sign, to gather all the pleading cries, all Retained revolt, of marching conviction, against tyranny. A monument to the irredeemable pain of the world spiked in the front gardens of all armored palaces, art – “trampled, spit on, tortured” (ibid., p. 173) – matures in the leaden hell of days, always volcanic in exemplary spring, the naked sovereign skin, blood still wet.

            The imminence of adversities makes the serious octaves ground the necessary: ​​let us never forget the poets (here representing all the workers of the art) who refused to give in to the seduction of silence, much less to the obtuse smile of the adversary who, great and vile, camouflages the cowardice on the armed coat of arms of the executioner before the defenseless. There are times when only the permanent bundle of shoulders, arms and futures can, vivid in memory, reach the honorable stage of a just evocation. Poets, faithful to human suffering even where the body and soul die a little each morning, carve horizons in stone – “I free the word from the shadow and write on the stone the provisional outline of my dreams”, which “I relive, recomposed gray , in the dreams of each one” –; these poets, remembering true heroes, redeem the soul and trajectory of the underprivileged, the disgraced, the innocent and of “all who left without saying goodbye”[13]. Only a universal rudeness of spirit, compatible, moreover, with the rudeness of the current times (not only in Brazil), can commit the impoliteness of forgetting, without becoming brothers, without strengthening, without raising barricades, who lived “the floor of the dead", "a land where men's mouths are sewn" and, even so, he offered his poetry, in the totality of his being - "broken wrist, / open veins" -, as "the clay of a country in struggle" , with eyes turned to the reconstruction of life:

I will till the ground in the morning.
with these hands
still handcuffed.

As if from the most unexpected background of the silent justice of the history of culture, this evidence does not fail to grant unspeakable pride: torturers do not have poets; and if they had, they would be an insult to all literature. Animals from cellars of torture, intoxicated by blood (to invoke Dostoevsky), much less will they be poets. O ethos from poetry he cuts the identity history of himself: he has always been purged from the crimson hands of the criminals. Something different happens in relation to their constituents: “superior” fascists, whether or not they wear suits, have favorite artists. Taste is enough: there is no need to be the craftsman himself to defile art. This is why, in one case as in another, there are only reasons, against the grain and in the light of the unparalleled, to re-elaborate darkness through the voice of poets: dictatorship, torture and fascism never again. The anti-totalitarian motto, universal in character, also contains an idiosyncratic and humanitarian antithesis in the yearning. Poets usually settle down where desolation, disillusionment and folly germinate prosperous ground so that some ingenious trap one day annuls them. Its message, inserted at the same time in the pebble of now and in the marble to come, awaits, in protest now discreet, now blazing, the unmasked justice that will dissolve it, extirpating the affliction (explicit or nonspecific) that founded it. This justice, which aims at itself without shame, loyal to repairing damages – the same ones that, in order to be combated and minimally overcome, require the past –, is exclusively attracted, in great affection, by those who do not forget.

São Paulo, summer 2020.

* Eugenio Trivinho Professor of the Graduate Studies Program in Communication and Semiotics at the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP).

References

BOURDIEU, Pierre. Backfires 2. Rio de Janeiro: Jorge Zahar, 2001.

BRECHT, Bertold. This Babylonian confusion; Who defends himself; In dark times; Beginning of war; Friends; German war primer. In: ——. poems 1913-1956. Translation by Paulo César de Souza. 6. ed. Sao Paulo: Ed. 34, 2000. p. 31-32, 73, 136, 143, 146, 157-160.

CELAN, Paul. Lithosols. In: ——. poems. Translation: Flávio R. Kothe. Rio de Janeiro: Tempo Brasileiro, 1977.

CERVANTES, Miguel de. Don Quijote de la Mancha. Madrid: Real Academia Española; Alfaguara, 2004 (Edición del IV centenary / Associación de Academias de la Lengua Española).

CHENG, François. Double Song and Other Poems. Translation: Bruno Palma. Cotia, SP: Atelier, 2011.

DOSTOÏEFFSKY, Fedor. The house of the dead: or Prison life in Siberia. London; New York: JM DenT & Sons; EP Dutton, 1911.

DRUMMOND DE ANDRADE, Carlos. I carry it with me; Our time.In: ——. The People's Rose. 21. ed. Rio de Janeiro; São Paulo: Record, 2000. p. 18-22, 29-37.

GIANNOTTI, Jose Arthur. work and reflection. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Brasiliense, 1984.

HEANEY, Seamus. Digging; Summer home; From whatever you say say nothing. In: ——. selected poems: 1966-1987. New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2014. p. 1-2, 34-36, 78-80.

IM, Yun Jung. crow's eye: and other works by Yi Sán^g. São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1999. (Signs Collection, 26).

JELSCH, Judith. The British Museum viking poetry of love and war. London: British Museum, 2013.

LACAN, Jacques. I'm talking to the walls: conversations in the Chapel of Sainte-Anne. Translated by Vera Ribeiro. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2011.

LEVITSKY, Steven; ZIBLATT, Daniel. how democracies die. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 2018).

MARTINS, Cristiano Zanin; MARTINS, Valeska Teixeira Zanin; VALIM, Raphael. lawfare: an introduction. São Paulo: Countercurrent, 2019.

MBEMBE, Achilles. critique of black reason. Translation by Marta Lance. Lisbon: Antigone, 2014.

_______. Necropolitical: Biopower, sovereignty, state of exception, politics of death. Translation by Renata Santini. Rio de Janeiro: n-1 editions, 2018.

MELO NETO, Joao Cabral de. Death and severe life. In: ——. serial and before. 4. imp. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 1997. p. 143-180.

MONTAIGNE, Michel de. Essay. Sao Paulo: Ed. 34, 2016.

MÜLLER, Luiz. The Triumph of Thanatos: Bolsonarist Fascism as the Incarnation of Necropolitics the glass house, 09 Nov. 2018. Available at: https://acasadevidro.com/2018/11/09/o-triunfo-de-tanatos-o-fascismo-bolsonarista-como-encarnacao-da-necropolitica/. Accessed on: 21 Jan. 2020.

NOGUERA, Renato. Is Democracy Possible?Cult Magazine, n. 240, 05 Nov. 2018. (Partly available at https://revistacult.uol.com.br/home/democracia-e-possivel/. Accessed on: 21 Jan. 2020.)

PASCAL, Blaise. Pansies. Edition by Michel Le Guern. Paris: Gallimard, 2004.

PELBART, Peter Pal. The becoming-black of the world. Cult Magazine, no. 240, 05 Nov. 2018. (Available at: https://revistacult.uol.com.br/home/o-devir-negro-do-mundo/. Accessed on: 21 Jan. 2020.)

ROSA, Joao Guimaraes. big hinterland: footpaths. 19. ed. Rio de Janeiro: Nova Fronteira, 2001. (Special edition).

SOUZA, Jesse de. delay elite. Rio de Janeiro: Estação Brasil, 2019. (Revised and expanded edition.)

TIERRA, Peter. With these hands; Do not look back…; The shadow persists; The reason for the poem; Return to Earth; Blow. In: ——. Poems of the People of the Night. 2nd ed. São Paulo: Perseu Abramo Foundation; Publisher Brasil, 2009. p. 67, 69, 90, 173-174, 175-176, 178.

TZU, Sun. The art of warfare. Translation by Roger Ames. New York; Toronto: Ballantine; Random House of Canada, 1993. (The first English translation incorporating the recently discovered Yin-ch'üch-shan texts.)

VIOLI, Paul. Tyrannosaurus Bronx; Four poems. In: ——. selected poems: 1970-2007. Edited by Charles North and Tony Towle. Berkeley, CA: Rebel Arts, 2014. p. 27, 28.

VIRILIO, Paul. L'espace critique. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 1984.

_______. L'inertie polaire: this. Paris: Christian Bourgois, 2002.

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Notes

[1] [Warning:] An essay exclusively for dissemination, the theoretical-strategic and pragmatic subsidies gathered therein comply, strictly speaking, with loyalty to the originally intended subtitle (and later replaced by a less specific section), namely: ethos non-dichotomous, Philia expanded strategic and pathos negentropic glocal in times of micropolitical rescaling of culture. These conceptual expressions are clarified and articulated throughout the argument.
The nature and purpose of the text, written and titled before the first case of COVID-19 contamination in China, inspired the author to suspend compliance with regular academic procedures in favor of expanded clarification, aimed at varied audiences. For this reason, the argument was established in such a way as to dispense with, as much as possible, the technical adornments normally based on the serial citation methodology. This resource mostly gravitated towards fixing inspiring epigraphs and text blots. Likewise, footnotes have been reduced to the necessary number.
The close and systematic presentation of the essay lends itself to the authorship's unshakable linguistic habits. Readers will notice many passages sealed in stamped ink: they only aim to equate, as an obvious symbolism, but with adequate signaling intent, to the social-historic gravity of the status quo current Brazilian; and, moreover, they serve, contrary to pamphleteering, to demarcate the quality of one side: more than proposing, the text is engaged – in combat, so to speak –, conceived and written with joy of soul, convinced by the professed values ​​and by the outlined goal. Due to circumstances that history is responsible for symmetrising, the essay evokes and fulfills what Pierre Bourdieu, breaking with the Weberian paradigm of analytical divorce between science and politics, established, in 2000, in the Preface to Backfires (p. 7), one of his most politically committed and remarkably up-to-date writings: “[…] those who have the opportunity to dedicate their lives to the study of the social world cannot remain neutral and indifferent, distanced from the struggles whose outcome will be the future of this world”.
Although not strictly academic, the text evidently mobilizes scientific and literary knowledge at the service of dissemination in free language, because it is practically impossible to deal with the theme, on the ground of the earth itself, without sober hands on the countersword of protection, eyes on resistance active and one foot on the streets. More than all, and before them, poets know the design. With variations in shape and color, his verses, because in the blood, exude it, regardless of the cocoon of belonging:

Between my finger and my thumb
The squat pen rests; snug as a gun.
Seamus Heaney (2014, p. 1)

And for those who still have doubts about whether, in the history of culture, poetry, always seen as mild, struggles, let us hear the dramatic testimony of those who suffered, in the open, their own verses:

Poetry does not mark time.
[...]
I found her on a rainy day,
during combat.
Bring a wind of freedom in your mouth
and the machine gun in his hands.
Pedro Tierra (2000, p. 173)

That, from a strictly methodological point of view, the text appears less scientific is self-explanatory (and thus also justified) in and by the conviction that the best response to all forms of social brutality must come not only from and through the street (and, today, on and through the network), but also through art of all genres, in all supports, especially under the assiduous encouragement of linguistic strategies and ethical services of reason for contradicto. The formal structure of the text, evocative of the composition of a play, echoes – one would like to believe – this principle, all the more so when in the fundamental and punctuated company of the poets.
Moreover, the essay was exclusively conceived to defend what was left of democracy in Brazil, to swell the ranks of the reinvention of democratic values ​​and to consolidate the foundations to amalgamate leftist and progressive forces around these tasks, as a contribution to the fight against neo-fascism in Brazil.

[2] The issue is addressed in thematic blocks IIIb and VI, below.

[3] See thematic blocks III, IV and VIII.

[4] The relationships between necropolitics, fascism and Bolsonarism were, for the first time, articulated, in a relatively systematic (although not definitive) way, by Peter Pál Pelbart, Renato Noguera and Luiz Müller, in articles on engaged philosophy and sociology, published in November 2018 , still under the impact of the elections at the time. The texts by Palbert and Noguera, “The becoming-black of the world” and “Is democracy possible?”, respectively, appeared in Cult Magazine, n. 240 (Nov. 2018); and Müller's, "The Triumph of Thanatos", was published online (in the same month). (See the bibliographical references.) With regard to necropolitics, the authors base themselves on the pioneering arguments of Joseph-Achille Mbembe, in Necropolitical: biopower, sovereignty, state of exception, politics of death and / or critique of black reason, fundamental works for understanding the concept and its empirical scope, especially linked to the racial and post-colonial dimension of politics and culture, with profound economic repercussions on the daily life, work and leisure conditions of black people and social groups economically disadvantaged and stigmatized.

The present reflection, inspired by the relations between neoliberalism, neo-fascist necropolitics and Bolsonarism, constitutes a free unfolding of the horizon interviewed by the four authors, as a theoretical contribution to the recognition of the multiple facets of the theme, also beyond the colonialist racialization of the skin, in the direction of a necropolitization sociostructural structure of the political system under neoliberal conditions. The task is carried out with and under the spirit of complementarity – shoulder to shoulder – subsumed in the goal proposed here, of programmatic and progressive combination of the left, as described below.

[5] The complexity of social logic lawfare, captured in the present study as harassing sociomediatic macro event, drags a vast interdisciplinary bibliography, still little known in Brazil. In it, the concept, originally linked to the mobilization of current legislation as an instrument of war, also appears related to the application of psychological and communication techniques on public opinion and entire populations, for the fulfillment of different objectives (political, geopolitical, religious, commercial, etc.) , on a national and global scale. Out of court – to privilege an important Brazilian section of this bibliography, compatible with a comprehensive exposition under the critical prism of Law –, see Martins, Martins and Valim (2019).

[6] The passage evokes the fundamental sociological work of Jessé de Souza – for the renewed understanding of Brazil –, especially delay elite (2019)

[7] Phrase collected by Pascal in Trials, by Montaigne (Book I, Chapter XIV).

French version, in Pansies (p. 518), fixed by Michel Le Guern: Nation farouche, qui ne Pensait pas que la vie sans les armes fût la vie. Translation by Sergio Milliet into Portuguese: fierce nation that did not believe it could live without fighting” (apud Montaigne, 2016, p. 98). Alternative version, close to the French: “fierce nation, who did not believe that life without weapons was life”.

[8] The reference is by Roger Ames, translator of the first North American edition of The art of warfare (op. cit., p. 10) based on the new version of Sun Tzu's text discovered in archaeological excavations at Yin-ch'üeh-shan, Shantung Province, in 1972. The find featured expanded expositions of the traditional thirteen chapters of the work and another five, hitherto lost.

[9] Under the concept of “criminal populism”, Luis Nassif recognized, in a succinct, brilliant and complete way, this threatening trait (no longer so subtle) of the Brazilian Judiciary (including the Federal Public Ministry). In a video on YouTube, entitled “The century of the Judiciary, the greatest threat to democracy”, the political analyst lists recent examples, in Brazil and in the world (found in Japan, the United States, Canada, Portugal and Peru), in which the Judiciary Power, tailing the Rule of Law under the necessary presumption of the defense of civilizing values ​​and guarantees, plays a copious policy of compliance under a series of mega-corporate and whistle-blowing conveniences, in the fulfillment of whose expedient ends up hurting Magna Cartas by granting investigative functions and by hindering the institute of due legal process guided by the precept of the full adversary, given in the broad right to defense; and, in this way, it closes the entire cycle of the executive service with political persecutions sanctioned by its own superior decisions, supports arbitrary and spectacular arrests as if it were the supreme corrective instance of society and, finally, prevails as the loci of reference for the judgment of eventual appeals. The video is available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0grwaf6x7Go.

[10] There was a hyphen in this word (here elided), because the translation of the poem was fixed in 2000, before the New Orthographic Agreement of the Portuguese Language came into force.

[11] wall: paranomasia of the French psychoanalyst by agglutination of native words mur e mirror (mirror), according to the translator of the work, Vera Ribeiro.

[12] The excerpts listed in the sequence (except for note 13, below) articulate the meanings of five of the author's poems, cited in the bibliography.

[13] Excerpt from José Arthur Giannotti's dedication to work and reflection (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2nd ed., 1984).