By THIAGO BLOSS DE ARAÚJO*

Under fascism, it is not a question of “another suicide”, but of a suicided person, or, more precisely, of a suicider.

Shortly after the fateful bomb attack in Praça dos Três Poderes on November 13, which resulted in the death of Bolsonarist Francisco Wanderley Luiz, the governor of the Federal District – Ibaneis Rocha – made the following statement: “This is a suicide.”

Although apparently trivial, Ibaneis Rocha's statement rescues a historical tradition in Brazil, namely: the use of suicide as a strategy to blame the dead and release the forces of co-optation and management of death produced by the authoritarianism present within society from responsibility.

In countless passages in our recent history, suicide has been rationally used as a resource to pardon perpetrators. Without a doubt, one of the main examples was the faked suicide of Vladimir Herzog, murdered on the premises of the DOI-CODI on October 25, 1975. The use of the justification of “suicide” became a cynical strategy of the Brazilian military dictatorship to conceal its murders, by attributing all responsibility for the death of the individual to his supposed madness, to his insanity.

However, Ibaneis' words are calculated. Last October, the Federal Police concluded the investigation into the coup acts of January 08, 2023, pointing out evidence of criminal activity by the governor in not coordinating effective actions to combat that coup attempt. His connivance, as well as that of Anderson Torres, was a clear sign of authorization for the destruction promoted by the Bolsonarist masses. The connivance was, rather, an incentive.

It is worth remembering that the escalation of extremist acts had already been taking place the previous year. In October 2022, following dissatisfaction with the result of the presidential elections, pro-Bolsonaro protests blocked more than a hundred points on highways and, in December 2022, two people were arrested for the attempted bomb attack at Brasília airport.

However, among these and many other acts, the one that caught our attention was the one that occurred on January 31, 2023, when a man died after setting himself on fire, in protest against the Supreme Federal Court. Before dying, the 58-year-old man shouted: “Death to Xandão”. This was perhaps the first recorded case of self-directed violence as a political act of Bolsonarism, which found a very similar one on November 13.

If for a portion of the left the cult of violence, as well as the permanent incitement of the masses against rights and democratic institutions, were not sufficient elements to understand Jair Bolsonaro's government as the contemporary expression of fascism, perhaps the latest attack on Praça dos Três Poderes is the final point for any lingering doubts.

After all, what defines the fascist wave is not just the escalation of authoritarianism in politics and violence against specific groups within the social body, but self-directed violence in the name of the collective, that is, violence of a suicidal nature.

As Vladimir Safatle rightly pointed out,^[1] According to the work of Paul Virilio, a fundamental characteristic of fascist society is the fact that it makes heterodestruction undifferentiated from self-destruction. The logic of destruction of the fascist State, due to its uncontrollability, becomes a pulsional dynamic of self-destruction. The annihilation of an external victim is internalized into self-victimization, into self-sacrifice in the name of the whole.

Because of this condition, this fascist self-sacrifice needs to be depoliticized by its true executioners. This is where Ibaneis's speech comes in, for whom the attack would be nothing more than the crazy expression of a solitary suicide. Reducing such an act to a pathology is nothing more than the calculated neoliberal strategy of particularizing a violence that, in its essence, is massiveized and permanently agitated by Jair Bolsonaro and his followers.

If the act promoted by Francisco Wanderley Luiz reveals that the coup d'état has clearly not ended in the country, his suicide is a reminder that fascism, in addition to being a regime of destruction and administration of the death of others, is also a regime of production of subjectivities willing to redeem themselves through self-destruction.

Under fascism, it is not a question of “another suicide”, but of a suicided person, or, more precisely, a suicider.

* Thiago Bloss de Araújo is a social psychologist and PhD from the School of Philosophy, Letters and Human Sciences at UNIFESP.

Note [1] https://dpp.cce.myftpupload.com/estado-suicidario/

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