ON ANTAGONISMS, DISPLACEMENTS AND SHACKLES

ABSTRACT:

The January 8th attacks in Brasília indicate the importance of collecting what emerged there as an expression of intrinsic (and not conjunctural) difficulties in Brazil. Relating the extreme hatred and destructiveness of the attacks with our colonial origin, the division of classes, races and cultures in which we have always maintained ourselves stands out. A fierce antagonism that leads to segregation and violence and prevents us from forming a collective that truly includes the diversity of the Brazilian population. Decolonial criticism, taken up with psychoanalysis and the ethics that accompanies it, allows us to resituate the tensions of current Brazil and opens the chance for a real commitment to the social bond, the environment, and the others.

Keywords:
psychoanalysis; Brazil; social responsability; collective

RESUMO:

Partindo das violações praticadas contra as instituições da República brasileira nos eventos do dia 8 de janeiro de 2023, em Brasília, procura-se demonstrar a importância de recolher o que ali emergiu, como expressão de dificuldades intrínsecas (e não apenas conjunturais) da nossa história e formação social. Examinando a relação dos componentes de ódio e agressividade extremos que permearam os ataques, com as linhas de força de nossa origem colonial, destaca-se o problema da divisão de classes, raças, gêneros, linguagens e culturas em que sempre nos mantivemos. Um antagonismo material e simbólico feroz, que é fonte permanente de segregação e violência e nos impede de formarmos uma coletividade que inclua, de fato, a diversidade da população brasileira. Com a introdução de elementos da crítica decolonial retomados a partir da psicanálise e o chamamento ético que a acompanha, afirma-se a necessidade de estabelecermos um novo paradigma que nos permita ressituar as tensões do Brasil atual, e que abra a chance de um comprometimento real de cada um com o laço social, o meio e os outros.

Palavras-chave:
psicanálise; Brasil; responsabilidade social; coletividade

Here comes Brazil bustling down the slope

(Moraes Moreira e Pepeu Gomes)

Antagonisms

In recent years, we have experienced various forms of incitement to hatred and violence. This happens here and in the world due to elements as broad as the direction of current capitalism, which causes increasingly fierce social exclusion, or the changes introduced in the field of discourse with science, digitalization, and the takeover of life by the dynamics of social networks where hate is cultivated, and forms a bond, among other factors. We are all there, therefore, and particularly in Brazil, no one can say they were not warned. Even so, the momentum of destruction we saw erupt in the attacks that took place on January 8 in Brasília was surprising.

At that time, all relevant deadlines for contesting the elections that took place months before were already behind us. And what was seen was not of the order of political action. On the contrary, the crowd acted in continuity with the erosion of all political dimension. Armed with sticks and stones - and cell phones that broadcast the feat live on social media - they entered the offices in broad daylight, by force, without permission, without going through security barriers. Violating everything in front of them. They destroyed documents and equipment, vandalized windows, furniture, and carpets, removed doors, stole weapons, looted pieces of historical memory, and ruined the beauty of Niemeyer’s columns, destroying fountains, sculptures, rooms and anterooms, auditoriums, and halls... As no important post was occupied, and there was almost no police resistance, the wave of destruction took institutional places, represented in the palaces-monuments of Brasília, by storm. An attack on the foundations of the republic, much more visceral and comprehensive than a simple protest against an electoral result.

Although less spectacular, amid all that devastation and against the background of images of the crowd occupying the ramps, the attack on a panel by Di Cavalcanti that was slashed across the screen draws attention. That, during that turmoil, someone made the effort to attack a painting at different points along its length, marks a kind of climax, a peak of fury. There were seven blows, not a single one, and not a tear from end to end. Seven stabs at the work considered emblematic, of inestimable value. Di Cavalcanti, as we know, is the painter of mestizos, the popular, the peripheral of all sorts. He preferably painted the diversity of the Brazilian population, the tropical aspect, the sensuality, and the social themes. The work from 1962 was certainly not the biggest victim of that day but the fact that it portrayed the integrative proposal for national identity that characterized our modernism made its ruin a true manifesto in the form of destruction.

That Sunday, it was this force of destruction that took over the scene like an explosion, a chain reaction. It seemed that the hatred accumulated in 500 years of our history emerged in that depredation, in which we were the predators of ourselves.

We tend to quickly settle for attributing these acts to a well-defined “them”: “them” the Bolsonarists, “them” the far right, “them” those “deceived by fake news.” It is indeed one of the most prevalent features of the hatred that has always permeated social life in Brazil: creating an “us” and a “them,” where the violence of the other is always denounced. However, once we witness the unusual and the force invested in those violations, we must make the ethical, theoretical, and political effort to collect what emerged there as an expression of intrinsic (and not just conjunctural) difficulties present in our history and social formation.

In extreme situations like the ones we are experiencing in Brazil, the political game itself pushes us towards this dynamic of attributing “evil” to the other, to the opponent, to the stranger who situates for us a hostile outside (fremde, as Freud says, 1915/2013). We often find ourselves operating in a register where difference is a factor in war and the other has become the enemy. This is not about “polarization.” We know that this farce of “polarization” precisely seeks to “symmetrize” incompossible things as if they were “political differences” between “right” and “left” when, in fact, the destruction we witnessed - and which did not only happen on the 8^th of January in Brasília, which often attacked the State and extended to public policies, basic State bodies, legal frameworks, the revocation of rights and an infinite number of records of republican public life and citizens --, it is neither symmetric nor compatible with the truly political debate at any level.

But if we stay at this level, attributing all “evil” to an opponent, to a field that is completely external to us, our responsibility, the division, the incidence of the word constituting a subject as an effect disappears for us. Whatever the other person says or does, they no longer question me; the point is simply that they ‘support the other team,’ they ‘follow the influencers on the other side,’ and ‘they receive fake news from the other bubble.’ In this dynamic, the other becomes an enemy to be defeated. It is indeed one of the gains through which hatred produces a tenacious enjoyment that is difficult to give up. The attribution of evil to others organizes the world in a way that provides a convenient explanation for our evils and a powerful justification for avoiding any rectification. Identity is established around what is rejected and is remade by the repeated expulsion of the other, in a kind of “anti-determination.” We are mobilized instinctively, we put ourselves “in combat,” safe from our own division, and we become entangled in repetition.

We can act like this and let it go, or we can let ourselves go through, actually feel the blow, seek in the incisive gesture of that depredation, the real that the images do not show but make present (DIDI-HUBERMAN,1990): the stabs in the painting, the hatred that persists against destruction, the invasion that did not just happen now, and not just in palaces.

It is this deadlock that we will have to deal with. Because it is real and insistent, it comes from our formation as a nation, and it cannot be canceled with the mere restoration of buildings and the return of chairs to their places. This “tip of reality” may be the thing that allows us to take someplace in the face of what we encountered that day. But this requires a shift that demands more than just a change of point of view. A displacement that mobilizes our forces and calls into question our enjoyment, our ways of sustaining ourselves. But if we want to be up to the task, if we want to stand up to this crowd and the even greater barbarity that awaits us, if we just let things go the way they are, it will require a great effort from us, to get closer to the real in which we are all involved.

From where I stand - since we never stand at “any point”; since whatever we can say, we always say it from a “situated point” (and this is indeed one of the principles that the decolonial perspective made indispensable for me) - a displacement was imposed with the hellish vision of the rubble to which our dream of a country, represented by Brasília was reduced. In those wreckages, hatred was expressed and directed at ourselves, our history, our culture, and some of the most representative elements of that culture. It was a rejection cut with a knife. Destroying the ideals and efforts of so many, big and small (the workers honored in the beautiful monument Os candangos by Bruno Giorgi, equally destroyed in the attacks), who made the monumental face of Brasília, the projected portrait of a Brazil that dreamed of being an innovative and inclusive country.

That was perhaps what struck us that day. That destruction brought Brazil’s eternal struggle with itself and the inequalities that chain us to a paroxysm. There was there, very clearly, the limit, now undisguised, of our Edenic dream (CALLIGARIS, 1992/2021), of our intention to live in an original way with our differences (RIBEIRO, 1995/2014; FREYRE, 1933/2019). And the denial of the dream coincided, naturally, with the revelation of the gravity of our real conditions.

Amid the cataclysm, I remembered what Todorov (1983/2019) describes as America in the 16th century: a world usurped and decimated by a brutal and foreign invader whose language and customs were unknown as were its power and interests. At the moment we live in, as Danowski and Viveiros de Castro (2017) remind us, this story has already happened. Because of it, we all see ourselves symbolically linked to the Tupis, Guaranis, and Tupinambás who stood before this outsider, unknown and hostile. Invaded by an alien, we emerged divided by the colonial process: “an alien half cohabiting with an indigenous half within the same body” (DANOWSKI & VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, 2017, p. 146).

The result is that we lose magical control of the environment, the confluence (MOLLICA & GALDINO, 2023) of exchange and coexistence with other beings and realities. And, as if this exile within ourselves, exile from what we could have been, was not enough, we experience the panic caused by our atavistic inability to resolve the inequality that constitutes us. And we have not been able to stop its main effect: the inequity we continually reproduce and inflict on our institutional and interpersonal relationships - linked to the specificities of our colonial origin and social formation.

There is no argument capable of synthesizing our two halves. On the contrary, what always haunts and separates us is the disparity between masters and slaves, abuse, kidnapping, rape, and so many other expressions of hatred that were practiced here and that emerge today without possible mediation. Or, rather, as a refusal of all mediation.

Eros and Thanatos

Much has already been said about the more immediate political meaning of those acts, about their direct connection with Bolsonarism, and also, from an après-coup perspective, about the identification of what happened to the mass movements formed in the last decade (FELTRAN, 2023), or, in a more prospective sense, the attempts to discern, on the fly, on top of the loop, what the resonances of that could be for the political moment and for the new government that had just been installed. Several highly relevant analyses may also help us give the due historical place to those acts¹, but given the proximity to what happened, because the episodes are too recent to allow any distance, and due to the level of impact that the event brought us, what stands out first, for me, concerns the destructiveness exerted in those attacks. A destructiveness that broke out there but that we recognize from our social bond. A violence that takes up and repeats certain traits of our formation and, therefore, involves each one.

In a fundamental dimension, we can highlight the relationship between this destructiveness and the hatred constituting our condition as speakers, which has roots in the instinctual dynamics that sustain us. We learn from Freud that this hatred is primordial, and in the process of constituting a subject, “the exterior, the object, the hatred is, in principle, identical” (FREUD, 1915/2014, p. 55). This means that hatred crosses us right at the guiding point of our relationship to the object and otherness. It is hatred that really creates an “outside” for us. Instituting in the same blow a loss, which is also the one that leads us to try to build a bond with the other even if it is always, to some extent, in fits and starts (FREUD, 1915/2014). As this primordial hatred never completely disappears, we can say that our history, the history that Lacan (1953[1966]/1989, p. 257) defined as the “emergence of our truth in the real,” is the history of what is done with that.

In the circumstances of radical desolidarisation and social partition experienced in Brazil, an increase in this destructiveness that harasses us is always about to condense into a movement of hate and unfold into violence. We see this happen every day and everywhere. And that Sunday, it was not so different. It was a fractal movement and, to a certain extent, unpredictable and uncontrollable... But it was also a war machine formed over the years and under everyone’s eyes. A motion born from our guts, our impasses, and our choices - and driven by the growth of fascism in a large part of the world. A blow that hit us hard.

That day, when the barracked mob moved, the worst of Brazil came to the Esplanade. It was not the Brazil of the poet, who “risks a verse” and receives the people’s response “in a samba without fear” (MOREIRA & GOMES,1979). It was an invasion; the Brazil that was created from the original intrusion and the one which repeats the usurpation every day. A passage to the limit of destruction, in a short circuit very representative of our impasses and our time. An intensity that was not in the political field but in the field of hate. A force that was not collective, which was directly the impetus of the mass. From the mass that grows, spreads, emulates, steals, and violates the field of the collective (FREUD,1921/2011). Leaving a trail of violence in its wake. And excrement scattered on the floor.

Reflecting upon that group that took over the Esplanade that day, it came to me the famous warning of the abolitionist Joaquim Nabuco, who, already in the 19th century, denounced the “lethargy of the elites” here. A resistance that delayed abolition and threatened to leave us out of what would happen in the world. The memory offered another picture of our division. Not just the current one, in these times of polarization, but our usual division: on one side, the battle for our constitution as an ethnically, nationally, and culturally diverse people (the people who had just climbed the palace ramp in Lula’s inauguration), and on the other hand, the angry masses (which we also are, which also exist here) breaking everything. Mobilized by a minority fighting to maintain privileges, ignoring the interests of the broader population.

Brazil was created and is still being created in this field of forces. Despite our alleged linguistic unity (GALINDO,2023) - which rests on silencing the languages of primitive peoples and enslaved people, as we will see - we have never experienced ourselves as a nation. We did not become a people, in the sense that the original people of South America give to this word, which makes it the same word that designates human, or person, or even the pronoun we, in most Amerindian languages (VIVEIROS DE CASTRO, 1996). We live dissociated in this “Brazilian fracture” that Paulo Arantes (2001/2023) describes as the jingoism of a new, singular country, whose greatness has yet to be realized and the dramatic revelation that knocks every day at our door from the distance that separates it from the minimum elements of citizenship and the achievement of rights (which have always been yet to be realized). By insisting on our division, we have glaringly failed to institute effective actions of social order and a project the vast majority can adopt as their own.

Darcy Ribeiro (1995/2014) observes we have never lacked hypermodern discourse and speeches that intended to create this “country of the future” (ZWEIG, 1941/2022), which we believe it to be. What was always missing was symbolic space and representation for social movements coming from other places, outside the “elites” and “outside thought.” Concrete actions that engage the “body” of the powerful², like the Brazil that Moraes Moreira sang about, of “those who come down from the hill, and don’t die on the asphalt”; Brazil that can only count on its own legs; which continues every day, “on the sole, on the heel,” “on the juggle with the bucket of water [...] going down the hill” (MOREIRA & GOMES, 1979).

Over time, the old dream of being part of capitalist prosperity faded away for this Brazil. The material and sociability restrictions imposed on the most vulnerable part of the population in the name of economic austerity, which cuts spending and reduces the state’s social obligations, transform the livelihoods of entire populations into ruins (BRUM, 2021). More and more people “do not fit into the calculations,” and unless we reinvent the terms of what can be counted and the system of values we practice, what the future holds for us are even worse conditions of survival for an increasingly greater number of people (NUNES, 2022). In contrast to our ‘lethargy’ in the face of this, to the impossibility of envisioning any other life project, the so-called extreme right has been agile (here and elsewhere) in appropriating this tension left over from our social relations to fuel discourses and “populist” and authoritarian actions. Fueled by conspiracy theories, and, rhetorical maneuvers that mistake conservation of privileges with rights, precarious working conditions with freedom and entrepreneurship (NUNES, 2022), big and small masses of people appear (here as in other corners of the world), and insurrects. They are many, and they are willing to sacrifice (VIANA, 2013) to destroy everything and annihilate the opponent.

Certainly, an extremely widespread network of WhatsApp groups, Telegram, churches, YouTube influencers, X-Twitter robots, and other social networks encourages this mob. But what actually mobilizes action, and the transition to violent acts that we saw happen in the January 8^th attacks, perhaps has less to do with fake news and more to do with the real difficulties arising from people’s experiences, from their growing difficulties, in a peripheric capitalist situation, like ours, whose horizon becomes increasingly oppressive (VIANA, 2022). These are the difficulties, probably the hatred they incite, which make many people prone to believing fake news.

In this sense, the arrangement of forces that precipitated the attacks cannot be reduced solely to Bolsonarism. Rather, perhaps we must take this new alignment seriously as a real convergence of different trends present in Brazilian social formation. Rodrigo Nunes calls us to move forward (analytically and politically) to understand “What is Bolsonaro the name of?” (NUNES, 2022, p.17). It is an important question because, in a certain sense, this name brings together people who are out there. People who did not win the rat race, who did not fit into the ideals of contemporary entrepreneurship and prosperity (VIANA, 2022), people who, in a given historical and political situation,— or rather, in a situation in which, precisely, politics is no longer part of the real life —, takes place by force. And they inform us that we are already at the limit of our compromise solutions. The message is not pleasant, but we need to hear it. What does this say about us as a nation, about what is in our social bond, and we have to go through?

If we respond to this by defining this field simply as “them” or “the Bolsonarists,” we cannot escape the judgment of attribution (FREUD,1925/2014). And the price is high. Without going beyond the attribution to the existential - or, let us say with Freud (1925/2014), if we do not go from the preponderance of the effects of the attribution judgment (which affirms or disaffirms the possession, in something, of a particular attribute of value, or quality - good/bad, pleasant/unpleasant), to the judgment of existence (i.e., the recognition of what is, that exists in reality, regardless of whether it is pleasant or unpleasant, as Freud says in 1911/1996) -, there is no opening to reality. We are left adrift, spinning in false. We do not build a civilization and not even a collectivity (a chain of small communities that more fully incorporates our diverse humanities. All races, all cultures, and forms of life).

In terms of the white elite, which holds most of the economic resources in Brazil, the hatred and segregation we have always cultivated deprive all Brazilians of the collective. We cannot take care of the country, the Amazon, the cerrado, education, or health; we cannot take care of the disadvantaged just as we cannot take care of the sidewalks, transportation, and children, just as we cannot take care of the children’s playground, the monuments and everything which is our obligation to future generations. We can’t say “us”. We remain divided like two halves that hate each other but inhabit the same body, the same territory, represented by the same signifier, Brazil.

On that fateful Sunday, precisely, we woke up to this momentum of destruction, which is at our origins and that, in recent years, has come to the surface and seems to stay. Unlike our ideals, the reality was there, full of sound and fury, as Shakespeare said, made of antagonisms, inequalities, Eros, and Thanatos.

The shackles of our history

If what is at stake is that we are responsible for the consequences we will give to that event, we can start by admitting that the hatred we saw manifested in the attacks is the hatred that comes from the reality of our history.

In the Brazilian social process, it has been present since the colonial foundation and extended, wreaking havoc throughout the empire and republic and hundreds of years of slavery. To this day, this hatred appears in the racism that permeates our social formation, in the existence of favelas as a territory for state disinvestment, in the various forms of exploitation we continue to practice, in the new civil wars we engender under the most varied pretexts such as the war on drugs, and other programmed disposals of the population (MBEMBE, 2003/2018), which we let happen on the margins of our formal democracy.

Due to colonization, we found ourselves participating in a consolidated social bond based on violence and exploitation from a very early age. Mbembe (2010/2019), Melman (1989/2000, 1990/2000), and others describe real difficulties we still experience in social life, even when the most obvious political forms of colonialism have disappeared. According to Melman (1990/2000), the radical heterotopia between colonizer and colonized that operates in the context of colonization determines that the taking of the Real by the Symbolic takes place by force, and the foundation of alterity is confused with real violence, instead of giving way to a symbolic pact. The other in the colonial relationship positions itself as an opponent, an invader from whom I must protect myself and take revenge. We tend to think of it always with suspicion moreover because it has the power and prerogative to capture and imprison other fellow human beings in real dungeons, with real chains, to punish them in real pillories. In this sense, the loss of an object that the bond with it demands from us inevitably evokes theft and violent expropriation that is impossible to accept. Having been conceived as an extractive and commercial operation, our colonization inevitably links us to attempts to recover this object that would have been stolen from us (attempts that can prove deadly and destructive) and, on the other, to slavery, which leaves for everyone - although in very different ways, depending on the very different places from which infamy is experienced - the scar of a jouissance composed of figures of hatred exercised as abuse as domination and exploitation of the other, or as a compulsory subjugation, which makes it difficult for the appropriation of our history, personal stories, and the affirmation of our steps.

Slavery in Brazil took place as if it were one more “commercial operation” within the scope of a project that was frankly extractive. And yet, it was a “hunting” initiative, the kidnapping of black people on the soil of their lands. Even before being captured, black people were already treated as “merchandise” here. Once captive, they had their family, cultural, and religious ties annulled, were deprived of their names (especially their family names), their language, and all their uniqueness, going as far as the total appropriation of their bodies for economic exploitation, torture, or any other purpose. Taking advantage of what Todorov (1983/2019) highlights regarding Spanish colonization, we can say that, here too, something in the ‘undertaking’ went beyond mercantile reasons. In the Spanish conquests, this had to unfold through war between states, but in Portuguese colonization, it took place in a much more subtle - and yet merciless - manner, through the capture and suppression of any trace of “humanity” in the captives. A suppression that added to the material, physical, and economic reasons for domination, a reason of jouissance, of the submission of the slave to the order of the lord.

In addition to the widely used force devices, Melman (1989/2000) shows that the dynamics of domination have always occurred as a discourse, a language, and a specific bond. The decolonial critique of our traditional and Euro-centric perspective highlighted how coloniality occurred as the imposition of a worldview and the domination of an epistemology (DUSSEL,1993). An epistemology in the sense that this notion, reformulated, can designate not only our ways of producing knowledge, but also a practice in the broadest sense. A personal, theoretical, and political way of acting in the world, which implies, at the same time, a whole pulsion_instinct, economy (MBEMBE,2013/2018, SANTOS-SOUZA,1983/2021), produced by the oppressors and inevitably reproduced by the oppressed - precisely to the extent that colonial power deprived us of all symbolic elements and real means that would allow the imagination and constitution of any alternative existence (GONZALES, 1984).

The Portuguese were diligent, as we know. There was a great effort to break ties and mix ethnicities on properties and slave ships in order to force black people to leave their original languages and accept Portuguese. They fought in every way against the maintenance of any cultural identity that posed a threat to the cultural and religious order of the colony, which required blacks and natives to be subjected and unable to react. In these fights, the original peoples were decimated or absorbed, acculturated. And black people are segregated. Both without ceasing to be placed to serve, in different ways, the pleasure of the master.

It was this colonization process that created the Brazilian³ in its movement (FERNANDES, 2023)⁴. We have not been here forever. Slavery and the extermination of original peoples are constitutive for us. It was through this as their life routine, over the centuries, that the Brazilian people were formed. And as expected, this brought a mark of jouissance and yoke.

With Lacan, we can recognize this as a symptom, our symptom - lived and updated in different ways by the different subjects who emerge and have to deal with this matrix based on their singular resources. But a symptom is precisely that point most resilient and difficult to move because it constitutes us, regardless of the criticism we have of it. The symptom realizes the “compromise solutions” sustaining our neurosis and organizing our entire regime of jouissance. And precisely because it is not possible to completely overcome the symptom, it accompanies us. Whatever we do, we do with it, passing through it. So, what can we know how to do with our symptoms?

Lacan left us a clue as to what, in our symptom, is particularized and can be singularized when he introduced the signifier “Westernized” in Lituraterra (LACAN, 1971/2003p. 21). This seems to be an important indication, which we still need to process (ethically and theoretically) today more than ever. From this signifier, perhaps what stands out for us is this kind of turn that gave us our place. It was the colonial way that made us Westernized. Unlike what we usually fantasize about our supposed “natural” belonging to an idealized “Western community,” coloniality penetrates all that we have been able to build so far and, above all, all the destruction that we continue to generate. It is from this place that is ours, Westernized in the colonial (jouissance’s) way, that we can come to singularize ourselves and take our destiny into our own hands. And this is precisely why the “decolonial turn” of our epistemologies, as Ballestrin (2013) puts it, is indispensable. To take the step that guides us “through the constellation of Cruzeiro do Sul” (GIL, 1972); to undress ourselves from the universalist illusions that imprison our modes of enjoyment in the repetition of the so-called “Western” standards, which we never really reach, and which prevent us from desiring another destiny; to launch ourselves into inventing our own way of life, which we need to achieve.

The process as we are seeing (and 500 years of our history prove it) is not simple. Other violence inevitably responds to colonial violence. But if there is anything that the 8^th of January attacks demonstrated, it is that we are all concerned with this movement. Since the clash with the interests of the Earth’s powerful will not occur without conjuring up some level of violence (FANON, 1961/2022), the question that arises for us today is to what violence we will commit ourselves. The struggle that awaits us is very different if we choose to take responsibility for the violence necessary to restrict the exorbitant privileges of the masters and to confront the colonial shackles that still exist; or if we choose to exercise violence to perpetuate the structures of power and oppression that pierce our social order. The choice is ours, as a nation, and for each person, at all levels. Today it is we, Brazilians, descendants of slaves and slave owners, who carry out the colonial enterprise under other, more contemporary, masks. It is we, the elite that holds economic resources, who created, in Brazil, a social bond, an economy, a justice that allows the type of exploitation practiced here to this day, and condemns the most fragile to abandonment and daily humiliation (SOUZA, 2019). The concentration of Indians, blacks, and mestizos in the poorest sections of the population are traits related to this long history of slavery. We are all marked by the music, dance, the black speech, entertainment, and culture brought from Africa and developed here, with an impressive capacity for survival. However, we also discriminate against black people, and persecute them, and we are not aware of our persistent racism. In our colonized alienation, we imagine ourselves as the master, assured by tradition and nobility, and we disconnect from the fact we are inextricably linked to the flesh of all punished blacks and exterminated indigenous people. As we hide from ourselves we are also the taskmaster, submitted, who leads their fellow men to the dungeon. The result of this repression is what we see: we began to persecute, discriminate, murder, massacre - and, from time to time, we break everything.

The enlargement of the world

If we understand coloniality as the persistence of social, political, and discursive operators of the colonial system in the organization of the world, we know that it does not end with the independence of the colonies (MBEMBE, 2010/2019). We are still in the same fight. One can see the line of continuity connecting contemporary forms of resource appropriation and extraction and the predatory colonial economic system.

The colonial project was constituted around the possibilities of appropriating the Earth’s richness and their reallocation, their transposition to the dominant poles. And capitalism continues, on new bases, this project, being colonial and racist in its form of domination and, above all, imperial (modernly, we say, “global”) - that is, ruining and replacing local cultures with the same “culture” of the colonizer. Even in times where technological escalation has produced a “computational capitalism,” which no longer relies on machines and muscular power (which are limited) but rather on algorithms (which are formal and can always be reformulated), we find that the colonial operation continues (MBEMBE, 2020). Domination and exploitation continue to affect the bodies and matters of the earth, and equally in the field of discourse, where the subject is constituted. The shackles have become fractal, reticular, but we still let ourselves be captured, like the first inhabitants of our beaches, fascinated by the little mirrors on our screens and the bunch of trinkets - now in a metropolitan version.

Meanwhile, capitalism continues its course, always aiming at the domination and possession of the Earth and its privatization by those with greater military power and technological advantages. However, who owns the Earth? Contact with other thinkers and other epistemologies generated in different cultures helps us understand that the assumption our humanity would give us some right over the other creatures on the planet acted to hide and alienate us increasingly from our dependence on Earth as an organism, to which we belong - and not, of which we are owners (KOPENAWA & ALBERT, 2010/2015; KRENAK, 2019). Today, the problem arises precisely in reaffirming that no one can own the Earth; it is no longer a question of invading and occupying populated lands, and it is no longer possible to exploit the resources of the lands and the people who inhabit them indefinitely.

In this sense, the objection we are trying to make, the opposition that needs to be sustained as resistance to the self-destruction practiced by capitalism, cannot be restricted to the frontiers of a country. Not even to a tyrant. The fight cannot be limited to appointed tyrants, to those who use capitalism to erect local and discretionary systems of power, when we know that it is oligopolies and financial capital that have taken over the Earth and are rapidly promoting the virtual extinction of Earth resources and humanity, with them. This is the most complicated thing. The opposition we have to exert today has to include us. Focus on ourselves, on each one of us. We need to reconnect with what Mbembe (2020) calls our dependence on the biosphere, with the obligations of care and responsibility that we owe to the planet and each other. Therefore, the task of new times would be to redesign institutions inherited from a past of unbridled exploitation and call into question the logic, premises, structures, and knowledge produced through them (MBEMBE, 2020).

This is precisely the “decolonial project,” a global project that concerns everyone, those who were colonized and the colonizers, a joint project of reconstructing the world, our discursive practices, epistemologies, and priorities. This is not about purism or the authenticity of certain people. For the decolonial project to become a political and aesthetic force on a global scale, it is necessary to promote a radical opening of our ways of desiring and thinking about social bonds. We need to promote a widening of the world, as opposed to isolation or rivalry between nations. However, as we said at the beginning, this implies a considerable displacement. The practice of capitalism is real and is based on the capture of the means of life for a promise of infinite enjoyment through consumption, which, ultimately, risks abolishing the subject and the injunctions that give rise to it. Accessing what is ours, given this, will require new strength from us to put into play the ways of producing our satisfaction and enjoyment. Each one in their own place, with different resources and responsibilities.

Although necessary for the work, we will not stop the lack of knowledge at stake which put us in danger of extinction, just with conceptual sophistication. Nor is it enough for us to have a political discussion in the usual terms in which we conceive a fact as political because the demand and the class struggle did not prove capable, by themselves, of limiting the unbridled enjoyment that capitalism makes available and that we, through our structure, feed. It is rather at the level of what sustains us and binds us to this structure, in the local dimension of our symptoms and their concrete dramas, that the displacement that matters to us can occur.

From a decolonial perspective, we can say that the effort involves suspending the sky to broaden our horizons. Include new voices that can tell another story to postpone the end of the world (KRENAK, 2019). Breaking, defoliating, crossing our own history and epistemology towards the plurality of forms of life, existence, and habits (KOPENAWA & ALBERT, 2010/2015) - instead of always offering the same understanding, the same values, the same language, the same forms of life, the imposition of the same supposed well-being, impossible to achieve, for everyone (VIVEIROS de CASTRO, 2004).

Will we be able to join the Brazil that bustles in time? Are we going to be able to say “us”? Affirming the diversity, the “cultural paradox” (DUNKER, 2022) of the Brazilian nation, is the indispensable act to build a nation where differences do not cancel each other out or polarize and, on the contrary, can affirm and multiply. This is the decisive shift. It reveals the crucial dead end we have reached with this violent project of a peripheral nation to which we cyclically reduce Brazil. And it is also what opens up a possible line of escape from our destiny of chaos. Without resuming our inexorable connection with the Earth and with each other, we cannot free ourselves from the jouissance that is ours, of segregation and devastation and excruciating expropriations. What is placed before us is the choice to commit our actions, bodies, and judgment with what is up to us - before the fall of the sky (KOPENAWA & ALBERT 2010/2015).

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• 1
  Among the works of exceptional quality recently produced regarding the Bolsonarist phenomenon, check out Starling, Lago & Bignotto (2022), Nunes (2022) and Feltran (2021).
• 2
  Lacan (1974/2011 p. 14) mentioned “thinking with your feet”.
• 3
  Angela Jesuino observes that the very meaning that designates our nationality refers to economic and extractive activity, with “Brazilian” being the name given to those who explored and sold Brazilwood. (JESUINO, 2020).
• 4
  I would like to take this opportunity to thank all colleagues participating in the Psychoanalysis Workshop in Extension of Freudian Time Psychoanalytic Association, who worked with me on the topic of hate following an invitation from the Association Lacanienne Internationale, and in particular Anna Carolina Lo Bianco and Francisco Leonel Fernandes, who contributed in various ways to the preparation of this text.

Publication Dates

• Publication in this collection
  11 Dec 2023
• Date of issue
  2023

History

• Received
  15 Sept 2023
• Accepted
  17 Sept 2023