“So what?” Life government and death production during the pandemics in Brazil

Abstract

The text interrogates the relations between life and death in the Brazilian politics, departing from the idea that the main philosophical task is to think the present, i.e, the effects of the pandemics in the country. I propose the hypothesis that the arrival of the coronavirus pandemics to Brazil has not only rendered explicit a set of different power technologies already put in action in the country, but also made evident a certain shift in the way biopolitics, neoliberalism and necropolitics articulate themselves among us. With the advent of the pandemics, biopolitical and neoliberal technologies did not disappear but were encumbered by necropolitics, which assumed prevalence under the motto of making to die and letting to die, which seems to inspire the Brazilian government’s actions and omissions. The shift towards necropolitics in Brazil is best revealed by the infamous expression according to which the Brazilian president has indistinctively referred to all those who have died from the new virus: “So what?” Finally, I argue that the Arendtian notion about the totalitarian ideology is of importance to explain the phenomenon of political fanaticism in the country.