Medicine, Dissent and the “Chloroquinization” of Truth: Brazil and Pandemic

ABSTRACT

This article explores the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Brazil radicalizing Foucault’s notion of governmentality. While dominant scholarship has been interpreting the human tragedy of the outbreak in Brazil in terms of necropolitics and Bolsonaro’s populist rhetoric, the present work highlights other dimensions. It shows that the management of the pandemic was deployed to govern the conduct of the Brazilian population. This article detects novel economies of medical truth, obedience, and salvation. It also examines the struggles and (bio)political resistance of Brazil’s vulnerable communities. While academic debates interpreted those movements in terms of care and compassion, this article highlights their radical political aspects. Extending Foucault’s notion of “counter-conducts,” this article reveals how those collectives shaped new forms of medical dissent. More concretely, they brought forward political practices of hope, solidarity, and resilience.

KEYWORDS:

• Bolsonaro
• Brazil
• dissent
• Foucault
• pandemic

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank the editors, especially Jingyu Gao, and the two anonymous reviewers for his/her insightful (and challenging!) comments and suggestions. Regarding Antonio Pele, this article has been conducted under the European Union Marie Skłodowska-Curie Action “HuDig19” (EHESS/IRIS, Paris and The Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, New York, DOI: 10.3030/101027394, Grant agreement ID: 101027394).

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interests was reported by the author(s).

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Antonio Pele

Antonio Pele is Associate Professor at the Law School of PUC-Rio University, Brazil, and Marie Curie Senior Researcher at the Ecole des Hautes Etudes en Sciences Sociales (EHESS) / IRIS in Paris (2021–2023). He is also a visiting scholar at the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought, New York. His scholarship intersects critical theory, new technologies and human rights. He has recently co-edited (with Stephen Riley and Austin Sarat) a monograph on Human Dignity (Emerald 2022). He has also published (with Caitlin Mulholland) “On Facial Recognition, Regulation, and Data Necropolitics” (in Indiana Journal of Global Legal Studies 30 (1), 2023: 173–194). Antonio Pele, Stephen Riley and Katharina Bauer are working on a book project entitled “How Humans Have Become Worthless (and What We Can Do about It).”

Stephen Riley

Stephen Riley is Associate Professor at the Law School of the University of Leicester, UK. His research explores intergenerational justice, human dignity and jurisprudence, particularly in how intergenerational justice provokes issues about law’s own survival, both as system and concept. He is the author of Human Dignity and Law: Legal and Philosophical Investigations (Routledge 2017), “Subsidiarity and Human Dignity: Democracy, Authority and Knowledge” in Bedford et al. (eds), Human Dignity and Democracy in Europe (Edward Elgar Publishing, 2022), “For a Right to Health beyond Biopolitics: The Politics of Pandemic and the ‘Politics of Life’” (with Antonio Pele, in Law, Culture and the Humanities, online, 2021).

Katharina Bauer

Katharina Bauer is Associate Professor of Practical Philosophy at the Erasmus School of Philosophy of the Erasmus University of Rotterdam, Netherlands. In her work she is connecting different traditions from Kant to poststructuralism and building bridges between academic philosophy, other disciplines, and civic society. Against the background of her research on fundamental ethical ideals (such as dignity, authenticity, autonomy), she investigates the impact of current societal, technological, and ecological challenges on the self-constitution of moral agents (self-optimization, post- and trans-humanism, hope in times of crisis, “technomoral resilience”). She is the author of “‘Do not Make Yourself a Worm’: Reconsidering Dignity as a Duty towards Oneself” (in Studies in Law Politics and Society, no. 88, 2022: 23–40); “Technomoral Resilience as a Goal of Moral Education” (with Julia Hermann, in Ethical Theory and Moral Practice, 2022), and “De brede moraal en het narratieve denken” (in Algemeen Nederlands Tijdschrift voor Wijsbegeerte, 2022).