Abstract
This essay presents the latest article written by chancellor Ernesto Araujo, current Minister of Foreign Affairs appointed by Jair Messias Bolsonaro, President of Brazil, in which he alerts how the Coronavirus (COVID-19) pandemic could allegedly be used as basis for exceptional measures against the Brazilian democracy, in the form of a ’Communist coup’ or a government driven by ‘Nazis acts’. When approaching the dangers of the pandemic for Brazilian democracy, Araujo quotes Slavoj Žižek and Giorgio Agamben to justify his warning. In response, this essay addresses the misuse of Agamben’s categories made by Araujo. Namely, how the concept of ‘state of exception’ can actually invoke the hypothesis that the Brazilian Minister in reality wishes to hide: in fact, behind Bolsonaro’s Neoliberal lies Thanatopolitics and authoritarian intentions.
Highlights
I n Bertioga, a coastal city in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, the body of an Austrian man, identified as Wolfgang Gerhard, was found with signs of drowning in 1979
Mengele had been a captain of the SS and one of the doctors who carried out experiments at the Auschwitz concentration camp, employing experimental surgery without the use of anesthesia. He lived in Brazil for 35 years, using numerous false names.2. He had lived in another city in Brazil called New Europe and, by the end of his life, he moved to a farther place, driven by his paranoid fear of being captured by the Israeli police, just as it had happened to Adolf Eichmann, years earlier, in Argentina
Araújo goes on to say that’s “[a] pretext of the pandemic, the new communism is on building a world without nations, without freedom,” and to build “[a] permanent global state of exception, transforming the world into a big concentration camp.”5
Summary
I n Bertioga, a coastal city in the state of São Paulo, Brazil, the body of an Austrian man, identified as Wolfgang Gerhard, was found with signs of drowning in 1979. Araújo goes on to say that’s “[a] pretext of the pandemic, the new communism is on building a world without nations, without freedom,” and to build “[a] permanent global state of exception, transforming the world into a big concentration camp.”5 By highlighting these passages from Minister Araújo’s article, this essay aims to prob lematize his use of Agamben’s remarks to validate his own conspiracy theory over Žižek’s book. “Leaders Risk Lives by Minimizing the Coronavirus To develop these hypotheses, this essay launches three tasks: 1) Better explore the categories of Agamben’s Theory that bases his critical position on government measures of exception; 2) Unveil the true authoritarianism and the functioning of the “political machine of death” hidden by the liberal discourse in the aforementioned article by Minister Ernesto Araújo – who is against rigorously maintaining social isolation, recommended by the medical-scientific orientation of PAHO and WHO (Pan American Health Organization and World Health Organization);7 3) show how Agamben’s criticism differs from Bolsonaro and his Minister discourses; and (3.1) how Agamben’s articles do not apply in the Brazilian context, governed by ideology that mixes Neoliberalism and apology for military authoritarianism
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