Throughout the pandemic generated by the coronavirus, the Italian thinker Giorgio Agamben emerged as one of the most critical voices against the measures implemented by Western governments to manage it. Our objective is to carry out an analysis of the policies deployed during the pandemic in a Foucauldian key that allows us to glimpse the need for new frameworks to understand our present. First, we examine Agambenin’s analysis of the state of exception, underlining the need to think about how emergencies introduce a whole set of transformations in the relations between law and order. Secondly, we expose the author’s postulates around the figure of the untore as a figure of contagion. We establish how the governance of emergencies emergencies enables a continuity between phenomena by politically framing them as emerging threats that must be monitored.Thirdly, we revisit the notion of the nuda vida which, for Agamben, made it possible to situate the concentration camp as a paradigm of biopolitical governmentality. We argue that this concept is inadequate to analyze the conflict between “making live” and “letting die” which, during the pandemic, generated an intense debate around the question of triage.

The objective of this work is to investigate the concept of judgment as a production of subjectivity, in order to understand whether there are relations between the judicialization of life and the growing social polarization. For this, we list some works by Michel Foucault, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari in which the judgment appears as a central or transversal theme. From the studies and analyzes of these works it was possible to understand with Foucault a genealogical perspective of justice that precludes any notion of neutrality and promotes the hypothesis that polarization may be the effect of the hypertrophy of the judicialization of life. Deleuze and Guattari provide an intensive reading of morals and ethics as components of subjectivity, with morality being a fundamental element of judgment and an instrument of life’s closure; while ethics allows the evaluation of events, moving us from the binomial good and bad and making vital power viable.

The article aims to present the AquilombaSUS concept-movement proposal based on three dimensions: i) the notion of quilombo as a territory and concept; ii) the expansion of access to the SUS based on the principle of equity, implemented through the mainstreaming of the National Comprehensive Health Policy for the Black Population; and iii) recognition of the articulation between racism, abnormality and dehumanization in public health. In this way, based on dialogue with Beatriz Nascimento, Abdias do Nascimento and Clóvis Moura, a proposal for health care technology is presented that starts from the ancestral Afrodiasporic rebellious ‘aquilombada’ as an anti-racist strategy to be incorporated as a guideline in the Unified Health System. Finally, in dialogue with Glissant, ‘aquilombamento’ is presented as a poetics of relationship and diversity.

The initial objective of this article is to use the concept of governmentality to understand the modes of management present in psychiatric practices, especially those present in Brazilian Psychiatric Reform devices such as the Psychosocial Care Centers (CAPS). This analysis will be carried out by examining medical records which record the daily ways in which cases are managed within the CAPS. Considering the possible existence of different modes of governmentality, we will discuss their meanings, pointing to very unique forms of management modulated according to gender divisions. From this point on, we will highlight how gender divisions have been objects of intervention and guidance in the modes of government by psy practices throughout history. Finally, we will conclude with a discussion of the devices of sexuality in a unique way based on the issues raised by the research.

This study seeks to highlight three ways in which the relationship between writing and the art of governing manifests itself. It first examines the critical attitude – or the “art of not being governed like that”– in the religious movement of devotio moderna through a specific reading of Thomas à Kempis’ Imitation of Christ and proceeds to examine Jesuit pedagogy as a machine to rarefy writing and govern the (and through the) written word. The article culminates with an invitation to revisit Michel Foucault’s work by looking at what his texts do, rather than what they say or what is said about them. As a teacher-researcher who wrote to both distance himself from his self and to transform himself, Foucault represents a process of subjectivation through writing in which the mediator no longer appears in the attire of the ascetic monk, in the neutral speech of the school manual or in the intimidating form of the inaccessible author, but as a “friend of the text” that is chosen by affinity and to which one can assign the role of a writing instructor. How can we envisage a pedagogical relationship based on writing as an art of neither governing nor being governed?

This article deals with the memories of a researcher who, for some decades, has been inspired by Michel Foucault, especially in his way of thinking about the urgencies of the present, the construction of truths and the status of writing and authorship. The text refers to some of the author’s research, making connections with recent political and social events, while also dialoguing with theorists and artists, such as Foucault, Chico Buarque, Deleuze, Manoel de Barros, Paul Veyne, among others. The theme of otherness runs through the entire text, with emphasis on the aesthetic elaboration of the self and the necessary exercise of an ethics of existence.

This article investigates possible analogies between the documentarian’s, Eduardo Coutinho’s, listening and view, and psychoanalytical attention. Coutinho’s filmography questions the simple duality between reality and fiction. Psychoanalysis, too, questions this duality, from notions such as psychic reality and material reality. Freud went on to affirm that the psychic apparatus is constituted as fiction. In a situation of analysis, and through free association, by the patient, and interested listening, which believes in the subject’s truth, by the analyst, transformations may occur, in a way that representations can be modified, traumatic situations elaborated, suffering settled. In this case, both psychoanalytical, as well as Eduardo Coutinho’s listening, would be attesting the subject’s existence through a radical opening to otherness and taking existence in its fictional aspect.

This article presents the experience of a group with women performed in a mental health service located in the hinterland of Pernambuco. Through the anamneses and psychological consultations, the great number of women who reported a history of family violence as antecedent of the mental suffering was noticed. The reported violence is of several types and committed by divers actors. The consequence of this violence are the various types of mental disorders because due to their socio-family specificities, often continue in the cycle of violence. Some have a history of attempted suicide. The group aimed to discuss issues of gender, violence, human rights and health. The meetings took place once a month, during the year 2015, with an average of six participants per meeting. As a result, the strengthening of family ties and the redefinition of symptoms are mentioned. It is believed that it is important to expand actions, carrying out experiments with specific groups such as the one presented, since medicating psychic suffering will not bring effective results in breaking the cycle of violence.