An experience of destruction: a view from Brazilian contemporary scenario

Abstract

Having the contemporary Brazilian political scene as an analytical target, the essay sustains the imaginative advantages of the metaphor of destruction for the observation of extreme political processes. In doing so, it takes as a premise the analytical predicaments of strictly political categories, which make up the usual imaginary of democracy, taken as a Schumpeterian and institutional experiment. The perspective of political destruction reconfigures the foundations of sociability. This essay highlights the dimensions of life and language as crucial elements of such a process. It is about taking the language of destruction, defined here as a rotten word, as a lexicon of an unprecedented subjectivity, not so much for the values it advocates, but for the intensity, official ostension and passage to the act that accompany it. The personalization of that pattern of behaviour took the form of Homo Bolsonarus, proposed by the essay as a model of human agency fully adapted to the work of destruction.