Foucault and the Politics of Resistance in Brazil

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The copyright for each article is maintained jointly by the author and by Bernard E. Harcourt. Permission to reprint any article may be obtained from the author or from Bernard E. Harcourt. To obtain permission, please address your inquiry by mail to Carceral Notebooks, 1111 East 60th Street, Room 525, Chicago, IL 60637, USA or by e-mail to [email protected]. Printed by U.S. Lithograph Inc., New York Printed in the U.S.A.

Bernard E. Harcour t

PREFACE FOUCAULT IN BRAZIL Carceral Notebooks XIII

Michel Foucault’s 1973 Rio lectures, Truth and Juridical Form, delivered at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in Brazil, are among the most significant political theoretic contributions that Foucault made in his lifetime. The Rio lectures crystalized the turn in Foucault’s thought toward one of his most influential theories: knowledge/power, and, eventually, regimes of truth. The Rio lectures demonstrate the illusion of pristine knowledge—of objective, neutral knowledge purportedly free of power or politics—and urged us, in the most compelling terms, following Nietzsche, to “liquidate” that myth. The lectures underscored the primacy of law and juridical form in the production of truth—and, more broadly, the primary role of law in his overarching research project. Together with his 1981 Louvain lectures, Wrong-Doing, Truth-Telling: The Function of Avowal in Justice, the Rio lectures provide a full historical arc—from the ancients to the 1970s—to critique the existing social and political order, and the ways in which we ourselves participate in the construction of that social order. I had always been curious about what it must have been like for Foucault to travel to Rio and live there under a military dictatorship. How did it affect his thinking? How did his intellectual trajectory at the time shape his understanding of the

Foucault in Brazil

political situation in Brazil, and through it, in France? Until now, those key questions could only be asked. It was when I read Marcelo Hoffman’s brilliant review essay of Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues’s book Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil: Presença, efeitos, ressonâncias (Michel Foucault in Brazil: Presence, Effects, Resonances) in the journal Theory, Culture & Society, that I realized how important the answers might be. I began to see the significance of Foucault’s experience in Brazil to his intellectual trajectory. I immediately reached out to Marcelo Hoffman to curate a volume on Foucault in Brazil. This outstanding collection is the product. I am deeply indebted to Marcelo Hoffman. In this Volume XIII of the Carceral Notebooks, Marcelo Hoffman, a brilliant political theorist and the author of Foucault and Power: The Influence of Political Engagement on Theories of Power (Bloomsbury Academic 2014) and Militant Acts: The Role of Investigations in Radical Political Struggles (State University of New York Press 2019), has brought together the leading thinkers in Brazil on Foucault and his interactions with the intellectuals and the public sphere in Brazil. Their contributions offer insights into the ways in which Foucault’s visits to Brazil and exchanges while there both influenced and were shaped by his intellectual trajectory at the time, as well as offering reflections on how Foucault’s writings and praxis can infuse political resistance in Brazil today. With the forthcoming publication of Foucault’s first set of lectures from 1965 delivered at the University of São Paulo in Brazil on the topic of his then-recently published book, The Order of Things: An Archeology of the Human Sciences, in the new collection of Cours et travaux de Michel Foucault avant le Collège de France

Bernard E. Harcour t

(Gallimard/Seuil; English edition by Columbia University Press), this volume could not be more timely. Foucault ultimately broke silence. While in Brazil during his fourth trip in 1975, Foucault suspended his lectures in protest of the Brazilian dictatorship. He joined in student protests, in late October 1975, and delivered a short manifesto declaring that “A university that is not fully free is nothing more than a business of servility. You can’t teach under boot heels; you can’t speak in the face of the walls of prisons; you can’t study when arms threaten.” Those words, given the military dictatorship, displayed a courage of truth. Two years earlier, in the discussion and debate that followed Truth and Juridical Form, Foucault recognized well that “To speak is to exercise a power, to speak is to risk your power, it is to risk succeeding or losing everything.” This volume is published in honor of that courage to break silence and to speak out, with the hope that it will enrich and encourage resistance and praxis both here in the United States and in Brazil, and in countries across the globe that are engaged in similar struggles against increasingly autocratic political leadership.

New York City April 15, 2019

DEDICATION

I would like to dedicate this volume and all of the previous Carceral Notebooks to Scott Kelly. The production of this particular Volume XIII was brutally interrupted by Scott’s sudden death. I cannot imagine how the Carceral Notebooks will continue without Scott. Scott Kelly was a brother to me, and a source of great inspiration and friendship. It was Scott who made possible and realized my idea to publish these Carceral Notebooks. Scott enlisted his colleagues at his publishing company, PubData, to help with the typesetting and printing, web design and distribution, and Scott turned a dream into a reality. Scott was an extraordinarily generous person—intellectually and emotionally. He never drew attention to himself, but was always working, behind the scenes, to ensure the well being of his family, friends, neighbors, and colleagues. He was always thinking something up, realizing a project, fixing something, building something. He always had a new idea to make things better. And in the process, he built so much. Quietly, unassumingly, he made it possible for us to realize our aspirations. It was about 15 years ago that I first spoke to Scott about this publishing project, and he immediately and so generously

made it come true. “That’s doable.” “Let’s make it happen.” “Here’s how.” Scott was brilliant and engaged the project of the Carceral Notebooks both intellectually and practically. He enlisted Karen Rolnick, Lynne Goldin, and Nick Papaseraphim to produce the book, and our other brother, Alcides Roverano, to print the volumes. He guided me through all its aspects— legal, including incorporation, and practical, including board meetings and minutes. At every juncture, he had new ideas and made them realities. He got an ISBN number. He found the right paper weight and quality. He sampled different inks, especially the inside red ink. He turned a few volumes into e-Books, then put them on Amazon. Scott had the most incredible ability to make things happen. Scott created. Scott accomplished. And in the process, so generously, Scott helped us live to our fullest. I will close with a poem by the Roman poet, Gaius Catullus, “A Brother’s Farewell,” with some edits and judicious adaptations since both Scott and I were born in New York City and grew up a few blocks apart: From neighborhoods across New York City, from its streets and its avenues, we have come, brother, father, uncle, partner, colleague, and friend, to these melancholy rites, to show this final honor to you, Scott, and to speak to your silent soul now, since fate has taken you, yes you, from us all.

Oh Scott, ripped away from us so cruelly, now at least take these last offerings, blessed by the tradition of our parents and our children. Accept, in this way, what a friend’s tears drown, and for eternity, Scott, “Hail and Farewell.”

Farewell, Scott. We will miss you. We admire you. We thank you.

New York City April 15, 2019

Marcelo Hoffman

INTRODUCTION

Political events often catch up with us, interrupting the flow of our work and opening up previously unimaginable horizons of thought, as Michel Foucault knew so well. The contours of the political present in Brazil have compelled me to modify my original plans for this editorial introduction. I am writing these introductory words to the thirteenth volume of the Carceral Notebooks in a state of profound grief. Jair Bolsonaro won the presidential election in Brazil yesterday. A far-right politician and former military captain known for his deeply hostile statements toward gays, Afro-Brazilians, women, and indigenous people, Bolsonaro has capitalized on a popular anger over corruption scandals, an imploding economy, and a generalized insecurity. His solution to these problems resides in Brazil’s recent past. Bolsonaro openly defends the military dictatorship that ruled Brazil from 1964 to 1985 and describes his overall objective as a return to what Brazil was like during that period.1 He finds inspiration in a regime that Foucault forcefully denounced for its severe political repression. Bolsonaro’s victory thus makes the theme “Foucault and the Politics of Resistance in Brazil” even more resonant. The exploration of this theme enables us to elucidate what lessons practices of resistance from the period of the dictatorship in Brazil might bear for struggles there (and elsewhere) in our present. This volume brings together the contributions of scholars throughout Brazil to explore the intellectual and political importance of Foucault’s visits to Brazil in 1965, 1973, 1974, 1975, and 1976. During these visits, Foucault synthesized and advanced 1

Introduction

his research in lectures and talks on an astoundingly wide range of topics, from juridical practices, to social medicine, to sexuality. He sought to clarify his unconventional perspectives in interviews with the mainstream and alternative press. Faced with the growing political repression of students, professors, and journalists, Foucault also engaged in open opposition to the military dictatorship. The point of the essays in this volume is not simply to account for Foucault’s activities in another national geographical space (alongside the more commonly recognized spaces of Tunisia, Iran, and the United States). The essays in this volume situate his contributions in Brazil within a series of theoretical, historical, and political contexts to reflect on the politics of resistance in Brazil in the past and present. Some of the essays fill in the historical details of Foucault’s visits to Brazil to expand our understandings of his concepts, such as political spirituality and militancy. Others bring concepts from Foucault’s toolbox, such as self-writing, to bear on practices of resistance in the Brazilian present. Still others focus on the effects of his encounters in Brazil for contemporary practices of resistance there. What emerges collectively from the essays is the importance of Brazil as a space of conceptual and political innovation for Foucault and the significance of Foucault for debates about theory and politics in Brazil. The initiative for this volume of the Carceral Notebooks sprang from the space opened up by the groundbreaking research of Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues into the littleknown theme of Foucault in Brazil.2 Bernard E. Harcourt was generous enough to invite me to put together this volume after reading my review of Conde’s book in March 2017.3 Most of the essays in the volume were initially presented at a workshop 2

Marcelo Hoffman

on “Foucault and the Politics of Resistance in Brazil” at the Columbia Global Center in Rio de Janeiro in May 2018. The workshop was sponsored by the Columbia Center for Contemporary Critical Thought (CCCCT). I want to thank the authors for their contributions. I also want to thank Lynne F. Goldin and Nick Papaseraphim for their excellent work on the production of the volume. NOTES 1

“Bolsonaro diz que objetivo é fazer o Brasil semelhante ‘ao que tinhamos há 40, 50 anos,’” O Globo, October 15, 2018, https://oglobo.globo. com/brasil/bolsonaro-diz-que-objetivo-fazer-brasil-semelhante-ao-quetinhamos-ha-40-50-anos-23158680.

2

Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil: Presença, efeitos, ressonâncias (Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina, 2016).

3

Marcelo Hoffman, “In the Shadow of Dictatorship: Foucault in Brazil,” review of Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil: Presença, efeitos, ressonâncias, by Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues, Theory, Culture & Society, March 22, 2017, https://www.theoryculturesociety.org/review-shadowdictatorship-foucault-brazil/.

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Salma Tannus Muchail & Márcio Alves da Fonseca

POWER AND RESISTANCE: FOUCAULT’S LABORATORY IN BRAZIL 1

On his various journeys to Brazil from 1965 to 1976, Michel Foucault engaged in a wide range of activities: interviews, lectures, courses, and the publication of journalistic and academic articles. The works produced at the time were first published in Portuguese and then in French in 1994 in volumes II, III, and IV of Dits et écrits.2 We shall highlight two of these works, one from 1973 and the other from 1974. The first consists of a series of five lectures given at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) under the title “La vérité et les formes juridiques.”3 The second is a series of lectures on social medicine that were delivered at the State University of Rio de Janeiro (UERJ). The subjects of these lectures were connected to Foucault’s Collège de France courses and resulted in research published in his books in France at the time. The preliminary or nearly simultaneous execution of these activities in Brazil allows us to advance some hypotheses: on the one hand, the articulation of the two lecture series with the courses and books makes up, in sum, a possible initial nucleus of Foucault’s investigations into matters of power and resistance; on the other hand, his activities in Brazil may be recognized as a kind of laboratory, succeeded or accompanied by more definitive productions. Foucault’s 1973 lectures at PUC-Rio are closely connected to his Collège course from the same year, La société 1

Power and Resistance

punitive, and his Collège course from the succeeding year, Le pouvoir psychiatrique, as well as his 1975 book Surveiller et punir.4 This first group of analyses gradually forms the study of disciplinary power. The 1974 lectures are, in their turn, connected to the Collège course “Il faut défendre la société” and the first volume of the history of sexuality La volonté de savoir, which were delivered and published, respectively, in 1976.5 This second group of analyses inaugurates Foucault’s investigations of biopolitics. DISCIPLINARY POWER Let us consider the lectures “La vérité et les formes juridiques.” They deal with a historical trajectory that begins in ancient Greece, traverses the Middle Ages, and then focuses on the modern age. Foucault organizes this trajectory around three procedures or social practices of a juridical character: the test, the inquiry, and the examination. In his second lecture, Foucault broaches the juridical procedure of the test and then the practice of inquiry in ancient Greece. The third lecture shows that in the second half of the Middle Ages the test tended to disappear in favor of the inquiry. In the latter practice, the resolution of questions of litigation does not happen directly between litigants, but is imposed from the “outside” and from “above” by a sovereign power. The notion of crime as an infraction takes hold in so far as damage does not appear anymore in the litigation between individuals, groups, or families, but as an offense against the state or the sovereign. The functioning of this system presupposes the questioning of the witnesses, which allows for the reconstitution of facts. The practice of inquiry thus serves as an 2

Salma Tannus Muchail & Márcio Alves da Fonseca

instrument capable of replacing the flagrant offense by reactualizing the crime when the criminal is not surprised in its commission. In his fourth and fifth lectures, Foucault shows that from the end of eighteenth century through the nineteenth century another model invaded the model of inquiry: the examination. What he famously calls disciplinary society takes root inside this new framework. In the lectures, Foucault proceeds to emphasize some aspects of disciplinary power. From the point of view of the judiciary, transformations occur at two levels. At the theoretical level, there is a new elaboration of the penal system. Civil law needs to be explicitly formulated because the infraction does not concern natural law or religious or moral law. It appears as a crime solely in connection with civil law. But, at the practical level, a penal procedure was adopted that had not been foreseen by the theoreticians of law, namely, imprisonment as practiced in the nineteenth century. As the practice of imprisonment becomes generalized, the principles of penal legislation are radically altered, implying whole new features. Laws tend to adjust as a function of individual situations, aiming less at punishment and more at the adjustment of the individual to society through the psychological and moral reform of behaviors rendered concrete in the practice of control. Punishment is dependent on the explicit existence of a law and concerns the effective occurrence of an infraction. Control reaches not only the already committed crime but also the possibility of it being committed, thereby leading to a new notion of potential danger. It is for this reason that this penal procedure necessitates extensive action in conjunction with other domains that are not exclusively judicial, 3

Power and Resistance

such as the police as well as psychiatric, psychological, medical, and criminological institutions. In this society characterized by discipline, the complete disappearance of the inquisitorial model does not take place. Organized around relationships of sovereignty, this model goes on living in the interior of the modern juridical system. However, the establishment of truth through the matrix of the examination is not achieved through the reconstitution of the order of the facts or the order of the testimonies but, rather, through the objectification of the individual in the order of what is permitted or forbidden, correct or incorrect. Disciplinary society produces behaviors and gestures. It creates habits. It does not exclude. It normalizes. Foucault privileges the elaboration of the subject of disciplinary power in his 1973 and 1974 Collège courses as well as in his 1975 book. Foucault’s 1973 course, La société punitive, studies the meaning of the punitive function as an expression of the consequences of relations between power and knowledge. It describes historically situated punitive forms. Among these forms, Foucault is mostly interested in the prison as the predominant form of punishment in modern Western societies. Understanding the historical prevalence of this mode of punishment is the central problem of La société punitive. It is with it that more precise analyses of disciplinary power will begin. Foucault distances himself from a conception of power that would imply essentially “negative” or “restrictive” procedures such as exclusion, separation, limitation, and repression. Dispensing with the notion of exclusion, his analyses approximate a conception of power that is fundamentally “positive” or “productive.” Power does not limit, but it does include, and it 4

Salma Tannus Muchail & Márcio Alves da Fonseca

does so through mechanisms of inclusion. Given that for Foucault all punitive operations are carried out inside a sphere of power, he dwells at length on the prison to find the power relations that work effectively in its interior. Foucault thus introduces disciplinary power as a central problem in La société punitive, which was delivered in the same year as his lectures “La vérité et les formes juridiques.” In his 1974 Collège course, Le pouvoir psychiatrique, Foucault is interested in the concrete mechanisms of power proper to the therapeutic act in asylums at the end of the eighteenth century and throughout the nineteenth century. He studies the therapeutic scenes that transpired in the disciplinary order of the psychiatric asylum. Characterized by the permanent regulation of activities and time and supported by the fundamental dissymmetry between the power of the physician and the power of the mad person, the disciplinary order of the asylum was the condition for, on one hand, the constitution of a particular medical knowledge, and, on the other hand, the realization of an effect of a permanent cure among the patients. As he covers scenes of asylum therapy, Foucault discloses a mechanism of power and the truth games facilitated by it. He takes as his example the scene in which King George III loses his mind in 1778. It illustrates the psychiatric practice of the time as a regulated manipulation of power relations. This example would also be adequate to illustrate future scenes of psychiatry, such as those of moral treatment, the discovery of hypnosis, psychoanalysis, and even anti-psychiatry.6 The description of the procedures to which the mad sovereign was submitted effectively brings out the traits of an anonymous, diffuse, and manifold power distributed among various agents. 5

Power and Resistance

These procedures highlight a form of power that is categorically distinguished from sovereign power: disciplinary power. From the moment that Foucault assumed the position of Professor of the History of Systems of Thought at the Collège in 1970, he engaged in a reorientation of his research that led him to more closely examine the subject of power. As with his Collège courses, Surveiller et punir presents power in a very different manner from the way it was analyzed at the time. This book distances power from the category of repression and the general categories of domination and ideology. Foucault presents and applies certain rules in the book that may be synthesized in the following manner: first, do not focus the study of punitive mechanisms only on their repressive effects but situate these mechanisms within a complete series of positive effects that they may produce (in other words, it is a matter of understanding punishment as a complex social function); second, analyze punitive methods not as simple consequences of the rules of law or as indicators of social structures but as techniques having their own specificity in the more general fields of other processes of power (or, to put it differently, adopt the perspective of political tactics in relation to punishment); third, do not treat the history of penal law and the history of the human sciences as two separate series, but check, rather, to see if there is not a common matrix between them and if both would not stem from the same process of epistemologicaljuridical formation (put differently, place the technology of power both at the beginning of the humanization of penalties and in the foundation of the knowledge of the human); and, finally, verify if the entrance of the soul on the stage of penal justice, and with it the insertion of a scientific knowledge into 6

Salma Tannus Muchail & Márcio Alves da Fonseca

the domain of judicial practice, would not be the effect of a transformation of the manner in which the body itself is invested by the relations of power (in other words, study the transformations of punitive methods starting from an analysis of the political technology of the body).7 The structure of Surveiller et punir is simple, consisting of four parts. The first one refers directly to torture and execution as the forms of punishment prevailing until the end of the seventeenth and mid-eighteenth centuries. The second discusses the form of punishment that consists in specifying penalties proportional to the crimes. This form was historically associated with the movement of the humanist reformation of penal law in the second half of the eighteenth century. The third and the fourth parts examine the institution of the prison as the most concrete expression of a relatively recent form of punishment that imposed itself historically in Western societies in the beginning of the nineteenth century and still prevails today. The prison had not been planned as a general form of punishment. It was used only in response to some particular crimes. The problem is that of understanding how it became one of the most general forms of legal punishment in such a short period of time. Now, Surveiller et punir shall seek the answer to this question in the identification and close analysis of the mechanisms of disciplinary power. The book describes the functions of these mechanisms: the spatial distribution of bodies; the thorough control of activities; the exhaustive use of time; and the serial composition of forces. It also describes the most important instruments of disciplinary power: hierarchical and continuous vigilance; subtle procedures of normalizing sanction whose form is not that of punishment but of exercise; and 7

Power and Resistance

the examination as the procedure for the constitution of a systematized knowledge about individuals. Discipline permits an increase of the forces of the body in economic terms of use and a decrease of the same forces in political terms of obedience.8 It is present in institutional forms at the end of the eighteenth century and the beginning of the nineteenth century. Its wide range of variations reaches our present: in schools, in hospital spaces, in military organization, in the psychiatric asylum, and in prison. This last institution, in its turn, is the exemplary model of all of these institutional forms. When Foucault analyzes the birth of the prison, he is interested in describing disciplinary mechanisms whose most important effect is the fabrication of submissive and useful bodies. Foucault’s study of mechanisms of power that correspond to the disciplines thoroughly guides his analysis of the prison in Surveiller et punir as the prevailing form of punishment in the penal horizon of modern Western societies. His book is therefore a synthesis and systematization of several roughly contemporaneous analyses from his Collège courses. It is also possible to see how Foucault’s 1973 lectures at PUC-Rio laid the groundwork for these courses and the book. BIOPOLITICS The reference to medical thought and practice has an important position in Foucault’s move from the analysis of disciplinary normalization to biopolitics. Let us consider his lectures on social medicine delivered at UERJ in Rio de Janeiro in October 1974. In studying the birth of social medicine between the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, Foucault

8

Salma Tannus Muchail & Márcio Alves da Fonseca

deals with the strategies and policies around contemporary health systems. In the first lecture, “Crise de la médicine ou crise de l’antimédicine?,” Foucault discusses the extent of the medical and sanitary model that has been established in the West since the eighteenth century.9 In the second lecture, “La naissance de la médicine sociale,” he broaches the subjects of state medicine and urban medicine as well as the relationships between medicine and the labor force.10 The third lecture, “L’incorporation de l’hôpital dans la technologie moderne,” is about the constitution of the hospital as a therapeutic instrument.11 More precisely, it focuses on the medicalization and disciplinary character of the hospital as an institution. The word biopolitics appears explicitly at the beginning of the second lecture. It is used as a kind of synthesis to name the content developed in the first lecture. In it, Foucault broaches the organization of health linked to a formulation of a new law, new morals, a new economy, and a new politics of the body in the period from 1940 to 1950. The care of the body, bodily health, and the relationship between health and disease became objectives of state intervention during this period. Medicine basically became a matter of the state. Foucault discusses this transformation in connection with the progress of medical technology. These aspects of his analysis of medicine in the first lecture form the ground on which the idea of biopolitics makes its appearance. As is well known, Foucault then develops this idea in subsequent analyses. His discussion of social medicine in his 1974 lectures at UERJ thus not only continues the analysis of the disciplines of the body but also announces the arrival of a new series of analyses of sex, species, and race. 9

Power and Resistance

Foucault developed the subject of biopolitics in two works from 1976: “Il faut défendre la société” and volume one of the history of sexuality La volonté de savoir. Both of these works enact a widening of the domains treated by the analytic of power. They make explicit the limits of the essentialist character of the juridico-discursive model of power and develop the strategic dimension of the analysis of power considered in terms of normalization mechanisms. Two main versions of the juridicodiscursive model of power form the object of critiques in the works of 1976.12 In one of these versions, power is enmeshed with order and established by law. “Il faut défendre la société” opposes this version. Instead, the course sets out to grapple with power as a perpetual war. Foucault studies a type of historical-political discourse that appeared after the end of the civil and religious wars of the sixteenth century. This discourse was clearly formulated in political struggles in seventeenth-century England. It was also present in political struggles of a different sort in France at the end of the reign of King Louis XIV and it persisted as a type of political discourse among racist biologists and eugenicists at the end of the nineteenth century. The central place occupied by war as a matrix of historical interpretation was new relative to the predominant philosophical-juridical discourse about power and society. War began to be understood as a permanent form of social relationship as well as the foundation of all relationships and all institutions of power.13 In the displacement of historical discourse from the nobility to the bourgeoisie, war transforms from a constitutive element of history to an element that is conservative and protective of society. The political elaboration of the idea of the nation in the very bosom of bourgeois thought facilitates the idea of an 10

Salma Tannus Muchail & Márcio Alves da Fonseca

internal war as a defense of society against the dangers that stem from its own body.14 It is in this context that Foucault turns to the subject of biopolitics at the end of “Il faut défendre la société” since the war “in defense of society” corresponds to the procedures of biopolitics. The first volume of the history of sexuality La volonté de savoir opposes, in its turn, another version of the juridico-discursive model of power. While power in this version is considered a repressive instance, the book tries to show that power does not repress or forbid but that it incites and produces. La volonté de savoir makes clear that repression as an explanation for the functioning of the bourgeois order would not be enough to account for the history of sexuality in the West. To the contrary, against the hypothesis that sex has been repressed, it is necessary to show that there is a discursive explosion around sex from the outset of the eighteenth century. Rather than resorting to the repressive hypothesis, Foucault effects a “placing of sex in discourse” that should serve as a principal reference for a history of sexuality.15 Devoting themselves to speaking at great length about their own silence, Western societies have developed a “will to know” about sex, making it at the same time an object of intervention of the techniques of power and a target of political investment. Thus, sexuality is not a given of nature, but a mechanism that is part of a political negotiation (or struggle) of life. It thus belongs to what may be called biopower. This power over life was concretely organized along two main axes in the eighteenth century: one centered on the disciplining of individual bodies and the other focused on the biopolitical regulation of population.16 Here we can see that 11

Power and Resistance

Foucault envelops his explorations of disciplinary mechanisms in the more general perspective of biopolitics. Biopower does not constitute a form of power independent of disciplinary power. It is, on the contrary, precisely around the disciplines of the body and the regulations of populations that a mechanism of power over life has been organized. This mechanism acts neither by forbidding nor through the imposition of death but through investments in life and its phenomena. It has its two main vectors in the living body and in life as a process. Foucault’s critiques and arguments in “Il faut défendre la société” and La volonté de savoir are complementary in substance and form. However, the lectures he that delivered at UERJ in Rio de Janeiro two years before prepared these critiques and arguments. They served as his laboratory to experiment with the concept of biopolitics. We have tried to reconstruct Foucault’s analyses of discipline and biopolitics in Brazil and France from the perspective of a genealogical elaboration. We have, in other words, engaged in a reading that attempts to place these analyses in the gradual movement of the construction of Foucault’s thought. We should add, in conclusion, that it is in the scope of this same historical movement of construction that Foucault’s thought becomes increasingly open to the horizon of struggles and insurrections, of countercultures and counter-conducts. To put it differently, in the same way that questions and practices of power develop (whether in the disciplines or biopolitics), questions and practices of resistance also arise as the underside of the same movement. The effort that allowed the questioning of power to be extended would require a symmetrical effort in order to increase our understanding of resistance. 12

Salma Tannus Muchail & Márcio Alves da Fonseca

NOTES 1

Richardo Pinheiro Lopes translated this article with the assistance of Marcelo Hoffman.

2

Michel Foucault, Dits et écrits 1954-1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald with the assistance of Jacques Lagrange, 4 vols. (Paris: Gallimard, 1994).

3

Michel Foucault, “La verité et les formes juridiques,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, vol. 2, 1970-1975, 538-646.

4

Michel Foucault, La société punitive: Cours au Collège de France (19721973) (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2013); Michel Foucault, Le pouvoir psychiatrique: Cours au Collège de France (1973-1974) (Paris: Gallimard/ Seuil, 2003); Michel Foucault. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison (Paris: Gallimard, 1975).

5

Michel Foucault, “Il faut défendre la société”: Cours au Collège de France (1975-1976) (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 1997); Michel Foucault, La volonté de savoir: Histoire de la sexualité I (Paris: Gallimard, 1976).

6 Foucault, Le pouvoir psychiatrique, 29-36. 7 Foucault, Surveiller et punir, 28-29. 8 Ibid.,140. 9

Michel Foucault, “Crise de la médicine ou crise de l’antimédicine?,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, vol. 3, 1976-1979, 40-58.

10 Michel Foucault, “La naissance de la médicine sociale,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, vol. 3, 1976-1979, 207-228. 11 Michel Foucault, “L’incorporation de l’hôpital dans la technologie moderne,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, vol. 3, 1976-1979, 508-521. 12 Frédéric Gros, Michel Foucault, 2nd ed. (Paris: PUF, 1998), 77-80. 13 Foucault, “Il faut défendre la société,” 42. 14 Ibid., 194. 15 Foucault, La volonté de savoir, 20. 16 Ibid.,183.

13

Marcelo Hoffman

FROM PUBLIC SILENCE TO PUBLIC PROTEST: FOUCAULT AT THE UNIVERSITY OF SÃO PAULO IN 1975

Michel Foucault visited Brazil five times between 1965 and 1976.1 His journeys there took him to the major metropolitan centers of São Paulo, Campinas, Rio de Janeiro, Belo Horizonte, Salvador, Belém, and Recife. In these cities, Foucault delivered important talks and lectures on a variety of topics related to his ongoing research, from juridical practices to sexuality. Foucault’s experiences in Brazil have recently elicited the attention of Brazilian interpreters of his thought. Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues recounts these experiences in great depth in her new book.2 Roberto Machado, who attended Foucault’s Collège de France courses and seminars and accompanied him on all of his visits to Brazil in the 1970s, recalls them in intricate detail in his new book.3 Yet the topic of Foucault’s presence in Brazil remains overwhelmingly unexplored in the English-speaking world. Moreover, even within the rich confines of the Brazilian literature on this topic, there are many facets of Foucault’s visits to Brazil that remain open to further exploration. His political involvement stands out as one such facet. It is especially worthy of greater consideration because it raises some questions that have not been formulated, much less answered. One of these questions concerns the timing of Foucault’s public opposition to the military dictatorship in Brazil. Foucault 1

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is widely (and correctly) regarded as a militant intellectual who spoke out against injustices and participated in various struggles for social transformation, often by facilitating the voices of those whose voices were suppressed. Such views of his militancy inform and stimulate the Brazilian reception of his thought and practice.4 A Brazilian interlocutor no less important than Machado offers the following deeply eloquent words about Foucault’s militancy: Foucault’s connection to politics led him to participate in concrete struggles that went beyond the walls of the university, not only in thinking about society but also in taking part in movements that sought to transform it. He was capable of going to the Bibliothèque Nationale during the day and participating in a demonstration at night. He, already known as a warrior, as a samurai, was a militant intellectual who sought through his example to take philosophy out of the ghetto of specialists. And, among his qualities – generosity, intelligence, lucidity – the one that I perhaps admire the most is fearlessness, courage. He who said that all courage is physical was capable of using the body and fame, notoriety, to denounce established powers, their injustices and violence, in struggles against racism, the death penalty, in favor of immigrants, prisoners, the mad, striking workers etc.5 Yet the story of Foucault’s five visits to Brazil in particular complicates this otherwise apt impression of his political militancy. All of Foucault’s visits to Brazil took place in the context of a military dictatorship that had been in place since March 1964 yet it was not until October 1975, well into the occasion of his 2

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fourth visit to Brazil, that he adopted a public stance against the dictatorship there. If Foucault was the kind of outspoken warrior depicted above in the admiring words of Machado, what happened to him in Brazil under the dictatorship? To be more precise, given his history of political militancy with all of its very public battles, why did Foucault remain publicly silent about the dictatorship for such a long period of time, and why did he finally break his silence? In the following pages, I develop answers to these potentially uncomfortable questions (for interpreters inclined to see Foucault as an unambiguously outspoken militant) through a detailed consideration of the larger historical and political context that framed his transition from a position of public silence to a position of public protest in Brazil. I suggest that Foucault remained publicly silent about the dictatorship there out of a prudence vis-à-vis his interlocutors. He did not want to recklessly endanger their lives by speaking out. Foucault nonetheless broke his public silence about the dictatorship owing to two interrelated developments: a more intensive and selective political repression under President Ernesto Geisel from 1974 and 1976 and the slow reawakening of the student movement in Brazil during the same period. These answers to the question of the timing of Foucault’s involvement in protests against the dictatorship suggest that he did not abandon his militancy so much as carry it with him in subtle and prudent ways attentive to the importance of articulating an oppositional stance through the collective resistance of others. This understanding of the rationale behind Foucault’s political actions has, in its turn, implications that extend well beyond the peculiarities of his manifold experiences in Brazil. Silence is all too often depicted as a form of complicity with intolerable acts.6 The story of Foucault in 3

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Brazil suggests that silence may also serve as the constitutive backdrop to a kind of militancy against these acts. “ YOUR LIVES ARE THREATENED” On October 6, 1975, Foucault arrived at Viracopos airport in Campinas for his fourth visit to Brazil.7 The Department of Philosophy of the School of Philosophy, Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH) at the University of São Paulo (USP) had selected him, along with Alain Grosrichard, to serve as a visiting professor during the second semester of 1975.8 Foucault’s visit, as explained in a March 24 letter to him from the USP Philosophy Chair Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco Moreira, would involve lecturing on a theme of his choosing.9 In his response letter from April 13, Foucault enthusiastically accepted the invitation to serve as a visiting professor and proposed the theme of “knowledge of human sexuality since the 17th century” for his lectures.10 In accordance with this proposal, he began teaching a (still unpublished) course on the history of sexuality at FFLCH-USP,11 where he had lectured a decade earlier on what would become The Order of Things.12 Yet, after only a handful of classes, political events caught up with him and disrupted his teaching agenda. On October 17 approximately one thousand USP students prepared a protest in anticipation of a visit by the Minister of Industry and Commerce to the School of Architecture and Urban Studies (FAU).13 The protest was to be directed “against governmental measures and imprisonments.”14 When the visit of the Minister never materialized, students proceeded to hold an assembly, stage their protest anyway, and plan more assemblies.15 After these events, agents of the Second Army’s Detachment of 4

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Information Operations and Internal Defense Operations Center (DOI-CODI) in São Paulo initiated a wave of arrests that swept up forty-eight USP professors and alumni, according to student estimates.16 Students nevertheless remained undeterred in their determination to protest the arrests of their peers and professors. On the morning of October 23, another assembly took place on the grounds of FAU-USP.17 It served as the occasion for yet another protest against the recent imprisonment of “‘students, professors and journalists.’”18 It was in the context of this protest that Foucault adopted a posture of public opposition to the dictatorship in Brazil. On October 22 the FFLCH-USP philosophy professor Marilena Chauí contacted José Castilho Marques Neto and other militants in the student movement to inform them that Foucault wanted to protest against the unfolding political repression and solicit their suggestions about what to do. Castilho recounts that the students immediately recommended that Foucault renounce his course, denounce the dictatorship when abroad, and demonstrate his solidarity with the imprisoned. The students also invited Foucault to participate in a student assembly the next day. Foucault accepted their invitation but he wanted to have a conversation beforehand to prepare for the event.19 Castilho met with Foucault the next morning to discuss the student movement and its struggles against the dictatorship.20 The content of their conversation revolved around the forms of organization and core problems in the student movement as well as the fear between students from the infiltration of informants into their everyday lives.21 After the conversation, Castilho accompanied Foucault and Gérard Lebrun in a taxi to the student assembly at the massive open space of the Caramelo 5

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room at FAU-USP. Upon arriving there, Foucault asked for paper, sat down on a bench, and penned his declaration. Glauco Arbix translated the declaration, and Lebrun and others revised it.22 Before an audience of roughly six hundred students,23 Foucault then delivered his declaration in French as Castilho read it alongside him in Portuguese.24 In his powerful words: Many dozens of USP students and professors were recently imprisoned. Maybe they’ll be tortured, if they are not already being tortured at this moment. Your lives are threatened. A university that is not fully free is nothing more than a business of servility. You can’t teach under boot heels; you can’t speak in the face of the walls of prisons; you can’t study when arms threaten. The freedom of expression and research are the signs of the liberty of peoples. In the defense of rights, in the struggle against torture and the infamy of the police, the struggles of intellectual workers unite with those of manual workers. The University of São Paulo knows that your struggle today is connected to the struggle for freedom in all of the countries of the world. I pay tribute to your courage and I willingly associate myself with the decisions that you make to ensure that justice here is not an outrageous word.25 These hastily written words packed a political punch. Foucault here succinctly, forcefully, and lucidly asserted the impossibility of engaging in ordinary academic pursuits in the context of a pervasive and severe political repression. If his point was fairly 6

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uncontroversial, Foucault took it in new directions by layering it within larger contexts of struggles for freedom nationally and globally. He suggested that political repression assaults the freedom of whole “peoples,” not just particular institutions or individuals inside academe. Foucault acknowledged the still incipient solidarity between (otherwise separated) intellectual and manual workers in their struggles against political repression in Brazil. He also situated the struggles at USP within a larger context of struggles for freedom elsewhere in the world. His overall message was clear: USP students and professors were in danger but they were not alone. Other segments of Brazilian society joined them and other groups in other countries struggled for the same principle. Finally, Foucault himself explicitly joined USP students and professors in their struggles but he did not play the role of the omniscient intellectual telling others what to do. He deferred to the decisions of a collective body assembled right before him rather than offer his own political prescriptions to it. His declaration had an immediate resonance. Castilho reports that students greeted it with an “emotional applause.”26 The assembly also passed a motion that reflected the original demands of students prior to the meeting of Castilho with Foucault. It approved Foucault’s suspension of “his work in the country” pending the release of “imprisoned colleagues.”27 The motion also set out to have Foucault “produce articles offering his perspective on the imprisonments and denouncing them widely in the international press, especially in France.”28 The same student assembly as well as another one on the evening of October 23 decided to write two letters: an open letter to the public denouncing “imprisonments and tortures” and a 7

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letter to the President of Brazil demanding the release of prisoners or threatening a general strike by October 28.29 FOUCAULT UNDER SURVEILLANCE The history of the production and circulation of Foucault’s little-known declaration (at least outside Brazil) is fascinating enough to warrant consideration before proceeding further in the elaboration of the historical and political context in which it was delivered. Students reproduced Foucault’s declaration on a typewritten page with handwritten corrections. The bottom of the page contained a brief summary of the motions adopted by the student assembly for Foucault. This page circulated as a pamphlet among students.30 It also ended up in the hands of the security services. We know from Daniel Defert that Foucault had his own suspicions about being under surveillance in Brazil and that the French diplomatic services had informed him that they were protecting him.31 Owing to the groundbreaking research of Conde and Maria Izabel Pitanga, we now know that Foucault was not misguided in his suspicions. Through a request for documents about Foucault from the National Archive at the Ministry of Justice in Brasília, Conde and Pitanga discovered that the national intelligence service created under the dictatorship, the National Information Service (SNI), had Foucault under surveillance.32 The SNI obtained a barely legible and heavily underlined copy of the pamphlet containing his declaration.33 The SNI also produced its own legible version of Foucault’s declaration in the presentation of his file.34 Conde does a great service to researchers of Foucault and the Brazilian dictatorship by reproducing whole portions of this file in her recently published book.35 Foucault’s

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declaration eventually circulated publicly through the letters to the editor column in the November 1975 issue of the alternative press monthly Ex.36 There are mild and largely inconsequential discrepancies in the wording of Foucault’s declaration in his SNI file and Ex. One major difference between them concerns authorship. Ex straightforwardly and correctly presented Foucault as the author of the statement whereas the SNI had a more complicated (and erroneous) view of the matter. It maintained that the FFLCH-USP philosophy professors Franco and Chauí had “‘maneuvered’” Foucault into taking “a position against the government” at the student assembly.37 Accordingly, the SNI attributed the drafting of Foucault’s declaration to these leftist philosophers rather than to Foucault himself. It based this attribution on the content of the statement as well as Foucault’s inability to “write correctly in the Portuguese language.”38 The SNI even speculated that the point of getting Foucault to deliver the speech was to provoke security agencies into detaining him, thereby casting the Brazilian government in a negative light internationally.39 In her probing commentary on Foucault’s intelligence file, Conde writes, “the security agencies seem strangely committed to ‘exonerating’ Foucault of his own speech,” as if blame for it resided exclusively in the machinations of an internal enemy.40 Yet the SNI version of what transpired at FAU-USP on October 23 is fanciful to say the least.41 Castilho acknowledges that Chauí may well have informed Foucault about the intensification of political repression in private conversations but he insists that her involvement would not have gone any further owing to her highly vulnerable position (as a known leftist professor) under the dictatorship. Castilho’s account clarifies that 9

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Foucault accepted the invitation from students to attend the assembly on his own and authored the declaration from scratch at the assembly. Chauí had simply served in a capacity as an intermediary between student militants and Foucault prior to the assembly. Indeed, Castilho stresses that Chauí did not even attend the student assembly at FAU-USP.42 Foucault’s declaration at this assembly also elicited the attention of other state agencies. A document from the Ministry of Aeronautics dated for November 24, 1975 mentions his declaration in the context of a larger criticism of Foucault and other researchers for receiving funds from the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) in spite of challenging the policies of the dictatorship and even attempting to establish communism in Brazil.43 Like Foucault’s SNI file, this document also reflected a basic confusion about the precise impetus behind the student assembly and his participation in it. It suggested that Foucault had delivered his declaration at the assembly in reaction to the assassination of the journalist Vladimir Herzog but that assassination took place two days after the assembly.44 The document from the Ministry of Aeronautics thus projected Foucault’s response to Herzog’s assassination back into his initial involvement in public opposition to the dictatorship, as if the assassination served as the catalyst for the entire sequence of his political activities in Brazil. FOUCAULT’S DECLARATION AT FAU-USP IN CONTEXT Universities throughout Brazil had a long history of political repression under the dictatorship because security forces viewed them as spaces of recruitment for the armed left and, 10

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more generally, as hotbeds of “subversion.”45 Apart from arrest, imprisonment, torture, death, and disappearance, this repression took a variety of subtle and overt forms with their own ebb and flow throughout the life of the dictatorship: successive legal prohibitions on student organizing,46 military invasions and occupations of campuses,47 purges of professors based on military-led investigations,48 the blacklisting of students,49 the use of rectors to gather and transmit information about students to security forces,50 and the surveillance of students through undercover security agents in the classroom.51 USP had a long history of experiences with these and other forms of political repression going all the way back to the beginning of the dictatorship. Shortly after the coup d’état in 1964, security forces invaded and pillaged the grounds of the FFLCH, where Foucault would lecture in 1965 and 1975. At the time, the Rector of USP, Luís Antônio da Gama e Silva, even created a secret commission to investigate the allegedly subversive activities of USP professors for security forces.52 The commission produced a report accusing fifty-two USP professors, students, and administrators of subversion.53 The report resulted in military police inquiries for many of the professors.54 The ensuing trials cleared the professors of the charges of subversion but not before they had already been dismissed or forcibly retired,55 and not before some of them had been arrested and imprisoned.56 Less than a week after the dictatorship drastically increased its powers at the end of 1968, the military engaged in a brazen attack on USP dormitories that resulted in the arrest of hundreds of students.57 The dictatorship also used its heightened powers to engage in another round of purges, forcibly retiring forty-two federal employees, including three USP professors, in April 1969. When the USP 11

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Vice-Rector, Hélio Lourenço da Oliveira, protested the compulsory retirements on grounds that USP professors are state rather than federal employees, the dictatorship responded in a vindictive manner by forcibly retiring him and over a dozen additional USP professors, including the future President of Brazil Fernando Henrique Cardoso.58 After these purges, security forces intervened to block the release of approved and budgeted contracts for the appointment of individuals deemed subversive, once these contracts reached the office of the Rector.59 By the time Foucault returned to USP in 1975, an atmosphere of fear, if not terror, pervaded the campus. As indicated by the mere existence of his intelligence file, informants circulated on campus to monitor the activities of students and professors. Security forces also arrested students and professors, sometimes even by pulling them out of the classroom.60 Arrests in turn led to more extreme measures, such as imprisonment, torture, death, and disappearance. Security forces assassinated or disappeared forty-seven USP students, professors, and alumni between 1968 and 1976.61 In this larger history of political repression, the case of the torture and assassination of USP geology student Alexandre Vannucchi Leme merits special consideration because the reaction to it would anticipate the forms of collective mobilization that Foucault would witness and experience in São Paulo in October 1975. The date of this case is also noteworthy, as it occurred roughly two months before Foucault’s first return to Brazil in the 1970s. Security forces picked up Leme on suspicions of his involvement in the armed wing of the guerrilla organization National Liberating Action.62 They then tortured him to death at DOI-CODI in São Paulo on March 17, 1973 12

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and attempted to cover up his death through two incompatible versions of the event: one that claimed Leme was killed in a truck accident while fleeing arrest and another based on the claim of his suicide at DOI-CODI.63 The reliance of security agents on both versions of Leme’s death provoked disbelief and outrage among his family members, Catholic clergymen, and USP students. The students channeled their disbelief and outrage into protests over the course of the following two months.64 Serbin provides a vivid account of the protests. In his words: USP buzzed with activity – with meetings, pamphleteering, discussion at information tables, and class stoppages. Students wore black arm bands and draped black banners around the campus. Leme’s geology colleagues organized a joint student-faculty committee to investigate the circumstances of his death and to establish proof of his innocence. Students from USP and other schools then issued a statement citing Leme’s ‘excellent reputation among students and professors’ and his qualities as a leader. The geology students declared a state of mourning and proposed a memorial mass for Leme.65 Cardinal Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns eventually presided over the proposed mass for Leme at the Sé cathedral in São Paulo on March 30. The service attracted three thousand persons in spite of the strong presence of security forces.66 Castilho attended the mass. He describes the experience of passing the military police to enter the Sé cathedral as one of the most frightening in his life.67 Foucault arrived in Brazil shortly after this event. It is unclear whether he ever learned about the assassination of 13

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Leme but the reaction to it created the first stirrings of the kinds of protests that he would encounter upon his return to São Paulo in October 1975. As we can see from above, USP students did not need Foucault to go tell them that their lives were imperiled. These students and their professors lived under the constant threat of arrest, imprisonment, torture, death, and disappearance. They had the courage to mobilize against it on their own long before Foucault showed up on their campus in 1975. His words nevertheless turned out to have been sadly prescient. Only two days after Foucault delivered his political declaration at USP on October 23, security forces tortured and assassinated the Jewish journalist and USP professor Herzog at DOI-CODI in São Paulo. A rank and file Brazilian Communist Party (PCB) militant,68 Herzog had voluntarily reported to DOI-CODI after being summoned there to clarify his ties to the PCB.69 In a manner partially reminiscent of the case of Leme, security forces tried to cover up Herzog’s assassination via torture by claiming that he committed suicide.70 Yet the official version of Herzog’s death was met with widespread disbelief in part because it simply did not sit easily with his voluntary appearance at DOI-CODI.71 After learning about Herzog’s death, USP students reacted swiftly. Rather than wait until October 28, they started their strike on October 27.72 Serbin captures the immense scale of the strike. “Thirty thousand students,” he notes, “went on strike at USP.”73 Outraged by the assassination of Herzog, Foucault proceeded to cancel his course at USP. This action may have already been inferred from his strong words at the student assembly on October 23. The editors of the alternative 14

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press monthly, Ex, even reported that Foucault outright suspended his course at this assembly.74 However, this reporting seems to have projected into the past an action that was anticipated but not yet undertaken. Folha de S. Paulo had a different take on the matter. The newspaper reported that Foucault had more carefully announced his intention to suspend his course.75 Whatever the case, the subsequent sequence of events pushed Foucault into a more forthrightly unequivocal position. Conde suggests that if Foucault had any reservations about going through with the course suspension he swiftly dispensed with them upon learning about the assassination of Herzog.76 Foucault announced the outright cancellation of his course at USP on October 27, the same day as the Jewish funeral for Herzog.77 The magnitude of this gesture (in terms of Foucault’s personal history as an educator with a rich history of political militancy) should not be missed. As far as I can surmise, it was the first and only time that Foucault cancelled a course for explicitly stated political reasons. He also read a statement about the assassination of Herzog that was immediately reproduced as a pamphlet for students. Unfortunately, the pamphlet has eluded the grasp of researchers on Foucault in Brazil.78 Machado, however, recalls the public statement that Foucault delivered. According to his recollection, Foucault proclaimed that he “would not teach in countries where journalists were tortured and killed in prison.”79 Moreover, there is a now discontinued online record of a subsequent declaration that Foucault made right before his participation in an ecumenical memorial service for Herzog on October 31. In that declaration, Foucault straightforwardly explained his motives for cancelling his course at USP. “‘I won’t,’” he said before an audience in an auditorium, “‘give a course here because they’re 15

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killing the thinkers of this institution.’”80 After uttering these words, Foucault withdrew from the auditorium to participate in a march culminating in an ecumenical memorial service for Herzog led by Dom Paulo.81 The service attracted eight thousand persons to the Praça da Sé in São Paulo in spite of the efforts of the security forces to diminish attendance through the use of well over three hundred roadblocks.82 Foucault was deeply moved by the whole experience. In an interview with Thierry Voeltzel from 1978, he marveled at the spectacle of a Catholic leader adopting a Jewish salutation to channel resistance to the dictatorship: It drew thousands and thousands of people into the church, on to the square and so on, and the cardinal in red robes presided over the ceremony, and he came forward at the end of the ceremony, in front of the faithful, and he greeted them shouting: ‘Shalom, shalom.’ And there was all around the square armed police and there were plain clothes policemen in the church. The police pulled back; there was nothing the police could do against that. I have to say, that had a grandeur of strength, there was a gigantic historical weight there.83 Foucault had good reasons to marvel at this event and to speak of its tremendous historical significance. Herzog’s ecumenical memorial service would turn out to be a major catalyst for the reemergence of the opposition to the dictatorship and the very slow transition back to democracy.84 Foucault also stuck to his words about not teaching in Brazil, at least for the remainder of his stay there in 1975. 16

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However, after the assassination of Herzog, he did receive a speaking invitation from Mariza Corrêa and other students at the State University of Campinas (UNICAMP).85 Foucault accepted the invitation but only on condition that his talk take place off the main UNICAMP campus, no doubt in an effort to prevent even the semblance of suddenly betraying his own words about no longer teaching in Brazil.86 His talk took place at the headquarters of an Academic Center (CA) in downtown Campinas, either on or right around October 27.87 The choice of this location is telling in itself. Victoria Langland describes CAs as “centers that served as platforms for students’ participation in national political debates, as well as for organizing social activities, producing student newspapers, and generally representing student demands to university authorities.”88 The CA is not, in other words, the more conventional pedagogical space of the classroom or lecture hall. It is emphatically not distinguished by the presence of professors, much less administrators. The CA is a space that nurtures the politicization of students by students. As Margareth Rago remarks, “The Academic Center is a space of students for students, a space of resistance, of their struggles.”89 For this very reason, security forces arrested many CA directors.90 They also invaded, occupied, and pillaged the grounds of some CAs.91 Langland suggests that CAs served to reawaken the student movement beginning in 1974, after a period of severe political repression.92 Foucault knew about the significance of CAs. He had asked Castilho about one at USP during their meeting.93 The CA in Campinas provided Foucault with a seemingly ideal space from which to elaborate his newly publicized solidarity with the opponents and victims of the dictatorship. Still, it is not clear that he took advantage of the opportunity. Foucault’s 17

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talk does not appear to have been recorded or transcribed but the political scientist Armando Boito Júnior and the philosopher Luiz B.L. Orlandi were present for it. Their informal recollections of the event with Rago do not indicate that Foucault made any explicitly political declarations about the recent assassination of Herzog or political repression.94 Boito recalls that Foucault affirmed the origins of sexual repression in the bourgeoisie rather than in the working class.95 Orlandi, who translated the bulk of Foucault’s talk, recalls that Foucault formulated a critique of totalizing syntheses.96 It seems that Foucault may have restricted himself to the themes related to his bourgeoning research on the occasion of his visit to Campinas. Then again, explicit political declarations of the sort he delivered at USP were not exactly urgent because Foucault had already made his political stance perfectly clear. Through his declarations at USP and his participation in the ecumenical memorial service for Herzog, Foucault sought to be expelled from Brazil in order to draw international attention to the political situation there.97 His strategy almost succeeded. Foucault was never kicked out of Brazil but there was an order for his expulsion that was, as he later explained, withdrawn in the final minute because of the potential reaction it could generate among students in Brazil and public opinion in France.98 Immediately after his departure from Brazil on November 18, Foucault visited New York City.99 There, he gave a talk at Columbia University in which he discussed recent events in Brazil.100 In his words: A few days ago I was in Latin America, in Brazil, where, as you know, there are a large number of political prisoners. Several hundred journalists, students, 18

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professors, intellectuals and lawyers have been arrested there during these last few weeks. And in Brazil, of course, arrested also mean[s] tortured.101 In this context, Foucault touched on a number of points related to torture in Brazil, namely, the assistance of American advisors in the development of techniques of torture, the spatial separation of the torturers from those formulating the questions for the tortured (via the use of computers) as well as the involvement of doctors, psychiatrists, and (highly sophisticated) psychoanalysts in torture sessions.102 He mentioned Herzog in his remarks on the role of doctors in torture. Foucault suggested that Herzog had died because he had not been given a proper medical exam to assess the risk of death during his torture sessions.103 In Foucault’s words, “Herzog, who died in prison ten days ago, had not been adequately examined.”104 These words would not be Foucault’s final words on torture in Brazil. In an interview published in 1977, he once again dwelled on the role of doctors, psychiatrists, and psychoanalysts in torture in the country. However, in a subtler twist, Foucault went on to acknowledge the prominent role of psychiatrists and psychoanalysts in the opposition to the dictatorship.105 After his visit to Brazil in 1975, Foucault received and accepted an invitation from Alliance Française to deliver lectures in the north and northeast of the country. He had hoped that the Brazilian government would block his entry into the country yet it did not pursue this course of action, no doubt in order to avoid the negative publicity that would have ensued.106 At this juncture, Foucault could have refused to go back to Brazil in order to remain consistent with his own adamant 19

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statements about refusing to teach in a country where professors, students, and journalists are killed but he went back for what would be the last time. Why? The diminution of political repression does not seem to be a compelling enough answer. The intensity of that repression had only begun to relent through highly controlled processes of political liberalization under Geisel. These changes would have hardly appeared stark or definitive when Foucault returned to Brazil only a year later. Are we to then conclude that he violated his own stated commitments? That conclusion would seem to be a bit too hasty because Foucault had articulated his commitments in anticipation of an expulsion from Brazil. When no expulsion transpired, he had to adapt to the judicious strategy of the Brazilian government in coping with him. He had, in short, to find another way to upend this strategy. Foucault reasoned that since he had been not expelled from the country after his protests he would force the government to put up with him one more time. In his words: I came more as a kind of challenge, after what happened in São Paulo, where an expulsion order was revoked at the last minute. When they asked me to come here to lecture at Alliance Française, I normally would have refused but I accepted it as a challenge to see what would happen. Because at that time, one year before, a relation of forces established itself: on one side, the Brazilian government wanted me to leave, then it considered that there would be many problems with USP (the University of São Paulo), with students, with French public opinion, etc. I exploited this

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correlation of forces to say: not only did you not expel me, you were obliged to accept me one more time.107 The Brazilian government did put up with Foucault again but not without resuscitating his own suspicions about being under surveillance.108 GOING PUBLIC WITH RESISTANCE The significance of Foucault’s declaration at FAU-USP on October 23, 1975 resides less in its powerful content than in the dynamic relationship between this content and the larger context of his visits to Brazil as well as the still unfolding political events in the country, above all the torture and assassination of Herzog. To fully gauge the significance of the declaration, it helps to recall that Foucault had been to Brazil on three previous occasions during the dictatorship. His preceding two visits in 1973 and 1974 even took place at the height of political repression under the dictatorship, in a period known as “the years of lead” (os anos de chumbo) from 1969 to 1974.109 Chauí repeatedly insists that Foucault visited Brazil in these years to support the resistance to the dictatorship.110 She also claims that he made a point of publicizing his support for this resistance within the Brazilian press.111 Yet the latter claim in particular effaces an altogether crucial difference between Foucault’s three visits to Brazil prior to 1975 and his visit there in 1975. Foucault adopted a posture of public silence about the dictatorship on his previous journeys to Brazil. Contra Chauí, there is simply no evidence to support the claim that he publicized his solidarity with the resistance to the dictatorship as early as 1973. In fact, “there are,” as the journalist Rafael Cariello correctly cautions, “few records of public criticism by 21

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the author of Discipline and Punish of the Brazilian military dictatorship, which was in force during the entire period in which Foucault visited Brazil.”112 For her part, Conde nicely captures a striking instance of Foucault’s public silence about the dictatorship without exploring it any further. She observes that Foucault offered no political commentary during a question and answer session in Belo Horizonte in May 1973 even though he had just concluded a tumultuous period of “battles with the French police.”113 Perhaps just as mysteriously, Foucault’s distance from Brazil did not afford a more publicly critical posture. He maintained his silence about the Brazilian dictatorship outside Brazil prior to November 1975. As we have already seen, Foucault’s public silence did not signal his indifference toward the dictatorship or, worse yet, his acceptance of it. Foucault’s silence also did not preclude his Brazilian audiences from construing the content of his lectures as implicitly critical of the dictatorship.114 But his silence mattered because it left his position unclear to those who were not proximate to him or knowledgeable about his broader political orientation. It thus constrained the scale of possible forms of solidarity he apparently sought to nurture in Brazil. Herein lies a major part of the historical significance of Foucault’s political declaration at FAU-USP. It publicly announced his solidarity with the victims and opponents of the dictatorship for the very first time. The timing of this announcement raises, in its turn, two interrelated questions. First, why did Foucault remain publicly silent about the dictatorship prior to October 1975? Second, why did he suddenly break his silence? To understand the impetus behind the first question, it helps to bring a few more basic details into sharper focus. One 22

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is that Foucault had already transformed into a political militant by the time of his visits to Brazil in the early 1970s. As late as December 1972, Foucault had been extremely active in the Prisons Information Group (GIP), which he co-founded with Defert and others in February 1971. The GIP set out to heighten public intolerance of the prison system through the voices of prisoners themselves. If Foucault had been a politically inactive intellectual then his public silence about the dictatorship in Brazil would come as little surprise and raise few, if any, questions. Indeed, given his history of militancy in France, it would seem that Foucault would have easily gravitated toward a more forthrightly public posture about political repression in Brazil. The other pertinent detail is that his visits to the country recommenced (after his initial visit in October 1965) at the height of the dictatorship, as stressed above. The passage of Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5) in December 1968 signaled the beginning of this period. AI-5 drastically amplified the powers of the president, eliminated civil liberties, and further empowered the military. After AI-5, torture “became,” in the words of Langland, “the central weapon in the regime’s assault on its opponents, real and perceived.”115 Serbin summarizes the gruesome iterations of torture deployed to instill fear in the population: Torturers used a horrifying array of techniques on prisoners: beatings, starvation, suffocation, near drowning, electric shocks to the genitals, rape, exposure to snakes and cockroaches, psychological abuse, and the infamous ‘parrot’s perch,’ a metal bar from which a bound individual was hung, then shocked and beaten.116 23

From Public Silence to Public Protest

Foucault returned to Brazil in the context of an intensification of these practices.117 The overall violence of the dictatorship thus provided him with what Conde aptly describes as “many reasons and occasions to protest.”118 The final detail worthy of retention is that Foucault’s interlocutors leave his staunch opposition to the dictatorship during this period entirely unambiguous. Why, then, did Foucault remain publicly silent? Machado offers what might be construed as a partial answer to this question. “In all of my time with him during his visits to Brazil in the period of repression,” Machado writes of Foucault, “I never heard him, no matter how much he was asked, use his theoretical analyses to say how one should struggle against the dictatorship, even though he was viscerally against it.”119 The unstated flipside of Foucault’s aversion to prescribing political actions for Brazilians on the basis of his analyses was letting them figure out these actions for themselves and therefore enabling them to take responsibility for their own decisions. Indeed, we can go a step further: Foucault apparently exuded the conviction that the Brazilian people would be capable of dismantling the dictatorship once they committed themselves to a collective refusal of the kind he later witnessed in Iran. Foucault once told Machado, “‘If Brazilians really wanted to they would take down the military regime! If they all said no, state power would not function.’”120 What Machado recalls is undoubtedly illuminating. Yet Foucault clearly found ways of being vocal in public without telling others what to do. We are therefore still left with the question of why he chose to be publicly vocal at one moment rather than another. Castilho stresses that Foucault simply 24

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lacked the context within which to become publicly vocal about the dictatorship, surrounded as he was by prominent leftist intellectuals who were too vulnerable to openly challenge the dictatorship.121 It could also be that Foucault simply did not know enough about the details of the situation in Brazil to feel comfortable taking a public stance against the dictatorship. Arbix opens up this interpretive possibility. He detected an inspiring “sign of rigor” in the fact that Foucault only composed his declaration from FAU-USP “after conversing with Castilho and becoming aware of the situation in detail.”122 The psychoanalyst Jurandir Freire Costa, who accompanied Foucault in Rio de Janeiro, offers another interpretive possibility. He picks up on something far more intentional in Foucault’s silence. “‘He,’” Costa says of Foucault, “‘was never an irresponsible provocateur. He knew that he was under dictatorship, surrounded by persons who were vulnerable. There was a tacit agreement that we would only speak of what was possible.’”123 In other words, Foucault sought to protect his Brazilian interlocutors through silence. Just as importantly, the “we” in Costa’s observation suggests that others participated in this silence. Silence thus amounted to a collectively practiced experience. The explanations above are not mutually incompatible. It could be that Foucault lacked the context for a political engagement in Brazil as well as a deep knowledge of the situation there but knew enough about the broad contours of this situation to want to protect his interlocutors by remaining silent. We know from above that Foucault had learned about the violence of the dictatorship in private conversations with these interlocutors. He also could have easily learned about 25

From Public Silence to Public Protest

torture in Brazil while still in France. Reports of torture in Brazil began to appear in the French press as early as December 1969.124 Perhaps the best indication that Foucault adopted a posture of public silence to protect his interlocutors from the violence of the dictatorship derived from the stated reasons for his affirmations of a related and continuing silence. He refused to openly criticize Brazilian Marxists over his own implicit differences with them on grounds that they could not defend themselves in a climate of anti-Marxist political repression. “‘I do not,’” Foucault declared with reference to Brazilian Marxists, “‘criticize those who do not have a right to a defense.’”125 He adopted this stance in the face of efforts by the Brazilian press to exploit his own underlying differences with these Marxists during his visit to Brazil in 1975.126 Foucault also retained his aversion to criticizing Brazilian Marxists as he prepared to visit the more intellectually Marxist northeast of Brazil in 1976. He even told Machado something altogether astounding for a fierce and longtime critic of the French Communist Party (PCF).127 “‘I,’” Foucault confided to Machado, “‘would never speak against the Communist Party when it is outlawed and its members are in prison.’”128 If Foucault felt such a strong need to adopt a posture of public silence toward Brazilian Marxists in order to avoid exacerbating their highly vulnerable positions under the dictatorship, it seems entirely plausible and highly probable that he would have struck a similar posture to avoid imperiling the totality of his Brazilian interlocutors with arrest, imprisonment, torture, death, and disappearance prior to his declaration at FAU-USP on October 23, 1975.129

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He nevertheless found an occasion to break his silence on that day. What, then, changed? Two interrelated developments appear to have modified Foucault’s approach. One was a more selective and intensive political repression under President Geisel. Though Geisel introduced policies of political liberalization that paved the way for a slow return to democracy, such as a reduction in censorship, this process was highly uneven in its application.130 As Paulo Markun explains, “The project of political opening imagined by Geisel and [the architect of the SNI] Golbery [do Couto e Silva] never allowed for any tolerance toward what was regarded as subversive opposition.”131 Indeed, the dictatorship under Geisel unleashed waves of repression against the PCB in particular in an effort to fully and definitively remove the threat of communism in the midst of the slow beginnings of the transition back to democracy. As the Brazil: Never Again project recalls, “Between 1974 and 1976, the PCB was subjected to successive waves of detentions in which hundreds of members and important party leaders were imprisoned, tortured, and killed throughout the country.”132 This political repression intensified in the city of São Paulo in particular at the very moment that Foucault returned there in early October 1975,133 to the point of ultimately compelling him to attend the student assembly at FAU-USP.134 It also resulted directly in the assassination of a rank and file PCB member, Herzog,135 which obviously drew Foucault even further into public protests against the dictatorship. The repression of the PCB thus acted as the stimulus to Foucault’s sudden public involvement in protests against the dictatorship in Brazil. The irony of this situation was not lost on Arbix. He recalls that even though students affiliated with the PCB wrongly dismissed Foucault as “a liberal and critic of the left” 27

From Public Silence to Public Protest

Foucault’s protest was fundamentally directed against waves of repression that targeted PCB militants.136 The other development that precipitated his involvement was the reemergence of the student movement during the same period. As we have seen, it was the student movement that drew Foucault into open political struggle in Brazil. This movement created a literal space in which he could speak publicly without recklessly endangering others or superimposing his voice on their enforced silence. Right before his eyes, hundreds of USP students took a public stand against the imprisonment of their peers and professors. In this context, it suddenly made much more sense to publicly criticize the dictatorship. After all, Foucault would not have been acting alone. He would have been, rather, acting with others who had already assumed the risk of exposing themselves to political repression through their participation in a collective act of protest. This act was, in other words, initiated and opened up by the courage of the opponents and victims of the dictatorship. It thus made sense to enter into solidarity with them and to follow their lead by deferring to their collective decisions. From this perspective, the story of Foucault in Brazil in October 1975 matters because it belongs to the much larger story of a reemerging opposition to the dictatorship in Brazil and the slow transition back to democracy. Indeed, as Castilho points out, Foucault’s reference to the unity of “intellectual workers” and “manual workers” in his initial declaration at USP even anticipated the increasingly important forms of solidarity in the reemerging opposition.137 The story of Foucault in Brazil before this declaration also matters because it complicates an image and understanding of 28

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his militancy as well as his own inchoate analysis of militancy. Foucault tended to practice a very vocal and public militancy, as perhaps best illustrated in a widely circulated image of him speaking into a bullhorn next to Jean-Paul Sartre before a dense crowd of journalists at a protest.138 His analysis of militancy from his larger exploration of courageous truth telling (parrhesia) in antiquity also focused overwhelmingly on public acts, if not of speech then of manifestations of forms of life. Indeed, Foucault anachronistically cast Cynics in particular as militants precisely because they sought to challenge society (and thus transform the world) through combative and scandalous acts in public spaces.139 Yet, as we have seen in some detail, Foucault hardly conformed to this kind of militancy throughout the bulk of his time in Brazil. Quite the contrary, he exhibited a conspicuous silence about the dictatorship and its bloody repression. However, his silence did not signal his abandonment of militancy. Foucault carried his militancy with him to Brazil, as indicated by his eventual involvement in protests against political repression. Indeed, through his actions and inactions in Brazil, Foucault disclosed another figure of the militant: not only the outspoken combatant in the streets but also the quiet opponent who breaks his or her silence only at a well-calculated and propitious moment in a public space. In this regard as well, Foucault shared a collective experience with many Brazilians. They had no choice but to be publicly silent in their militancy. Silence in public (and sometimes even in private) was a manner of protecting oneself and others in the context of a dictatorship bent on detecting, monitoring, and punishing the slightest signs of subversion. In the case of Foucault, public silence was a manner of engaging in solidarity with silenced others, including those who had divergent politi29

From Public Silence to Public Protest

cal and theoretical orientations. The progressive Archbishop of Recife and Olinda, Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara, captured something of this kind of silence when pressed about not speaking during the ecumenical memorial service for Herzog. “‘Why speak in a high voice,’” he asked, “‘when all of us are conversing in silence?’”140 An appreciation of the political potentialities of this experience of silence enables us to obtain a more robust understanding of the breadth and complexity Foucault’s political commitments and engagements. It also reminds us that silence in public need not be confused with complicity. NOTES 1

Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. I dedicate this essay to my mother, Josenilda de Araujo Hoffman. I thank Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues and Anderson Aparecido Lima da Silva for providing me with copies of the official documentation discussed in the essay.

2

Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil: Presença, efeitos, ressonâncias (Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina, 2016).

3

Roberto Machado, Impressões de Michel Foucault (São Paulo: n-1 edições, 2017).

4

For a detailed and theoretically engaging elaboration of the specificity of Foucault’s militancy from the Brazilian context, see Priscila Piazentini Vieira, A coragem da verdade e a ética do intellectual em Michel Foucault (São Paulo: Intermeios, 2015). Vieira contends that Foucault went so far as to practice and then conceptualize a whole new form of militancy. She suggests that Foucault’s militancy broke with traditional molds of militancy on the left by aspiring toward autonomy and worldly transformations, rather than obedience and other worldly access (in the sense of utopian realizations).

5 Machado, Impressões de Michel Foucault, 120-121.

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6

Incidentally, the French Jesuit philosopher Michel de Certeau construed silence precisely in these terms in his foreword to a report on torture in Brazil published in a progressive Catholic magazine in France in 1969. After raising the possibility that Europe had “exported” the “virus” of torture, Certeau asked the following rhetorical question: “Can we be its accomplices, by our silence, by lassitude, by self-interest or by skepticism?” “Livre noir: terreur et torture au Brésil,” Croissance des jeunes nations, December 1969, 21.

7

“Paul Michel Foucault,” Informação No. 5497/71/ASP/SNI/75, November 14, 1975, 1, Arquivo Nacional, Ministério da Justiça, Brasília, Brazil.

8

Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco Moreira to Eurípides Simões de Paula, April 1, 1975, Arquivo Nacional, Ministério da Justiça, Brasília, Brazil.

9

Ricardo Parro and Anderson Lima da Silva, “Michel Foucault na Universidade de São Paulo,” Discurso 47, no. 2 (2017): 222. Franco’s open-endedness about the themes of Foucault’s lectures diverged from the way she subsequently portrayed these themes to the Director of FFLCH-USP, Eurípides Simões de Paula. In a letter to the latter, Franco indicated that Foucault would elaborate on themes related to his recently published book, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison. Franco may have simply gravitated toward these themes as a de facto work plan for Foucault, pending the articulation of his own preferences for the plan. See Maria Sylvia de Carvalho Franco Moreira to Eurípides Simões de Paula, April 1, 1975.

10 Parro and Silva, “Michel Foucault na Universidade de São Paulo,” 221. Parro and Silva reproduce Foucault’s letter in the appendix of their collection of firsthand reflections on his activities at USP. Though dated for April 13 only, the content of the letter suggests that it was from 1975. 11 Daniele Lorenzini and Henri-Paul Fruchaud are currently preparing the edition of Foucault’s lectures at USP in 1975. Foucault offered glimpses into the content of his course there in an interview conducted and published during his visit to Brazil. His brief remarks suggest that the course sought to open up new ways of thinking about political power through a critique of repression and related concepts. See Michel Foucault, “Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 1,

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1954-1975, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald with the assistance of Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Quarto/Gallimard, 2001), 1639, 1649. 12 For firsthand accounts of his lectures at USP in 1965, see Parro and Silva, “Michel Foucault na Universidade de São Paulo,” 207-210. For a discussion of the larger intellectual and political context of his visit to USP in 1965, see Conde, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil, 30-46. At the time, what is now the FFLCH was known as the School of Philosophy, Sciences, and Literature (FFCL). 13 Angélica Müller, “No caminho ao retorno democrático: Greves e manifestações estudantis nos primeiros anos do governo Geisel (19741975),” Revista do Mestrado de História 13, no. 2 (July/December 2011): 27. 14 Ibid. 15 Ibid. 16 José Chrispiniano, “USP parou em repúdio ao assassinato de Herzog,” Revista Adusp, no. 33 (October 2004): 66. 17 Müller, “No caminho ao retorno democrático,” 27n31. 18 Quoted in “Outras deliberações,” Folha de S. Paulo, October 24, 1975, http://acervo.folha.uol.com.br/fsp/1975/10/24/2//4633626. 19 José Castilho Marques Neto, “No taxi com Michel Foucault: Memórias de um estudante de filosofia aos 22 anos,” Cult, no. 225 (July 2017): 22. 20 Ibid., 22-23. 21 José Castliho Marques Neto, interview with the author, July 23, 2017, São Paulo, Brazil. 22 Ibid.; Castilho, “No taxi com Michel Foucault,” 23; Glauco Arbix, e-mail message to author, August 10, 2017. 23 Müller, “No caminho ao retorno,” 27n31. 24 Castilho, “No taxi com Michel Foucault,” 23.

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25 Michel Foucault, “Pronunciamento do Prof. Michel Foucault na Assembléia Universitária,” October 23, 1975, University of São Paulo, Brazil. 26 Castilho, “No taxi com Michel Foucault,” 23. 27 Foucault, “Pronunciamento do Prof. Michel Foucault na Assembléia Universitária.” 28 Ibid. 29 Müller, “No caminho ao retorno,” 27-28. 30 Castliho, interview with the author. 31 Daniel Defert, “Chronologie,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 1, 19541975, by Foucault, 65. 32 Conde, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil, 113-115. For a helpful synopsis of the immense structure and size of the SNI, see Archdiocese of São Paulo, Torture in Brazil: A Shocking Report on the Pervasive Use of Torture by Brazilian Military Governments, 1964-1979, trans. Jaime Wright and ed. Joan Dassin (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 64. For a careful delineation of the scope of the activities of the SNI, see Kenneth P. Serbin, Secret Dialogues: Church-State Relations, Torture, and Social Justice in Authoritarian Brazil (Pittsburgh: University of Pittsburgh Press, 2000), 29-30. Serbin emphasizes that the SNI engaged in intelligence gathering while leaving the instantiation of political repression to other agencies. For a highly critical account of the birth and development of the SNI, see Elio Gaspari, As ilusões armadas, Vol. 1, A ditadura envergonhada, 2nd ed. (Rio de Janeiro: Intrínseca, 2014), 155-175. 33 “Paul Michel Foucault,” 4. 34 Ibid., 1. 35 Conde, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil, 119-121. 36 Michel Foucault, “Uma aula de Fucô,” Ex, November 1975, 2. 37 “Paul Michel Foucault,” 5. 38 Ibid.

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39 Ibid. 40 Conde, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil, 114. 41 The misattribution of the authorship of Foucault’s declaration to Chauí and Franco belongs to a larger history of basic errors in the files of the SNI. Gaspari offers some glaring examples of these errors to arrive at the following (damning) conclusion about the service: “It spent a lot of money, but it did not acquire any sophistication beyond primitive police power, arbitrariness and corruption.” As ilusões armadas, Vol. 1, A ditadura envergonhada, 173. 42 Castilho, interview with the author. I am deliberately privileging Castilho’s account here because he attended the assembly and played a pivotal role in it. By contrast, Foucault’s SNI file offers no indication that the informant or informants responsible for its materials even attended the assembly. The informant or informants may have simply obtained the pamphlet of Foucault’s declaration and then used it to try to settle professional and/or political scores with Chauí and Franco without ever going to the assembly. 43 “Fundação de Amporo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo – FAPESP,” Informação No. 505/A2/IV COMAR, November 24, 1975, 2-3, Arquivo Nacional, Ministério da Justiça, Brasília, Brazil. 44 Ibid., 3. 45 Serbin stresses that while “subversion” initially referred to activities prohibited by the dictatorship, it transformed, as political repression intensified, into “the military’s catchall phrase for anything that smelled of leftism, that threatened the political status quo or implied criticism of the regime – for example, peasant organizations, student unions, and protest songs.” Secret Dialogues, 21. For a similar point, see Victoria Langland, Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 175-177. Langland suggests that the charge of “subversion” initially applied to individuals suspected of an association with the clandestine left but that as the dictatorship became more repressive “subversion” began to designate a remarkably wide range of behaviors, including sexual behavior.

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46 Langland, Speaking of Flowers, 93, 98, 173. 47 Ibid., 96. 48 Ibid., 96-97. 49 Ibid., 174 50 Ibid. 51 Ibid., 177-178. 52 Associação dos Docentes da Universidade de São Paulo (ADUSP), O livro negro da USP: O controle ideológico na universidade, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: ADUSP, 1979), 11-15; Conde, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil, 37-38. 53 ADUSP, O livro negro da USP, 16. 54 Ibid., 19, 24-25. 55 Ibid., 19. 56 Ibid. 25-27. 57 Daniela Alarcon, “Encontro de ex-moradores reaviva memória do CRUSP e da invasão militar de 1968,” Revista Adusp, no. 44 (March 2009): 57, https://www.adusp.org.br/files/revistas/44/r44a10.pdf. 58 ADUSP, O livro negro da USP, 37-50. 59 Ibid., 55-71. 60 Ibid., 54. 61 Camila Rodrigues da Silva, “Ditadura matou 47 pessoas ligadas à USP, entre alunos e docentes,” Revista Adusp, no. 53 (October 2012): 41, https://www.adusp.org.br/files/revistas/53/mat05.pdf. Out of the forty-seven assassinated or disappeared individuals affiliated with USP, eight were alumni and the other thirty-nine were professors and students. 62 Serbin, Secret Dialogues, 202. 63 Ibid., 206. 64 Ibid., 207.

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65 Ibid. 66 Ibid., 208-209. 67 Castilho, “No taxi com Michel Foucault,” 22. 68 For an account of the rationale behind Herzog’s decision to join the PCB and the extent of his involvement in it, see Paulo Markun, Meu querido Vlado: A história de Valdimir Herzog e do sonho de uma geração (Rio de Janeiro: Objetiva, 2015), 71, 93. 69 Ibid., 133-134. 70 Ibid., 145-146. 71 Ibid., 146. 72 Müller, “No caminho ao retorno,” 28. 73 Serbin, Secret Dialogues, 217. 74 Ex, November 1975, 2. 75 “Outras deliberaçoes.” 76 Conde, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil, 107, 127. 77 Margareth Rago and Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues, “Datas de Foucault no Brasil” (unpublished manuscript, May 30, 2010), Microsoft Word File. 78 Ibid. 79 Machado, Impressões de Michel Foucault, 124. 80 Quoted in “O filósofo Michel Foucault se notabilizou por seus estudos sobre o poder e a sociedade,” Media Relations at the Federal University of Pará, November 29, 2004, accessed May 8, 2017, https://www. portal.ufpa.br/imprensa/noticia.php?cod=223 (site discontinued). Though I have not been able to track down the original source for this quotation or ascertain the name of the author of the article, the statement itself is fully consistent with Foucault’s position on Herzog’s assassination. I have also learned that the author was a militant in the student movement who met Foucault at his hotel in São Paulo to discuss the assassination of Herzog. Ernani Chaves, e-mail message to the author, May 18, 2017. 36

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81 “O filósofo Michel Foucault se notabilizou por seus estudos sobre o poder e a sociedade.” 82 Markun, Meu querido Vlado, 165. 83 Michel Foucault, “On Religion (1978),” in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 107. 84 Serbin, Secret Dialogues, 217; Clara Amanda Pope, “Human Rights and the Catholic Church in Brazil, 1970-1983: The Pontifical Justice and Peace Commission of the São Paulo Archdiocese,” Journal of Church and State 27, no. 3 (October 1985): 438. 85 Mariza Corrêa, e-mail message to Margareth Rago, June 18, 2010. 86 Caio Liudvik, “Foucault na USP,” Cult, no. 159 (June 2011): 42. 87 Machado, Impressões de Michel Foucault, 123. Machado indicates that Foucault was in Campinas for his talk on October 27, 1975 but whether his talk actually took place on that date is unclear. 88 Victoria Langland, Speaking of Flowers, 27. 89 Margareth Rago, e-mail message to author, May 27, 2017. 90 Camila Rodrigues da Silva, “Razões de sobra para se criar a comissão da verdade da USP,” Revista Adusp, no. 53 (October 2012): 49, https:// www.adusp.org.br/files/revistas/53/mat06.pdf. 91 Ibid., 50. 92 Langland, Speaking of Flowers, 220-221. 93 Castilho, interview with the author. 94 Armando Boito Júnior, e-mail message to Margareth Rago, June 1, 2010; Luiz B.L. Orlandi, e-mail message to Marareth Rago, June 14, 2010. 95 Boito, e-mail message to Margareth Rago. Of course, in the absence of any recordings or transcripts of Foucault’s talk in Campinas, it is impossible to know for sure what he said there. However, it seems highly unlikely that he would have imbibed the conceptual language of sexual repression without any further qualification. Quite apart from teaching a whole course at USP devoted to a critique of repression, Foucault had

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voiced repeated doubts about this concept in his interviews in Brazil. In an interview with a Brazilian newspaper conducted within days of his talk in Campinas, Foucault went so far as to outright dismiss the view of Western civilization as a sexually repressive civilization. See Michel Foucault, “Michel Foucault. Les réponses du philosophe,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 1, 1954-1975, 1682. On the dating of this interview just days after the assassination of Herzog, see Guilherme Freitas and Leonardo Cazes, “Uma entrevista com Michel Foucault,” Prosa (blog), O Globo, January 11, 2014, http://blogs.oglobo.globo.com/ prosa/post/uma-entrevista-com-michel-foucault-520469.html. 96 Orlandi, e-mail message to Margareth Rago. Totalizing syntheses were certainly on Foucault’s mind in Brazil. For his critique of totalizing syntheses in an interview with a Brazilian periodical, see Foucault, “Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 1, 19541975, 1650. 97 Machado, Impressões de Michel Foucault, 124. 98 Michel Foucault, “As obsessões de Michel Foucault,” Invasão, March 1977, 26. 99 Daniel Defert, “Chronologie,” 65. 100 Ibid. 101 Michel Foucault, “Schizo-Culture: On Prisons and Psychiatry,” in Foucault Live: Collected Interviews, 1961-1984, ed. Sylvère Lotringer, trans. Lysa Hochroth and John Johnston (New York: Semiotext(e), 1996), 172, brackets added. 102 Ibid., 172-173. 103 Defert, “Chronologie,” 65. 104 Ibid. Strangely, Foucault was mistaken about the date of Herzog’s death. Herzog died on October 25, 1975, not on November 9 of the same year. 105 Michel Foucault, “Enfermement, psychiatrie, prison,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 2, 1976-1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald with the assistance of Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Quarto/Gallimard, 2001), 345.

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106 Machado, Impressões de Michel Foucault, 132. 107 Foucault, “As obsessões de Michel Foucault,” 26. 108 Conde, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil, 106-118. 109 On the origins of the expression “the years of lead,” see Langland, Speaking of Flowers, 249n8. 110 Parro and Silva, “Michel Foucault na Universidade de São Paulo,” 211; Marilena Chauí, Comments from a panel with Roberto Machado and Salma Tannus Muchail at the 1a Jornada Michel Foucault: Foucault Filósofo, facebook video, 9:29, April 18, 2017, Posted by the Grupo de Estudos Espinosanos USP, April 19, 2017, https://www.facebook. com/espinosanosusp/videos/vb.691576157604966/127384463937 8112/?type=2&theater. In these same comments, Chauí insists that Foucault wrote an article against the imprisonment of USP students in 1974. She does not mention the title of the article but she elaborates that it was published in Italy and France before being translated into Portuguese and published in Brazil. Obviously, the existence of such an article would modify the timeline of my argument in this paper but I have not been able to track it down. 111 Parro and Silva, “Michel Foucault na Universidade de São Paulo,” 211. 112 Rafael Cariello, “Sócrates no calçadão: As viagens de Foucault ao Brasil,” Folha de São Paulo, May 21, 2011, http://www1.folha.uol. com.br/fsp/ilustrissima/il2205201105.htm. 113 Conde, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil, 61. 114 Ibid., 23. In this regard, Conde wonders whether the mere title of Foucault’s lectures at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) in May 1973, “Truth and Juridical Forms,” did not allude discreetly to the political situation in Brazil at the time. 115 Langland, Speaking of Flowers, 186. 116 Serbin, Secret Dialogues, 32. 117 Machado emphasizes this point in his own way, perhaps even with an allusion to the assassination of Leme. He stresses that Foucault’s lectures at PUC-Rio in May 1973 coincided “with the intensification of the violence of the dictatorship on account of the protests of professors 39

From Public Silence to Public Protest

and students against the hardening of the military coup of 1964.” Impressões de Michel Foucault, 33. 118 Conde, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil, 23. 119 Machado, Impressões de Michel Foucault, 116. 120 Quoted in ibid., 118, italics in the original. 121 Castilho, interview with the author. 122 Arbix, e-mail message to author. 123 Quoted in Cariello, “Sócrates no calçadão.” Conde corroborates a portion of Costa’s observation. She recounts that Foucault’s interlocutors in Belo Horizonte in May 1973 had been targeted for their opposition to the dictatorship. Conde, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil, 69. 124 “Livre noir: terreur et torture au Brésil,” 19-34. 125 Quoted in Ludvik, “Foucault na USP,” 41. 126 Ibid. 127 For my own reflections on Foucault’s criticisms of the PCF in the larger context of an elaboration of his approach to the party form, see Marcelo Hoffman, “Sources of Anxiety About the Party in Radical Political Theory,” Theoria: A Journal of Social and Political Theory, no. 149 (December 2016): 23-28. 128 Quoted in Machado, Impressões de Michel Foucault, 203. 129 In a private conversation with the author in Rio de Janeiro on May 7, 2018, Rago expressed apparent misgivings about my argument in the preceding two paragraphs. She suggested that Foucault’s Brazilian interlocutors would not let him speak on his visits to Brazil in 1973 and 1974 simply because he would have been killed. However, rather than undermining my argument, her suggestion lends itself to my larger point about the importance of the collective character of silence that Foucault experienced in Brazil. 130 Langland, Speaking of Flowers, 217. 131 Markun, Meu querido Vlado, 68, brackets added. 132 Archdiocese of São Paulo, Torture in Brazil, 84. 40

Marcelo Hoffman

133 Markun, Meu querido Vlado, 112-113, 117, 129. 134 Conde, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil, 107. 135 Chrispiniano, “USP parou em repúdio ao assassinato de Herzog,” 66. 136 Arbix, e-mail message to author. 137 Castilho, “No taxi com Michel Foucault,” 23. In a striking instance of this solidarity, two metalworkers delivered speeches at USP in 1977 to ask students there for help in protesting the imprisonment of students who had assumed identities as workers in the factories of Greater São Paulo. For a fascinating discussion of this episode, see Natan Zeichner, “Representing the Vanguard,” Brown Journal of History, Spring 2007, 17, https://brownjournalofhistory.files.wordpress.com/2017/04/ spring-2007.pdf. 138 Machado, Impressões de Michel Foucault, 110-111. Not coincidentally, Machado reproduces this very image in his own book at the beginning of a chapter on Foucault’s political militancy. 139 Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 283-285. 140 Quoted in Markun, Meu querido Vlado, 166.

41

José Castilho Marques Neto

IN THE TAXI WITH MICHEL FOUCAULT: MEMORIES OF A TWENTY-TWO-YEAR-OLD PHILOSOPHY STUDENT

Translated by Marcelo Hoffman

In those first years in the 1970s of democratic reconstruction after the bloody decimation of all resistance to the arbitrary judgment and brutality of the civil-military dictatorship, we who recommenced the resistance against oppression did not know how to think or act in the singular.1 The plural and the collective inspired us and guided our actions, despite differences between the few and courageous groups that reconstructed the student movement at the University of São Paulo (USP). To write a first-person account about an unforgettable encounter with Michel Foucault in 1975, as Cult requests, is a difficult task.2 But it is clear from the uncomfortable memory of a period in which many of us were a part of a youth mowed down by the omnipresence of arbitrary judgment and the usurpation of the most fundamental rights. The truth is that we were really frightened and we drew from fear a force of solidarity that made us excited about each classmate who joined us to become a companion of struggle and resistance, an invisible unity that expressed an increasingly plural desire for freedom. We wanted more than to survive, we wanted to live fully.

1

In the Taxi with Michel Foucault: Memories of a Twenty-Two-Year-Old Philosophy Student In this spirit and with this desire, I started my degree in philosophy at USP in 1972. Socializing between students occurred at a slow pace. The restrained conversations deepened according to the rhythm of confidence that we gradually established between ourselves. Students in the graduate program reached out. They sought to influence us on national issues and the necessity of rebuilding the student movement. To engage or to separate by trying to stay away from the timid movements of re-creation of representative spaces, such as Academic Centers?3 These were the first almost philosophical questions that I had to confront. It was a time of censorship of news and political opinion in newspapers and, at the same time, of cultural explosion and transgressions of the imposed order. Banned humanities books were purchased in other languages at the Raul Castell newsstand in the USP “Barracos” or in some bookstores in the old center, such as Duas Cidades, Brasiliense, and Avanço.4 The book covers were packaged in brown paper in case of a “raid” in the streets of São Paulo. At the same time, new titles appeared in the press: Brasil Mulher, Lampião, Em Tempo, Movimento, Nós mulheres, Versus, Bondinho, ex, and Jornal da República. These so-called “tinies” were against censorship and the dictatorship, and they aligned with counter-culture, opposition arguments, and the rights of women and homosexuals. Times of fear but times of opposition. I made the decision to join my classmates who reconstructed the Philosophy Academic Center (CAF), which we named “João Cruz Costa” after the unforgettable retired USP professor who hosted us a few times in his house to tell us stories about the school and cheer us up with his philosophical erudition. 2

José Castilho Marques Neto

There were few of us but we were almost Siamese twins. Out of everyone, Vânia and I, and later Jorge, were the most inseparable. At the CAF, we made bulletin boards, promoted debating groups, and set up roundtables with university professors and others who were forcibly retired, such as José Arthur Gianotti. Philosophy was the first USP department to declare a free Academic Center. We did not have a hierarchical board but a group of leaders that coordinated activities. Decree 477 and the fight against paid education gained the greatest weight on the agenda of struggles for student autonomy on March 17, 1973, when security forces assassinated our classmate Alexandre Vannucchi Leme.5 The mass at the Sé Cathedral in his memory led by Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns attracted three thousand five hundred persons who confronted an enormous repressive apparatus in the area. Walking through the aisle of military police to enter the Sé that early evening was one of the most frightening experiences I’ve ever been through. But the air of active solidarity and revolt that we received upon entering the cathedral filled our lungs with the desire and strength to continue resisting. The student movement progressed from that moment in struggles for democratic liberties. In 1974, the Defense Committee of Political Prisoners was established and, in 1975, the famous “School of Communications and Arts strike” left USP with the first student rally since Institutional Act Number 5.6 It was in this context of repression, fear, and active resistance that I got to know Michel Foucault in 1975, not as a student or researcher of his work, but as a young militant and philosophy student fighting the military dictatorship. 3

In the Taxi with Michel Foucault: Memories of a Twenty-Two-Year-Old Philosophy Student Against the boldness of student demonstrations in 1975, the dictatorship reacted by carrying out various arrests of students, and it did the same thing with civil resistance to the coup, arresting journalists, professors, and union members, some of whom were members of clandestine parties of the left. In September and October, these arrests intensified and, precisely in this period, Michel Foucault, who had just published one of his most important works, Discipline and Punish, was teaching a highly popular course in the USP Psychology Department, in the same “Barracos” where we studied. The first time I saw him I was responding to a call for help from organizers, who looked for me and Vânia to convince our classmate Luiz Gonzaga, who suffered from emotional disturbances, to withdraw from the front of the table where Foucault was lecturing. With a bottle of cachaça in his hand and already drunk, Luiz yelled “Nonsense” and “Lies” to the horror of the educated audience. The climate was almost hostile toward him and among the few stares of sympathy and acceptance of that explicit contravention of order was Foucault’s. We spoke delicately to our friend and guided him to his home at the time, the CAF. But what stuck with me was the non-judgmental look of our illustrious speaker. Repression intensified, the climate was tense, and fear ran high. On October 22, Professor Marilena Chauí contacted us and informed us that Foucault was open to demonstrating against the state repression we were suffering, and that he wanted to know what we would suggest as the student movement. I remember that we suddenly demanded that he renounce his classes, denounce the military dictatorship abroad, 4

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and express his solidarity with the imprisoned. On the following day, the 23rd, we would have a university assembly against the imprisonments at the large Caramelo room of the School of Architecture and Urban Studies (FAU) at USP. We invited Foucault, who promptly accepted the invitation. He asked only for a conversation before the event. It was up to me to have the conversation and around 8 a.m. on October 23, 1975, the eve of the imprisonment of Vladimir Herzog and two days before his assassination, there I was at the age of twenty-two on a bench in Praça Roosevelt awaiting the famous philosopher and his colleague (and our professor) Gerard Lebrun. I remember that I prepared for this meeting with all of the apprehension of the world, not because I was going to meet an internationally renowned philosopher, but because the matter was too important and strategic for our democratic struggle. It’s incredible how youth and the strength of the time of combat against arbitrary judgment can make us, really a lot of young persons, averse to being dazzled. Once again, the attitude of a true master asserted itself before the notoriety of a star philosopher. He had an objective, inquisitive, respectful, and attentive dialogue with a young student who listened to him and understood him in French but needed a translator (Lebrun) to make himself understood. It was not a dialogue of intellectuals, one between peers. But a respect between citizens asserted itself and we had a long conversation about what we were constructing in the student movement, in the focus of our struggles, in the situation of political prisoners, and in the daily horror of studying and 5

In the Taxi with Michel Foucault: Memories of a Twenty-Two-Year-Old Philosophy Student working under the bloody dictatorship. He heard, argued, and questioned. In the end, he told me: “Let’s go. I’m ready. We can go. I’ll make a declaration there renouncing my classes and I’ll denounce what is happening in Brazil abroad.” We took the first taxi that passed, a Volkswagen Beetle with only a backseat. I sat in the middle with Lebrun and Foucault at my sides and, at that moment, I felt “the token drop,” as we used to say at the time.7 I went up Consolação with one of the most polemical and innovative thinkers of that period and I sensed his proximity to us, to our struggle, to our identity. Like so many professors who were with us back in those days, Michel Foucault was also one of us. Upon arriving at FAU he created an expected stir at the assembly, which was already taking place. I took him backstage, where some classmates were already waiting for us. He asked for paper, sat down at the table, and rapidly wrote a short text of two paragraphs. Glauco translated it to Portuguese, some classmates revised it, and I had to read the version for the assembly next to Foucault, who read the text in French. Emotional applauses and a genuine excitement greeted the strong words of the philosopher who refused to continue giving classes in a country that arrested and tortured intellectuals and workers. His manifesto anticipates what would become a reality in the years to come, namely the approximation of the student movement with the new unionism that already announced itself in 1975 in the ABC:8 “In the defense of rights, in the struggle against torture and the infamy of the police, the struggles of intellectual workers unite with those of manual workers.” 6

José Castilho Marques Neto

After the reading we shook hands energetically with emotion in our eyes. I never saw him again. I only accompanied him from afar in readings and in the innumerable polemics of his life. But the combative twenty-two-year-old boy still in training received another type of lesson from Foucault that certainly helped him demarcate his own intellectual trajectory as a professor and citizen. Difficult but enormously instructive times! TRANSLATOR’S NOTES 1 This article was first published as “No táxi com Michel Foucault: Memórias de um estudante de filosofia aos 22 anos” in the July 2017 issue of Cult. It is translated here with permission from the author. 2

Cult is a Brazilian magazine published on a monthly basis.

3

Academic Centers are spaces of student representation. For an overview of them, see Victoria Langland, Speaking of Flowers: Student Movements and the Making and Remembering of 1968 in Military Brazil (Durham: Duke University Press, 2013), 27.

4

Barracos translates as “shacks” or “shanties.” It is a reference to an area consisting of buildings that temporarily housed the School of Philosophy, Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH) at the time of its forced move from Rua Maria Antônia to the Butantã campus.

5

Decree 477 was a law issued in February 1969. It banned a wide range of political activities at universities and imposed harsh punishments on violators. For a more detailed description of the law, see Langland, Speaking of Flowers, 175-176.

6

Institutional Act Number 5 was a decree issued in December 1968. It expanded the powers of the dictatorship and inaugurated a period of intensive political repression.

7

To feel “the token drop” (cair a ficha) means to suddenly realize something.

7

In the Taxi with Michel Foucault: Memories of a Twenty-Two-Year-Old Philosophy Student 8

8

The ABC is an industrial region of São Paulo consisting of the cities of Santo André, São Bernardo do Campo, and São Caetano do Sul.

Ernani Chaves

“THE SNI WAS ASKING FOR THE ROSTER...”: FOUCAULT IN BELÉM IN NOVEMBER 1976

Anyone who reads the “Chronologie” in Michel Foucault’s Dits et écrits will see that he visited Belém in the state of Pará in northern Brazil on two occasions: May 1973 and November 1976. He went there for the first time as a tourist right after the delivery of “Truth and Juridical Forms” at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro at the end of May 1973. He had visited Belo Horizonte and other cities in Minas Gerais before arriving in the Amazon, first in Manaus and then in Belém. The second time he went back to back to Belém was to fulfill a promise he had made to Benedito Nunes, Chair of Philosophy at the Federal University of Pará (UFPA), in 1973. In 1976, he organized his trip to Brazil, under the coordination of Alliance Française of Brazil, and asked that Belém be included in his tour. On November 6, 7, and 8 of that year, he spoke in French to a select audience in the auditorium of the then Center of Arts and Languages at UFPA. Nunes was the moderator of the discussion. Questions were formulated in Portuguese, and Nunes served as the translator. On that occasion, as a recently enrolled nineteen-year-old university student, I was the teaching assistant for “Introduction to Philosophy.” My function at Foucault’s lectures was to pass a roster for each attendee to sign his or her name. I never thought that my academic destiny was being sealed on those three nights of listening to Foucault. From his lectures, I 1

The SNI Was Asking for the Roster

understood only three words: sexualité, vérité, and pouvoir. I had no idea at that time how much these three words would work in my life as “magical” words, and how they would become “concepts” of a “philosophy,” which I have been studying since. Foucault’s second visit to Belém has a fundamental prehistory to be told, which allows us, first and foremost, to understand why Nunes invited Foucault back to give lectures at our university. Born in Belém on November 21, 1929, Nunes graduated with a Law degree in 1952. He formed part of a generation of writers and poets who were responsible for the consolidation of the modernist movement in Belém. In the 1950s, he started to write for the literary supplements of the major newspapers of southern Brazil in Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. He was one of the founders of the Philosophy School of Pará in 1954, teaching the History of Philosophy and Ethics until 1960. Founded in 1957, UFPA hired Nunes in 1961. In 1966, he became a full professor. His fundamental philosophical interests were, from the very outset, focused on Phenomenology. He became an autodidact, mainly of Husserl, Heidegger, Sartre, and Merleau-Ponty. His books about Heidegger and his studies in literary criticism of great Brazilians writers, such as Clarice Lispector, made him famous in Brazil and abroad. As a visiting professor and lecturer, Nunes was in Rennes, Porto, Austin, Vanderbilt, Berkeley, Stanford, and Montreal. In 1960, during his first trip to France, he attended the lectures of Merleau-Ponty (at the Collège de France) and Paul Ricouer. In 1992, Nunes retired. On February 27, 2011, he died in Belém.

2

Ernani Chaves

In a very special and significant way, the paths of Foucault and Nunes had crossed before their first personal meeting in 1973. Besides teaching at the School of Philosophy, Nunes had been involved in theater since the end of the 1950s. Alongside his wife, Maria Sylvia, he founded an amateur theater group called Grupo Teatro Norte, which was responsible for the introduction of “modernism” in the theaters of Belém. They staged not only classics such as Oedipus the King and Max Frisch’s Biedermann and the Arsonists but also Brazilian masterpieces, such the poem Morte e Vida Severina by one of Brazil’s greatest poets, João Cabral de Melo Neto. Nunes was the director of UFPA’s School of Theater between 1962 and the beginning of 1967, which is to say, already in a period of full military dictatorship. It was in his capacity as the director of the School of Theater that Nunes began to suffer political persecution, which was preventing him from leaving the country because he was not able to obtain a passport, as he recalls in a text from January 3, 1967. On top of that, he was subjected to a military judicial process. Of course, “getting out of the country” at that time was one of the options for Brazilian intellectuals to avoid jail and Nunes started to plan to go to France to pursue his PhD in Paris. In the same text from the beginning of 1967, he referred to the period as if it was under the domain of the “spirit of gravity” from Nietzsche’s Thus Spoke Zarathustra. From the section “On Old and New Tablets” in the third part of that book, he notes the following passage: “And we should call every truth false which was not accompanied by at least one laugh.” It was a sad period of the persecution of all who were considered enemies of the regime and, before long, the institu3

The SNI Was Asking for the Roster

tionalization of torture, which produces nothing but false truths. After long negotiations, Nunes and Sylvia arrived in Paris in October 1967. Nunes sought to write a doctoral thesis about Brazilian modernism at the Sorbonne’s Institute of Brazilian and Portuguese Studies, under the direction of Léon Bourdon (1900-1994), a specialist in Portuguese themes who had been the director of the French Institute of Lisbon between 1928 and 1935. In other words, the Nunes couple arrived in Paris in the prelude to May 1968 and a little after other events that shook the intellectual and philosophical scene in France. The Order of Things was published in Paris a year and a half before that October of 1967 in April 1966. On August 10, 1966, a newspaper report on the selling of books in the summer of that year from Le Nouvel Observateur had as its title “Foucault comme des petits pains,” which referred to the unexpected success of the book. The three thousand five hundred copies of the April edition sold out very quickly. In June, five thousand copies were reprinted; in July, three thousand more; in September, three and a half thousand more, according to Didier Eribon’s biography of Foucault. The success continued in 1967: four thousand in March and five thousand more in November. We could imagine the scene (it would only be a matter of imagination): Nunes going out to buy bread and returning with a copy of The Order of Things! In short, Nunes arrived in Paris not only on the eve of May ‘68 but also in the midst of the resounding success of Foucault’s book and of the structuralist wave. In 1988, in the foreword of my book Foucault e a psycanálise, Nunes referred to the “rare verbal beauty” of The 4

Ernani Chaves

Order of Things! Indeed, it was that beauty that attracted him to the book in the beginning. There were so many reading marks in his personal copy because he had read it with so much intensity. I handled that copy many times in the second semester of 1980 in the library of his home. That was the place where he used to receive his students in the midst of my master’s thesis preparation. But the aspect that attracted Nunes more than the beauty of Foucault’s style was certainly the fact on each page he recognized another thought from a philosopher that he had already chosen as his greatest philosophical reference: Heidegger. Nunes got back to Brazil in 1969 without concluding his doctoral thesis. But at the time of his stay in Paris he wrote the article “Arqueologia da Arqueologia,” where he played Foucault against himself to seek to demonstrate that it was necessary to do an “archaeology” of Foucault’s perspective, which would take us, in any case, to Heidegger. That article was published in four parts between October and November 1968 in the literary supplement of O Estado de São Paulo newspaper, with which Nunes had been collaborating for some time. The article, which pioneered the Brazilian reception of The Order of Things, was soon included in the first edition of O dorso do tigre, a collection of Nunes’s essays published by the highly regarded São Paulo publisher Perspectiva in 1969. O Dorso do Tigre bears some traces of the reading of The Order of Things in its title and epigraph. The latter return to the words of Foucault at the end of section four of chapter nine: “Ought we not to remind ourselves that we are bound to the back of a tiger?” The interrogation of this question takes us back to the consideration of man in the “analytic of finitude” as “a strange empirico-transcendental doublet.” The presence 5

The SNI Was Asking for the Roster

of Kant in Foucault’s book does not escape Nunes, who begins the article by comparing Foucault’s undertaking – that of the “‘archaeology’ of the human sciences” – with that of Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason, which would have been the “‘archaeology’ of the natural sciences.” This is not the occasion to offer a summary of Nunes’s argument, which starts from a Foucauldian conception of “positivity” very different from the Kantian meaning; presents itself as contrary to the kind of historiography proper to a history of ideas; and “rests in a secret historical-philosophical sedimentation” that he will “seek to identify.” Now, this secret, which the “archaeology of archaeology” aims to reveal, would eventually bring to light the crucial importance of Heidegger’s thought, whose ontology is considered the “main generating matrix of Foucault’s archaeology.” Such a reference does not contradict his comparison with Kant in the beginning of the article. Quite the contrary, Nunes refers to the fact that Foucault’s Kant in The Order of Things was Heidegger’s Kant, a relation completely confirmed by subsequent Foucauldian studies. We can imagine that Nunes’s encounter with Foucault in June 1973 made him remember that reading of The Order of Things. Indeed, when Foucault’s arrival in Belém was confirmed a few months in advance in 1976, Nunes gathered together a small group of professors from the Philosophy Department for a small introductory course on Foucault’s philosophy. Though he was already familiar with Foucault’s subsequent books, especially Discipline and Punish, Nunes devoted his course exclusively to The Order of Things. In 1976, ten years after its publication and when Foucault’s philosophy had already taken other turns, The Order of Things still remained 6

Ernani Chaves

Foucault’s main book to Nunes. In the interview that he gave to Professor Márcio Benchimol de Barros and me in 2004 (but published only in 2008), Nunes reiterated his admiration for this book. When I asked him what Foucault’s legacy is for posterity, he replied: “The Order of Things and the book about sex.” Referring to The Order of Things, Nunes highlighted one more time what he had already shown in his 1968 articles: “The fact that he [Foucault] had established a notion of positivity as a mark of each epoch with its regime of thought that is at the same time a language regime is very important. This seems to me to be a very great contribution.” Nunes personally handled Foucault’s visit together with the director of Belem’s Alliance Française. In a statement to the journalist Adriana Klautau Leite a few years before his death, he joyfully recalled those days of hanging out with Foucault: We were in a period of military rule when he came to deliver some lectures in Pará at my invitation. Foucault was extraordinary. I moderated and translated the questions of the people. Afterwards, we took Foucault to Maraú Beach, close to Belém. I had land there but I didn’t have a house. It was just the land. He loved it. He was a brilliant swimmer. An athlete. He told me that it was the first time that someone had taken him to a beach like that in Brazil. He swam a lot there. Afterwards, we went to a little dive bar. We bathed right there and had lunch. This anecdote pleased Nunes so much that he had already recounted it a few years before in the same interview with Professor Benchimol and me when we referred to the photo7

The SNI Was Asking for the Roster

graphs of him with Foucault at Maraú Beach on Mosqueiro Island near Belém. “Ah,” Nunes told us, “there are pictures, it’s true. Foucault at Maraú. A tremendous swimmer, he dove into the waves. He was athletic. We went to a dive bar. At the time I did not even have a house in Maraú. We bathed there and then had lunch at a little bar next to the beach.” However, Foucault’s arrival in Brazil in 1976, one year after he had interrupted his course at University of São Paulo to demonstrate his solidarity with the students of that institution who were on strike against the military dictatorship, represented a challenge for him. As Roberto Machado recalls for us in his new book Impressões de Michel Foucault, an order for the arrest of Foucault had been issued right after his participation in the student strike and his attendance at an ecumenical mass at São Paulo’s Cathedral the week after the journalist Vladimir Herzog had been found dead in a well-known prison in the city, where political prisoners were interrogated, tortured, and sometimes killed. The order was withdrawn for fear of the negative national and international repercussions that it would occasion. Without even knowing about all of those details, Nunes was well aware of the undercover agents at our university, students who were actually police officers from state security agencies. I think that he organized a roster for Foucault’s talk to avoid the “informants.” In the same way, he arranged with Foucault to have the lectures delivered without any translation. Only the discussion would be translated. All of these measures were taken, and the fact that they were carried out in the strictest terms is due to the prestige of Nunes. There was not any interference in the organization of the lectures, which were 8

Ernani Chaves

entirely his responsibility. Basically, he wanted to “shield” Foucault, as we say today in Brazil. He wanted to protect him to the greatest possible extent from any political problem. He was well aware of the radical character of Foucault’s thought. Seated in the back of the small auditorium, I followed the lectures of that already renowned philosopher without great interest after having asked those present to sign their names on the roster. My knowledge of French did not allow me to understand much of what he said. But I still have a very strong memory of his appearance: he was seated on top of a table with his legs crossed in the manner of “zen” masters all in white with his long sleeve shirt and turtleneck that we recognize so easily these days, since he appears with this same shirt in many photographs. I remember his paused voice, sometimes strident and assuming an enthusiastic tone. When the television crew entered the room to film him for a few moments on one of the nights, he stopped speaking and struck various poses in front of the camera while laughing. On the last night, my colleague, who was a teaching assistant like me, asked me to solicit Foucault’s autograph for her own personal copy of the Portuguese edition of The Order of Things. At the exit to the auditorium, I gave Foucault the book, in which he wrote: “Amicalement, Michel Foucault” (Best wishes, Michel Foucault). Everything seemed fine but two events changed the course of things. On the last night, Foucault was offered dinner at the most upscale restaurant in town. My friend, the same one who had asked me for Foucault’s autograph, was responsible for recording the lectures. She did it on her personal recorder and left it, along with the tapes, inside her car next to the restau9

The SNI Was Asking for the Roster

rant. A thief stole the recorder and the tapes, thinking, undoubtedly, that the latter contained music. In this way, the recording of Foucault’s lectures at my university was lost forever. Furthermore, on the day after Foucault’s interviews, the fears that Nunes did not reveal became a reality: the dreaded National Information Service (SNI) asked the university for the roster of those present at the lectures, the same roster that I was responsible for distributing among the attendees. Nunes categorically refused to give it. He knew what it would mean for the lives of the persons who he himself had invited if the roster ended up in the hands of the SNI. Once I asked him for the roster. He told me that he had destroyed it. As Freud said, the trauma is always “a posteriori.” I thought of the theft of the tape recordings of Foucault’s lectures in Belém as a shadow only years later, when I started to write my MA thesis on Foucault and psychoanalysis after I had discovered another Foucault (so different from the one of The Order of Things) through the Brazilian publication of Microfísica do poder in 1979. When I went on my first trip to Europe in 1988, I received a small package containing the tapes of the lectures of “Truth and Juridical Forms” from the hands of Machado. In Paris, I had to deliver them to the hands of the editors of Dits et écrits, who were then in the process of collecting Foucault’s interviews and courses from around the world. In the low-lit streets around Gare du Nord, in the direction of the home of the person where I had to deliver the precious package, I walked rapidly and tensely. It was December. It was very cold. The shop windows were decorated for Christmas and I squeezed the package close to me. It could not be stolen. I confess that it was a great relief when I saw those lectures pub10

Ernani Chaves

lished in Dits et écrits in 1994. Only at that moment did I feel that my mission was accomplished. Foucault had spoken very generously about Belém. In the “Chronologie” of Dits et écrits we can read that “il garda une forte nostalgie” (he retained a strong nostalgia) of Belém. In his book, Machado refers to the pleasure that the visit to Belém gave Foucault in 1976. When I met Daniel Defert in Paris on May Day 2015, he told me the same thing, and one of the most exciting moments of our conversation was when I showed him the photos of Foucault in Belém. I personally met Nunes for the last time in December 2010, two and a half months before his death. We participated in an event about photography at a cultural institute in Belém. Our personal relations through more than thirty years were made easy by the fact that we lived next to each other. On that night I picked him up and left him by car at his home. On the way back right after his talk, which I moderated, I told him enthusiastically that I was beginning to write a new book about Foucault on Cynicism on the basis of the course The Courage of Truth. “It will be a lovely book,” he said to me, “and I want to read it.” “You, sir, will write the preface,” I responded. We were almost at the door of his house. And so the last words I had with him were, perhaps by no coincidence, about Foucault. Unfortunately, he cannot read my 2013 book Michel Foucault e a verdade cínica, which I dedicated to his memory.

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The SNI Was Asking for the Roster

NOTES 1

Bruno Pereira Dutra translated this article with the assistance of Marcelo Hoffman. I dedicate it to Daniel Defert and Maria Sylvia Nunes.

2

Daniel Defert, “Chronologie,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 1, 19541975, by Michel Foucault, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald with the assistance of Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Quarto/Gallimard, 2001), 59, 68.

3

Lilia Silvestre Chaves, ed., O amigo Bené: Fazedor de rumos (Belém: Secult, 2011), 41-42.

4

Ibid., 42.

5 Nietzsche, Thus Spoke Zarathustra: A Book for All and None, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin Books, 1978), 192-193. 6

Ibid., 210.

7

Didier Eribon, Michel Foucault, rev. ed. (Paris: Champs Biographie, 2011), 266.

8

Benedito Nunes, foreword to Foucault e a psicanálise, by Ernani Chaves (Rio de Janeiro: Editora Forense-Universitária, 1988), xi.

9

Benedito Nunes, “Arqueologia da arqueolgia I,” O Estado de São Paulo, October 5, 1968, Suplemento Literário; Nunes, “Arqueologia da arqueolgia - II,” O Estado de São Paulo, October 19, 1968, Suplemento Literário; Nunes “A arqueologia da arqueolgia - III,” O Estado de São Paulo, October 26, 1968, Suplemento Literário; Nunes, “A arqueologia da arqueolgia,” O Estado de São Paulo, November 2, 1968, Suplemento Literário.

10 Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1996), 322. 11 Ibid., 318. 12 Benedito Nunes, “Arqueologia da Arqueologia,” in O dorso do tigre (São Paulo: Perspectiva, 1976), 59.

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13 Benedito Nunes, “Entrevista com Benedito Nunes,” Interview by Márcio Benchimol de Barros and Ernani Chaves, Trans/Form/Ação 31, no. 1 (2008): 22. 14 Ibid., brackets added. 15 Adriana Klautau Leite, “Benedito Nunes, o iluminista dos trópicos,” Brasileiros, August 2009, 102-107. 16 Nunes, “Entrevista com Benedito Nunes,” 22. 17 Roberto Machado, Impressões de Michel Foucault (São Paulo: n-1 Edições, 2017), 111-112. 18 Nunes, “Entrevista com Benedito Nunes,” 22. 19 Defert, “Chronologie,” 59. 20 Machado, Impressões de Michel Foucault, 229-230.

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THE TINY BRAZILIAN PRESS AS RESISTANCE: FOUCAULT, THE ENEMY OF THE KING 1

In recent years, we have developed research about Michel Foucault’s visits to Brazil in 1965, 1973, 1974, 1975, and 1976. This topic can be approached from many angles. In a previous analysis, one of us favored the constitution of an audiography understood as the ways in which Foucault occupied the speech places that were proposed to him.2 This concept was used for the discussion of the relevance of Foucault’s journeys to Brazil to the inflections of his thought and its seizure of the concept of dispositif. These parameters seemed appropriate. The dating of Foucault’s visits in the 1960s and 1970s, which was a period in which we lived under a civilmilitary dictatorship, framed the exploration of the way the philosopher would eventually be able to alter the rigid discursive order in place at the time by speaking and acting in a South American country under the aegis of dispositifs such as press conferences, a university course, and journalistic interviews. Today, however, we have decided to adopt another approach, given that we find ourselves in a historical-political moment after a state coup that dares not to speak its name. Changing the government but not the regime, which remains a parliamentary democracy, this coup in the form of an impeachment has nourished a “shielded democracy” that solemnly ignores or dissolves by non-lethal arms (for now) all resistance to the reforms that are said to be indispensable to the 1

The Tiny Brazilian Press as Resistance

immediate implementation of the neoliberal project.3 Paraphrasing Roberto Schwarz, who said that between the end of 1950s and the beginning of the 1960s the country was “unrecognizably smart,”4 Felipe Demier diagnoses the Brazil of late 2010s as “unrecognizably stupid.”5 He lists the following reasons for his diagnosis: There has not been a week in which we have not been astonished at some huge budget cut in social areas; at some barbarity committed by degenerated military police; at some absurd anti-minority proposal presented in the chamber of deputies; at some incitement to hatred by histrionic political-religious leaders; at some crime motivated by sexism, racism, homophobia, transphobia and even xenophobia against Haitians; at some lynching of a burglar carried out by mobs animated by evening police shows on television.6 In these circumstances, we found a passage in our readings that guides our approach to Foucault’s visits to Brazil: “In times like these, there’s nothing better than rummaging history for a bit of antagonism. And particularly when we use some part of it in which men and women unite, with a touch of humor, irony, and courage, to try to dethrone the king.”7 The passage comes from an anthology of covers, cartoons, articles, and editorials of the anarchist newspaper O inimigo do rei (The enemy of the king), which was one of the exemplars of the nanica (tiny) press that flourished in Brazil between the 1964 civil-military coup and the 1980s. Its provenance and content compel us to explore this press as an analyzer of the dictatorial moment experienced by Foucault.8 This exploration is especially appropriate, given that the nanicos (tinies) got close to him and used 2

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his concepts as analytic-political tools for the problems of that time.9 Our contribution will therefore appreciate the ways and effects of the encounter in body and thought between the tiny press and Foucault, foregrounding the anarchist tiny press in particular. Contacts between Foucault and the mainstream press will serve as a counterpoint, making it possible to explore agonistic games of resistance and/or submission to official powers. GUARD DOGS, TINIES, AND THE RADICAL JOURNALIST What we propose to explore refers to a moment in which, to use a very Foucauldian expression, “dividing practices” established a split between the “guard dogs” of the dictatorship and the “tiny” press within the larger context of the Brazilian press. The phrase “guard dogs,” which points to the mainstream press, comes from the title of Beatriz Kushnir’s Cães de guarda: Jornalistas e censores do AI-5 à constituição de 1988.10 According to Bernardo Kucinski, about 150 periodicals known as tinies were born and generally languished in Brazil between 1964 and 1980.11 Kucinski authored the first thesis on this topic.12 His thesis was quickly transformed into a book, which serves as one of our main sources.13 Let us begin with the numbers. Kucinski increased the number of tinies from 150 to 160 when he updated the introduction to his thesis.14 The work of Reinaldo Chinem, published a few years after Kucinski’s thesis, raised the number of periodicals characterized by “uncompromising opposition to the military regime” to three hundred.15 The catalog of the collection initially archived at the Center of Alternative Press 3

The Tiny Brazilian Press as Resistance

and Popular Culture of Rioarte reached 560 entries.16 Although the temporal limits varied a bit and the impact of “new discoveries” should not be underestimated, it is likely that the oscillation in numbers is due primarily to criteria adopted for a journal to be incorporated into the classification system. Let us now go from numbers to names. In the pertinent literature, there is almost always talk of an “alternative or tiny press,” although some differentiate between the two adjectives. The catalog mentioned above refers to mimeographed or photocopied periodicals with small print runs as “tiny” and tabloids of a medium size with a national distribution sold at newspaper stands as “alternative.” Such a distinction, however, does not enjoy the preference of the analysts of this somewhat indefinite series. They most commonly use the conjunction “or,” adding that the “alternative press” emphasizes the struggle against information control whereas the “tiny press” prioritizes the commonly adopted tabloid format. Regarding this point, attention must be paid to detail. The first article to use the term “tiny” was in João Antônio’s “Aviso aos nanicos” (Warning to the tinies), published in 1975 in the tiny O Pasquim.17 For Kucinski, Antônio opened a discussion about what would be the correct adjective to qualify a press that had existed for more than ten years but was still called “marginal.” He compared it to underground newspapers that multiplied in the United States in the 1950s and 1960s. According to Kucinski, however, Antônio’s praise of the tinies was based less on similarities with other underground newspapers than on the fact that they were “the only press that dared to denounce abuses of power.”18 In 1975, as signs of a political opening began to appear, Antônio warned the tinies of a possible “loss of the 4

Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues & Rosimeri de Oliveira Dias

primacy of denunciation.”19 For his part, Kucinski stresses the paternalistic connotations acquired by the qualifier “tiny” when it fell in line with tastes of advertisers: the designation, however affectionate, would suggest “immaturity and littleness.”20 However, Gileide Vilela et al. evoke Antônio’s article to explore the singular nuances of the qualifier “tiny.” In their words: “The term tiny . . . was probably a return to the Oswaldian idea of decolonizing our values, therefore, of the little that faces the big. The ‘roaring rat,’ a slogan adopted by O Pasquim, constitutes itself in a configuration very proximate to this original idea.”21 The authors above allude to this slogan in the title of their book about the alternative press in Bahia: Os baianos que rugem (The roaring Bahians). On the other hand, Kucinski emphasizes the “semantic density” of the adjective “alternative.”22 This adjective simultaneously designates practices not linked to the dominant culture, a choice between two mutually exclusive things, the only way out of a difficult situation, and the desire to lead change.23 Noting that the press is “all of this at the same time,” Kucinski definitely opts for the designation “alternative.”24 He writes: In contrast to the complacency of the mainstream press for the military dictatorship, alternative newspapers made systematic critique of the economic model . . . thus deviating from the triumphalist discourse of government echoed in the mainstream press. They reported torture and human rights violations whenever they could, while the mainstream press often avoided this issue.25

5

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Although the introduction of technological changes that facilitated offset printing should not be forgotten, those changes were not, of course, exclusive determinants. The emergence and expansion of the periodicals in question can only be apprehended on the basis of a multiplicity of correlated elements: the courage to take risks by criticizing (in deeds and words) the economic, cultural, and subjectivist models present in dictatorial practices, including those most extensively silenced in the mainstream press, such as torture and disappearances; a minoritarian character provided that it is rendered positive, that is, taken as a kind of guerrilla line capable of sometimes becoming victorious among hegemonic strata of an authoritarian character and then self-defined in terms of unique possibilities of life and thought. Thus, we opt for the adjective “tiny” to designate such a press, which we evaluate as a form of resistance in the Foucauldian sense and as “minor” or “minoritarian” in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense. It should be added that we adopted the definition of a minority formulated by the gay tiny Lampião da Esquina: “a group on which the repressive society keeps its heels, even if it is not minor, as women . . . (are not).”26 With these elements in mind, we bring up yet another controversy: could there have been the complacency of the mainstream press with the censorship imposed by the Brazilian dictatorship? A scholar and protagonist of this history, Kucinski highlights this complacency and even a possible complicity or, rather, the presence of self-censorship in the majority of the traditional media. He does so both in his thesis and in his already quoted book based on the thesis. And it was at the time of the updates in the book that the reactions were most audi6

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ble. As an extreme example, it is fitting to quote the journalist Luiz Maklouf Carvalho: Kucinski should have been on another planet . . . . Self-censorship as a category must be seen in the historical framework of total destruction of the rule of law – torture, National Security Law, Institutional Acts, seizures of newspapers, censors in newsrooms, journalists in the prisons, etc. etc. – and not subjectively. To say that it has determined the pattern of information control during the 15 years of authoritarian regime is to lick the boot of the dictatorship.27 We do not know of any response from Kucinski to Maklouf. However, like us, Maurício Maia agrees with Kucinski and disagrees that the empire of silence was only “exogenous” and “vertical.” In order to demonstrate the latter point, he first highlights the official control of the information in each of the presses: Preventative censorship reached its peak in weeklies like O Pasquim and O São Paulo. Official control over the weekly Movimento began with the first edition. In the case of Opinião, censorship pressure was one of the main reasons for the closing of the newspaper. Tax evasion, legal proceedings (through the National Security Law and the Press Law), seizures and terrorist attacks complete the repertoire of actions against these outlets. . . . In the mainstream press, preventative censorship was used in a parsimonious way. The newspapers O Estado de São Paulo and Jornal da Tarde lived with preventative censorship between September 7

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1972 and January 1975. Veja was under censorship in 1972 and then between 1974 and 1976. . . . It is worth remembering that the presence of military censors in the editorial offices of newspapers, such as Correio da Manhã and Jornal do Brasil, lasted a few weeks after the publication of the Institutional Act No. 5 in December 1968.28 Then, with the support of research conducted at the National Archives/Ministry of Justice, Maia refers to a veiled surveillance of the mainstream press through notes and phone calls from the Federal Police. This surveillance had the goal of preventing the disclosure of news contrary to the regime. With regard to its effects, Maia remarks: “In the eyes of the operators of this type of censorship, the degree of obedience was extremely high. . . . The efficiency . . . is translated by the few episodes (only 7) in which there was noncompliance with some of the 80 federal orders dispatched between 1971 and 1973.”29 But Maia’s strongest argument in favor of Kucinski’s perspective lies in the transcription of texts from the mainstream press in which there is declared support for dictatorial politics. Although Maia offers numerous reactions to international denunciations of repression and torture published in O Globo, Jornal do Brasil, O Estado de São Paulo and Folha de São Paulo, it suffices to cite an editorial from the first of these newspapers. In spite of considering itself an adversary of torture, O Globo disqualified international denunciations of it as the mere expedients of political opponents. In the words of the editorial, “We do not allow terrorists and their sympathizers to transform the accusations of torturers into a campaign of demoralization of the authorities now engaged in the defense of the Brazilian 8

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family threatened by these monsters linked to foreign organizations.”30 In light of the contrast between the “guard dogs” and the “tinies,” we shall now turn to Foucault’s visits to Brazil. Even though the first of these visits dates from 1965, we will privilege his visits in the mid-1970s due to the problem that animates this inquiry. At the time, Foucault expressed his intention to abandon the sacralized place of the intellectual in order to dedicate himself to the diagnosis of the present through the exercise of radical journalism, sometimes evoked under other denominations, such as pyrotechnics, explosives, and fireworks.31 Inspired by this minoritarian attitude, we will now turn to the historical narrative, which draws from one of Foucault’s insights. As he explained in a 1977 interview: “History is fictionalized from a political reality that makes it true; a politics that doesn’t yet exist is fictionalized from a historical truth.”32 For some have wanted and many still want, like Foucault and the tinies, “to dethrone the king.” UNPLANNED DISCONTINUITIES In October 1975, Foucault returned to the University of São Paulo (USP), where he had been ten years earlier. Shortly before his departure to Brazil, he had traveled with Yves Montand, Régis Debray, Costa-Gravas, Jean Lacouture, Father Ladouze, and Claude Mauriac to Madrid to protest the death sentence of eleven anti-Franco militants. The group even read a protest statement in the presence of the international press. As a consequence, Foucault and his fellow protestors were immediately escorted by the police to the airport and dispatched back to Paris. His work project at the School of 9

The Tiny Brazilian Press as Resistance

Philosophy, Literature, and Human Sciences (FFLCH) at USP was to involve lecturing on psychiatrization and anti-psychiatry but it apparently bored him because it did not at all resemble the kind of political engagement that he had just experienced in Spain. “Freud and Marx to infinity,” Foucault complained to Daniel Defert.33 His initial impression of the sterility of academic life did not last. Spurred by the regime’s targeting of persons merely suspected of connections with the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), Foucault went to a student assembly on October 23. The following day, Folha de São Paulo reported: At noon, a meeting of USP students was held on the premises of the School of Architecture and Urban Studies, in protest of the arrest in recent weeks of students, teachers and journalists. . . . Professor Michel Foucault . . . attended the student assembly. . . , and made a statement of solidarity with the students. He also said that he intended to suspend the classes he is giving.34 On the same day as the publication of this report, security agents went to the headquarters of a television station to arrest the journalist Vladimir Herzog. He obtained permission to present himself at the headquarters of the Detachment of Information Operations and Internal Defense Operations Center (DOI-CODI) the following day. Elio Gaspari chronicles what transpired after Herzog arrived at DOI-CODI: He was hauled in with two colleagues. He denied that he belonged to the PCB and was alone with an interrogator in a room downstairs. The two colleagues, in 10

Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues & Rosimeri de Oliveira Dias

a contiguous corridor, heard his screams and the order for the electric shock machine to be brought. A highvolume radio muffled the sounds. At one point the news reported that Generalissimo Francisco Franco . . . had received the extreme unction. . . . In the middle of the afternoon there was a great silence in the jail.35 Vlado, as Herzog was known, was dead. On October 27, a strike broke out at USP after Vlado’s funeral. Foucault cancelled his course. He also attended an ecumenical mass for Herzog. Years later, in a book of interviews with Thierry Voeltzel, Foucault evoked the mass to stress that revolts are never useless and that their defense constitutes one of the elements of an anti-strategic ethic. As he recalled: The Jewish community didn’t dare hold a funeral service. It was the Archbishop of São Paulo, Dom Evariste [sic], who organised the ceremony, which was moreover inter-denominational, in memory of the journalist in the cathedral of St. Paul. It drew thousands and thousands of people into the church, on to the square and so on, and the cardinal in red robes presided over the ceremony, and he came forward at the end of the ceremony, in front of the faithful, and he greeted them shouting: ‘Shalom, shalom.’ And there was all around the square armed police and there were plain clothes policemen in the church. The police pulled back; there was nothing the police could do against that.36

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FOUCAULT AT VERSUS Although he considered himself to be under police surveillance, Foucault remained in Brazil until November 18. He was at UERJ almost informally and at the State University of Campinas at the invitation of the student Academic Center. What interests us specifically, however, is his contact with the tiny press. Versus published an interview with Foucault titled “Asylum, sexuality, prisons” in its first issue, which appeared in October 1975. In the interview, Foucault offers the following response to a question about the need for a synthesis of knowledge and struggles: “What makes a synthesis is the historical process, the synthesis is made by the collectivity. If the intellectual wants to synthesize these various activities he will resume his old solemn and useless role.”37 He went on to clarify, “I did not speak of the lack of synthesis as something that is missing, but of an achievement: at last, we are freeing ourselves of synthesis, of totality.”38 Nothing better than this radical rejection of synthesis could be offered to Versus. The newspaper had started as an effect of the event of the assassination of Herzog. Barros Filho recounts, “Herzog’s drama in prison coincided with the printing of the first edition. . . , around 12,000 copies. . . . Distributed precariously from hand to hand, in newsstands in São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, Porto Alegre, and a few other cities, . . . it resonated deeply with readers, and would go further than expected.”39 In the same perspective that we have adopted to characterize the tinies, Barros Filho elaborates, “We were more than 100 newspapers, I read in some statistics, but we made the noise of a thousand.”40 In spite of (or perhaps because) of these minoritarian conditions, Versus published thirty-three regular editions, three 12

Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues & Rosimeri de Oliveira Dias

extra editions of comic books, and two special editions, one related to the Chilean coup and another on May Day in the greater industrial region of São Paulo, between 1975 and 1979. But as much as these numbers, which sound almost farfetched today, we are interested in an approach to Versus as an analyzer of the perspectives then present in the sphere of political struggles. Maria Paula Araújo tells us that the first half of the 1970s brought about a new tactical definition for the Brazilian left: the “resistance struggle” as a self-criticism of the armed struggle and its defeat.41 This attitude, linked to the daily defense of freedoms, did not, however, enjoy unanimity: “a new polarity was established . . . on the one hand, those who agreed with a resistance struggle . . . on the other, militants and organizations that considered this proposal a replica of the reformism of traditional Brazilian communism.”42 Linked to the new polarity was the action of minorities, such as movements of women, blacks, and homosexuals, which then emerged (or resurged). While those who supported the resistance struggle embraced these initiatives, with or without attempts at partisan “rigging,” the (now) traditional perspective of political action claimed that they divided the opposition, leading to unwanted fragmentation. According to Araújo, this debate can be traced in the legal space of the pages of the tiny press because “the political discussions began to leave the strict scope of clandestine organizations and gained a greater space and a larger public audience.”43 In its first two years of existence, Versus did not lack reasons for participation in resistance struggles. The worker Manuel Fiel Filho was murdered in 1976 on army premises. In the same year, the fashion stylist Zuzu Angel, who had been 13

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denouncing the massacre of her son in the cellars of repression, died in a suspicious car accident. At the same time, bomb attacks began against large organizations that were critical of the regime, such as the Brazilian Press Association and the Brazilian Bar Association. Other attacks followed that were directed at small spaces that sold the tiny press, such as newsstands. The language of Versus was a summary of that moment. Araújo writes: “The newspaper sought a form of expression that represented the terror and anguish. . . . On the other hand, intellectually, it was . . . close to the French May 1968, viewing politics as an aesthetic manifestation.”44 Regardless of its emphasis on themes such as panic and death, Versus was considered an extremely beautiful publication. It expressed “both beauty and tension, using all resources, from the comic to the photo, . . . differing aesthetically from everything that had been done before.”45 According to Marcos Faerman, editor of Versus, this political aesthetic aimed to introduce the Brazilian public to a still unknown Latin America made up entirely of fear and terror. “It was all the past,” he observes, “we used the past to speak of the present.”46 The phrase evokes a procedure adopted by Foucault in Brazil, namely, the use of an encoded historical discourse to perform a critique of the present. Young journalists soon joined an initial nucleus of journalists who had signed promissory notes to finance the newspaper. The first number of Versus fascinated them. They also collaborated with veteran intellectuals and artists as well as a new generation of designers and comic book creators. There was no concern about copyright. Versus “stole” texts from foreign magazines or received them as gifts from its counterparts. It 14

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also attracted exiles from elsewhere in Latin America and even housed them in its headquarters.47 The synthesis, when it exists, is made by the collectivity, as had occurred at the time of Herzog’s murder. It should be added, however, that supposed syntheses do not always lead to something desirable. In 1977, Versus reached its apogee. It sold about thirty-five thousand copies per edition, brought together people from all left-wing parties, and obtained funds through ticket sales for a show attended by about fifteen thousand people at the Alternative Congress of the Brazilian Society for the Advancement of Science. At that same time, Versus took in (through exiles) the Workers’ League, which launched the Socialist Convergence movement within the newspaper. It was a journey full of incidents, which we will not detail here. We will simply limit ourselves to depicting it (perhaps with a bit of exaggeration) as a confrontation between a fragmented utopia and a totalizing utopia or, to use Foucauldian categories, between heterotopia and utopia.48 Kucinski summarizes the outcome of this confrontation: “With amnesty, [Socialist] Convergence no longer needs Versus. . . . In October [1979], the last edition of Versus comes out.”49 REVOLUTIONS AND CONFESSIONS It is worth remembering that Foucault gave another interview to the Brazilian press in 1975. It was with Jornal da Tarde, which we would describe as a hybrid newspaper. Launched in 1966 with the pretension of being a graphically revolutionary evening paper with great reporting, it was, in fact, a byproduct of O Estado de São Paulo, a circumstance that defined its limits. As for Jornal da Tarde’s revolutionary forms, it is opportune to 15

The Tiny Brazilian Press as Resistance

cite the most famous one, even though aesthetic daring did not exactly distinguish it. In the years of preventative censorship, the newspaper published cake recipes in the spaces where the scissors of the censors worked. Evaluating this strategy, Frei Betto, who collaborated with the Jornal da Tarde, said that it mitigated complicity, “the cut before the cut.”50 The public reception of the strategy is debatable. Some report that people phoned the newspaper complaining that the recipes did not work. Others assert that over time the sense of maneuver as a form of resistance became clear. It is true that Jornal da Tarde was known as less rightwing than its rival, Folha da Tarde. Since Institutional Act no. 5 (AI-5) the latter served as a ferocious “guard dog,” to the point of being considered the newspaper with the largest tiragem (circulation), which is to say, the newspaper with the largest number of tiras (slang for cops).51 It is impossible to say how much Foucault knew about the connivance and resistance of the Brazilian press. But the interview given to Cláudio Bojunga and Reinaldo Lobo allows us to appreciate both the discursive order that prevailed in Jornal da Tarde and the possible disorder that Foucault introduced in it. In the lower left corner of page twelve, one finds a box with the following title: “The history and culture seen by a deep, intelligent, original, devilish thinker. I give the floor to Michel Foucault.”52 But Foucault does not have the floor. Lobo has it. After indulging in some ironic statements, such as “Michel Foucault is a star” and “Some have gone so far as to read his books,” Lobo explains the meaning of an already distant The Order of Things to readers.53 Only then does he announce, “We need to give him the floor.”54 Foucault answers the interview16

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ers on the right of page twelve and on the next page. The subjects of the interview do not differ much from those in Versus. But they are formulated in an almost scholarly format rather than following a lively conversation, as in the case of the tiny. Foucault, however, knew how to bend the questions in his direction. Thus, when asked to clarify the meaning of confession in his genealogical research, he aims at the (Brazilian?) present. “If it is true,” he notes, “that the wild extortion of confession is a habitual practice of the police and that justice, in principle, ignores it . . . it is also true that, by attributing such a privilege [the production of truth] to confession, the judicial system is a little complicit in this police practice, which consists in extracting it at any price.”55 Foucault himself does not escape the necessity of repeatedly confessing to (or atoning for) the boldness of attacking the sacrosanct figure of man. The interviewers ask, “What about man? Does he exist?” Foucault patiently replies, “Of course he does. What has to be destroyed is the set of qualifications, specifications and settlements by which some human essences were defined from the eighteenth century.”56 The answer opens the way to a final provocation. Knowing that Foucault was a tireless advocate of minorities, the interviewers ask him if such a position could escape humanism. Looking at his present, the philosopher closes the dialogue with the following statement: “If these struggles are conducted in the name of a determinate essence of man . . . I would say that they are lost struggles. Because they will be conducted in the name of the abstract man, the normal man, in good health, which precipitates a series of powers.”57 Foucault concludes, “To make a political critique in the name of a humanism means reintroducing the very thing we fight into the weapon of combat.”58 17

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Shortly after his interview with Jornal da Tarde, Foucault went to New York, where he attended a conference on schizoculture hosted by Sylvère Lotringer. At a roundtable on “Medicine, Violence and Psychiatry,” which brought together Ronald Laing, Howie Harp, and Judy Clark, Foucault reminded the attendees of us: Forgive me for this digression that seems to speak only incidentally of asylums and not at all of medicine, except that, in fact, this new technique of torture introduced a new character now constantly present in the ritual of torture: this character is the doctor. In practically all important tortures, a doctor is present whose function is, firstly, to say which are the most effective tortures; secondly, he takes medical tests to see if the patient is at risk of dying – Herzog, who died in prison ten days ago, had not been adequately examined – and, thirdly, the doctor gives different kinds of injections to reanimate the patient so that he can physiologically and psychologically tolerate the tortures.59 SIGNS OF SUSPICION AND NEW ALLIANCES So many demonstrations in Brazil and abroad would not have gone unnoticed by censors of all shades, from official information services to guardians of order in the press.60 After the murder of Herzog, Foucault feared that a return to our country would be forbidden. However, he came back once again, under the auspices of Alliance Française. Foucault avoided the so-called great metropolitan centers on that occa-

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sion. He restricted his lecturing to Salvador, Recife, and Belém in 1976. In these circumstances, Foucault’s last visit to Brazil would tend to be ignored were it not for the split between “guard dogs” and “tinies.” So far, we have located only one mention of Foucault’s last trip to Brazil in the mainstream press of the Rio de Janeiro-São Paulo axis. That mention can be found in an article signed by Renato de Moraes in the Folha de São Paulo. Moraes indulges in poorly disguised prejudices to disqualify Foucault. In his words: Wrapped in a purposeful anonymity, the ‘maître à faire’ Michel Foucault landed days ago in Salvador. . . . And there he continues, unconcerned, without explaining the real motives (if any) of this new incursion into Brazil. The most recent excavations of the ‘archaeologist of knowledge’ are now turned to another of his curious theories, the differentiation between erotic art (typically oriental) and erotic practice (typically Western). . . . In Bahia, it is known, things happen in a unique and different way. Born an iconoclast, the Frenchman Foucault is not settling for less in his Bahian footloose: the only company he has deemed convenient in his moments of relaxation has been a guapo guy, cultured and handsome, known in those lands as Paulete. Elementary, I would say, for a guy who claims to have an almost erotic pleasure in his ‘craftsmanship.’61 Though it did not announce the arrival of the philosopher to the city, the local press of Salvador gave some prominence to 19

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his lectures at the School of Philosophy and Human Sciences (FFCH) of the Federal University of Bahia (UFBA). Tribuna da Bahia, A Tarde, and Jornal da Bahia published articles respectively entitled “Foucault talks about repression in Western society,” “Michel Foucault finds journalism today’s philosophy” and “Psychiatry is linked to power.” The first and the last articles attempt to summarize the content of the lectures. The second article is most proximate to our own concerns. In it, Foucault re-introduces journalism as a weapon in struggles of the present, which are often absent in traditional philosophy. Coverage of Foucault in Salvador, however, will mainly be the responsibility of the tiny press. Opinião, which followed Foucault’s presentations at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro in 1973 and continued to mention him in the following months in articles critical of the institution of psychiatry,62 concentrated on his stay in Salvador. Opinião published the article “Interlocutors or Enemies?,” which ignited a controversy with Marxism and revealed disagreements with Lacanianism.63 The paper also includes an article by the Brazilian psychoanalyst Chaim Katz about the forthcoming The History of Sexuality: Volume I: An Introduction and the translation of one of Foucault’s articles that was unpublished in Brazil.64 With regard to the scope of the coverage of Foucault’s passage through Salvador, it is necessary to mention the tiny Invasão. A single issue of this periodical was published in March 1977, well after the departure of Foucault. His name does not appear in the headlines of the cover, the most outstanding of which turns to the denunciation of the lead contamination of workers in the municipality of Santo Amaro. It 20

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reads: “Chumbo neles (Lead on them)! The Brazilian Company of Lead is poisoning the workers’ blood.”65 The story about Foucault occupies three pages. It is composed of a long interview, intertwined with excerpts from the lectures at UFBA and a cartoon by Laerte in which Foucault is portrayed with a ponytail. The first question of the interviewers is predictable: “What does your thinking consist of in general terms?” The answer is not predictable: “I have absolutely no thought, I do not function as a classic philosophical thought. . . . I have no thought, I have obsessions.”66 A little later, when asked about historical materialism, the sharpness of the rejoinder leads one to suppose that Foucault only repeated what has often been said but perhaps what was impossible to hear in the contentious Brazil of the 1970s, when any restrictions directed at Marxism implied the possibility of being accused of reactionary tendencies. In his words: We can make two different uses of dialectical or historical materialism, or, if you will, two uses of Marxism – one that consists precisely in recoding all history to reproduce a philosophical representation of it, and a methodological, almost technical, use of a certain number of concepts. . . . In the first case, you have Marxism as it is practiced in universities . . . and in the second case, you make a tactical and strategic use of Marxism, a number of fundamental concepts of Marxism that allow you to decipher a situation, analyze a historical time, etc.67 After 1975, as we have been attempting to show, Foucault had been exposed to something quite different from the large news conglomerates that had followed him with invasive flashes and 21

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headlines.68 On his last trip to our country, young anarchists with their tinies were primarily the ones who approached him in body and in thought. We will now turn our attention to the exploration of two Bahian periodicals, O inimigo do rei and Barbárie, given that they belong to the focus of the present article and do not usually receive a lot of attention from researchers focused on the general theme of the resistance press. Almost all of these researchers reveal a clear preference for supposedly more serious publications, founded (or appropriated throughout) by Marxist tendencies and/or parties. Even Kucinski’s research mentions only two anarchist periodicals, Dealbar and O Protesto, among the 150 cited.69 This omission is a clear effect of his classification scheme, where “predominantly political publication” and “anarchist publication” are mutually exclusive categories.

O INIMIGO DO REI AND BARBÁRIE With the support of João Henrique C. Oliveira’s dissertation, it is possible to say that between 1964 and 1980 at least seven “evil flowers” flourished in Brazil, which is to say, seven anarchist periodicals in association with the counterculture: O Pasquim (Underground column), Tribo, Soma, Autogestão, Utopia, O inimigo do rei and Barbárie.70 O inimigo do rei, a newspaper that people said had a “strange name,” appeared in 1977 at the initiative of UFBA students linked to the group The Phantom of Freedom. The name of the group, taken from Luís Buñuel’s film, referred to a list of candidates created to run for the elections of the Academic Directory of Philosophy. It expressed the dissatisfaction of a part of the student move22

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ment with the centralist paths taken by the National Union of Students, which was still illegal but had been reconstituting itself since 1974. Or, in perhaps more precise terms, the list expressed the opposition to authoritarianism on the part of the entire university left, including professors and students. Other groups with equally suggestive sobriquets, such as Um estranho no ninho (A stranger in the nest – Economy), Ovelha Negra (Black Sheep – Communication) and Fim de festa (End of the party – Social Sciences), soon joined the The Phantom of Liberty. In this context, it was not long before O inimigo do rei surpassed both the university circuit and the geographical boundaries of Bahia, and attracted the attention of libertarian collectives from several states, especially São Paulo, Rio de Janeiro, and Rio Grande do Sul.71 With regard to the singular contributions of the periodical, Daniel Aarão Reis Filho observes: “It stood as a milestone in the good anarchist tradition of a sense of humor and satire against the government, the church, conservative right and left.”72 The reader will certainly have noticed the resonance between the risky manifestations of truth on Foucault’s part, as in the case of his comments about Herzog in New York, and those of the anarchist tiny. Perhaps because of this courage (and its inseparable humor), O inimigo do rei remained active until 1988, albeit with an irregular periodicity. Early on it adopted the tabloid format and dedicated itself to themes such as the history of the anarchist movement, revolutionary syndicalism, direct action, federalism, critiques of elections and parliamentary democracy, the rejection of centralism and party practices, self-management, and struggles for liberties among 23

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women, blacks, homosexuals, drug users, and prisoners. Against this backdrop, the September and October 1979 issue of O inimigo do rei deserves special consideration. With the topic of amnesty on the agenda, the periodical criticizes the distinction between political prisoners and common law prisoners maintained by the Marxist left. Consequently, it demands the immediate freedom of common law prisoners. On the cover, there is a photo of a man behind the bars and, next to the cover, captions in bold letters read: “Common prisoner: I want to leave too!” The headline on the cover also happens to announce the publication of Foucault’s “As Manhas do Poder” (The Ploys of Power), which was an excerpt from his Collège de France course from 1975 to 1976, “Society Must Be Defended.”73 According to Gustavo Simões, “as anarchists, [the editors of O inimigo do rei ] did not make the distinction [between political and common law prisoners]: imprisonment is for those who threaten property with actions and ideas.”74 By bringing the common prisoner’s voice closer to Foucault’s own ideas, O inimigo do rei is linked to post-68 thoughts and movements. For although the criticism of the split between political prisoners and common law prisoners (heroes versus proletarians in rags, virtual traitors) has been a constant theme in anarchist literature since the nineteenth century, the presence of this same criticism in Discipline and Punish was not so well known in Brazil. In the book, it is important to remember, Foucault explores the contrast in the early decades of the nineteenth century between socialist newspapers, which increasingly called for the imprisonment of non-workers, and the Fourierist La Phalange, which was the only publication on French soil to problematize the split between “good citizens” and “criminals.” Moreover, Foucault associates the utopian socialism of 24

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the Fourierists with anarchism and (more implicitly) with the libertarian struggles of the present. The Prisons Information Group (GIP) began with a protest of political prisoners and then extended (through criticism and self-criticism of differentiation of the political versus common law) to all incarcerated. As for Barbárie, it emerged from a noisy little spin-off of O inimigo do rei and ran from 1979 to 1982. The themes covered were very similar to those of its companion in the struggle against the governance of life: anarchism, self-management, the labor movement, libertarian pedagogy, minorities, direct action, and the conflict between anarchism and Marxism. Barbárie showed a strong interest in contemporary philosophical currents that analyzed power, the state, and institutions. It therefore featured Foucault but also Félix Guattari, Gilles Deleuze, and Noam Chomsky. The title of the magazine deserves special consideration: what Barbárie (Barbarism) is it about? The one we will necessarily experience if we do not reach socialism in the future? The introduction of the collective editor in the first issue rejects this overly orthodox assumption: In contrast to the destructive barbarity of the present world, we counterpoise another, libertarian and creative one. . . . Instead of enslaved and routine work, we propose the ‘right to laziness,’ and free, voluntary and self-managed work. To the control of our bodies by powers (parents, educators, doctors etc.) we suggest the right to dispose of our bodies and to withdraw all pleasures from them. In opposition to

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modern, bureaucratic and hierarchical civilization, we propose creative (and libertarian) ‘barbarism.’75 Born in the context of “openness” and “amnesty,” this (creative) Barbárie did not fit within the narrow limits of defense of “democratic institutions.” This lack of fit is evident in an article entitled “Who is afraid”76 A passage from the article conveys a deep distrust of both bourgeois parliamentary democracy and the dilution of rage toward the dictatorship. “Today,” the passage reads, “the same regime that tortured and crushed the majority of the Brazilian people speaks of ‘democratic openness’ and even ‘amnesty,’ as if nothing had happened.”77 It was precisely Barbárie that maintained (however belatedly) the record of Foucault’s passage through Salvador. In 1981 and 1982, the tiny published his lectures “Sexuality and Its Control in Western Societies” in two parts under the title “The Mesh of Power.”78 The new title derived from the suggestion of the anarchists of Barbárie. According to Cláudio Luiz Pereira, the lectures had a restricted circulation at the time, due to the reduced distribution of the magazine. However, “[‘The Mesh of Power’] continued to be reproduced through photocopies, becoming for some students of FFCH a kind of cult text, which occasionally enchanted those who discovered it . . . ; it continues to be rediscovered by young people, today more than ever.”79 SILENCE AND WORDS The news about Foucault’s visits to Recife and Belém was scarce in the mainstream press of Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo. But the memories of his visit help us understand what trans26

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pired.80 In Recife, many of the meetings with Foucault, which were arranged by the organizers of his visit, were suddenly canceled, apparently due to the fear among intellectuals and professionals of having their names associated with the philosopher and, consequently, becoming persons suspected of subversion. Professor Benedito Nunes eloquently recalls the events that followed the lectures Foucault delivered at the Federal University of Pará in Belém.81 In his words: Less than a week after Foucault left, I was called by the director . . . [who told] me that the SNI was asking for the roster of attendees. I said, ‘I will not give the roster.’ I left and went directly to the dean. He was very decent and even courageous. He told me not to give the roster. . . . There was a surveillance up to that point. It was not a fantasy to say that the SNI had informants.82 Therefore, if Foucault apparently had no trouble returning to Brazil in 1976, those who approached him might have experienced difficulties, had it not been for the ethical conduct – “the courage of silence,” we dare say – of some faculty members in Belém. At this point, it is worth once again revisiting the conduct of the mainstream press through Maia’s analysis. As we have seen, it never endorsed international denunciations of human rights violations in Brazil, opting instead for the use of euphemisms (“lack of politeness by the police,” “inevitable disturbances of police action”) or even the vehement denial of violent practices by the political police (“fantastical stories about torture,” “rejection of public opinion by subversives”). 27

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As Maia notes, “even though the newspapers were forbidden to touch on the subject (which would become the most striking feature during the ‘years of lead’), they simply denied its existence.”83 Unlike some faculty members in Belém, mainstream newspapers therefore practiced what we would call “the cowardice of the word.” CONCLUDING REMARKS During his visits to Brazil in 1975 and 1976, more or less ferocious “guard dogs” besieged Foucault. But, as we have seen, tinies of various shades also approached him. They not only used Foucault’s tools of analysis but also echoed his own reflections about these tools through interviews and the untimely reproduction of his lectures. To conclude, we want to draw attention to two recent developments. Today in Brazil, contrary to what Foucault so longed for, the naturalization of the humanistic-subjectivist split between good and evil and the innocent and guilty gains traction as the idea of managing illegalisms, which he sought to highlight, is increasingly ignored. At the same time, the intensification of a punishing furor without any end and prospect beyond that of revenge lumps together corrupt politicians, petty burglars, and lives considered abject by groups that consider themselves overseers of the world. Reactivating the anarchist critique of prisons and parliamentary democracy is therefore essential in our country today. At the same time, some nostalgia for the tinies of the 1970s invariably affects us, due to the boldness they demonstrated. We forget, perhaps, that the definition of the place of dispositifs in our lives is always to come. What will, after all, be 28

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the effects of the global computer network, alternative digital media, news portals, social networks, search engines, and blogs in the ethical-political construction of our present and our future? Without any illusion as to the enlightening potential of this rapidly changing series, whose innovation-invention we may be part of, it becomes interesting to recall the title (and associated content) of an already dated book by Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism, and History: Mode of Production Versus Mode of Information.84 In it, Foucault’s thought is associated with the analysis of the mode of information without forgetting that this mode is an indispensable condition for the eventual transformation of the (capitalist) mode of production. The importance of the discussion of resistance media is therefore not limited to academe: the possibility of forging libertarian lifestyles or, rather, enemies, like Foucault, of any king depends at the present time on this media, as it did in the period we have studied. NOTES 1

Diana de Oliveira Dias translated this article.

2

Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil: Presença, efeitos, ressonâncias (Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina, 2016).

3

The category of “shielded democracy” comes from Felipe Demier, Depois do golpe: A dialética da democracia blindada no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Mauad X, 2017).

4

Roberto Schwarz. “Cultura e política no Brasil (1964-1969),” in O pai de família e outros estudos (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1978), 9.

5 Demier, Depois do golpe, 90. 6 Ibid.

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7

Carlos Baqueiro and Eliene Nunes. “Introdução,” in O inimigo do rei: Imprimindo utopias anarquistas, ed. Carlos Baqueiro and Eliene Nunes (Rio de Janeiro: Achiamé, 2007), 12.

8

The concept of analyzer comes from French Institutional Analysis and it refers to the events that condense forces at play in social processes, favoring their collective analysis and eventual transformation by the agents involved.

9

Although the Portuguese word nanico (tiny) is an adjective it can also function as a noun, referring either to the persons, such as journalists, editors, and cartoonists, involved in the tiny press or to the newspapers themselves.

10 Beatriz Kushnir, Cães de guarda: Jornalistas e censores do AI-5 à constituição de 1988 (São Paulo: FAPESP/Boitempo, 2004). 11 Bernardo Kucinski, Jornalistas e revolucionários: Nos tempos da imprensa alternativa (São Paulo: Edusp, 2003), 13. 12 The thesis was presented at School of Communications and Arts at the University of São Paulo (USP) in 1991. 13 The publisher Scritta published the first edition of Kucinski’s book in 1991. We use the revised edition. See Kucinski, Jornalistas e revolucionários. 14 Bernardo Kucinski, “A aventura alternativa: O jornalismo de oposição dos anos 70,” in A síndrome da antena parabólica: Ética no jornalismo brasileiro (São Paulo: Perseu Abramo, 2002), 178. 15 Rivaldo Chinem, Imprensa alternativa: jornalismo de oposição e inovação (São Paulo: Ática, 1995), 7. 16 Sandra Alves Horta, “Imprensa alternativa – comentários sobre o acervo,” in Maços na gaveta. Reflexões sobre mídia, ed. Beatriz Kushnir (Niteroi: Eduff, 2009), 102. The archive was donated to the City Archive of Rio de Janeiro 1992, where it is open to public consultation. 17 João Antônio, “Aviso aos nanicos,” August, 1975, 5. 18 Kucinski, “A aventura alternativa,” 178. 19 Ibid.

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20 Ibid., 179. 21 Gileide Vilela et al., eds., Os baianos que rugem. A imprensa alternativa na Bahia (Salvador: Edufba, 1996), 17. Oswald de Andrade was one of the creators of the anthropophagic movement in 1928. 22 Kucinski, “A aventura alternativa,” 179. 23 Ibid. 24 Ibid. 25 Ibid. 26 “Lontras, piranhas, ratos, veados,” Lampião da Esquina, April 1978, 11. 27 Quoted in Maurício Maia, “Henfil e o império do silêncio,” in Perfis cruzados:Trajetórias e militância política no Brasil, ed. Beatriz Kushnir (Rio de Janeiro: Imago, 2002), 188. 28 Ibid., 188-189. Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5) started the anos de chumbo (years of lead) through an increase in the powers of the repressive apparatus. 29 Ibid., 189. 30 Quoted in Maia, “Henfil e o império do silêncio,” 191. 31 The interviews with Roger-Pol Droit in 1975 stand out in this regard. See in particular, Michel Foucault, “Eu sou um pirotécnico,” in Michel Foucault – entrevistas, ed. Roger-Pol Droit (Rio de Janeiro: Graal, 2006), 67-100. 32 Michel Foucault. “Les rapports de pouvoir passent à l’intérieur des corps,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 2, 1976-1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald with the assistance of Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Quarto/Gallimard, 2001), 236. 33 Daniel Defert, “Chronologie,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 1, 19541975, by Michel Foucault, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald with the assistance of Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Quarto/Gallimard, 2001), 65. 34 Folha de São Paulo, October 24, 1975.

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35 Elio Gaspari, A ditadura encurralada (São Paulo: Companhia das Letras, 2004), 174. 36 Michel Foucault, “On Religion (1978),” in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 107. 37 Michel Foucault, “Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons,” in Dits et écrits, 19541988, Vol. 1, 1954-1975, 1650. For the Portuguese version of this interview, see Michel Foucault, “Hospícios, sexualidade, prisões,” in Versus: páginas da utopia. Antologia de reportagens, narrativas, entrevistas e artigos, ed. Omar L. Barros Filho (Rio de Janeiro: Beco do Azougue, 2007), 34. 38 Foucault, “Asiles. Sexualité. Prisons,” 1650. 39 Omar L. Barros Filho, “O Versus nosso de cada dia nos dai hoje,” in Filho, Versus, 10-11. 40 Ibid., 15. 41 Maria Paula Araújo, A utopia fragmentada: As novas esquerdas no Brasil e no mundo na década de 70 (Rio de Janeiro: FGV, 2000), 124. 42 Ibid., 124. 43 Ibid., 128. 44 Ibid., 132. 45 Kucinski, Jornalistas e revolucionários, 255. 46 Quoted in Ibid., 256. 47 Ibid., 259. 48 For this counterpoint, see Michel Foucault, O corpo utópico: As heterotopias (São Paulo: N-1 edições, 2013). 49 Kucinski, Jornalistas e revolucionários, 267-268 50 Frei Betto, Batismo de sangue (São Paulo: Casa Amarela, 2000), 99. 51 Kushnir, Cães de guarda, 274. 52 Michel Foucault, “As respostas do filósofo,” Jornal da Tarde, November 1, 1975.

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53 Ibid. 54 Ibid. 55 Ibid. 56 Ibid. 57 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 58 Ibid. 59 Quoted in Defert. “Chronologie,” 65-66. 60 The National Information Service (SNI), which was an intelligence agency created under the dictatorship, monitored Foucault’s participation in the student assembly at USP. For the details of this episode, see Conde, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil, 113-121. For a firsthand account of the experience of participating in the assembly with Foucault, see José Castilho Marques Neto, “No taxi com Michel Foucault: Memórias de um estudante de filosofia aos 22 anos,” Cult, no. 225 (July 2017): 21-23. 61 Renato de Moraes, “Foucault na Bahia, atrás de Eros,” Folha de São Paulo, November 19, 1976. 62 Wilson Nunes Coutinho, “O contestador na universidade,” Opinião, June 11, 1973; Laymert Garcia Santos, “Para despsiquiatrizar a loucura,” Opinião, October 1 , 1973. 63 José Júlio Costa Amaral, “Interlocutores ou inimigos?,” Opinião, November 19, 1976. 64 Chaim Samuel Katz, “Reich, sexo e poder,” Opinião, November 19, 1976; Michel Foucault, “O ocidente e a verdade do sexo,” Opinião, November 19, 1976. 65 The expression “chumbo neles” literally translates as “lead on them.” However, its most common meaning is “to open fire” against someone. 66 Michel Foucault, “As obsessões de Michel Foucault,” Invasão, March 1977, 25. 67 Ibid. 33

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68 From this standpoint, the year 1973 was important. Jornal do Brasil published excerpts of a roundtable discussion of Foucault’s lectures “Truth and Juridical Forms” in Rio de Janeiro. See “Em torno de Édipo,” Jornal do Brasil, May 26, 1973. In Belo Horizonte, the mainstream press alternated almost scholarly articles about the work of Foucault with gossip columns that describe him as poorly dressed and impolite. On this coverage, see Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues and Adriana Maria Brandão Penzim, “Cronos, Kairós, Aión: Temporalidades de uma visita de Michel Foucault a Belo Horizonte,” Cadernos Brasileiros de Saúde Mental 6, no. 3 (2011): 16-40, http://incubadora. periodicos.ufsc.br/index.php/cbsm/article/view/1501/1723 69 Kucinski, Jornalistas e revolucionários, 337-340. 70 João Henrique C. Oliveira, “Do underground brotam as flores do mal: anarquismo e contracultura na imprensa alternativa brasileira (19691972)” (master’s thesis, Federal Fluminense University 2007), http:// www.historia.uff.br/stricto/teses/Dissert-2007_OLIVEIRA_Joao_ Henrique_Castro-S.pdf 71 “Libertarian” here refers to a commitment to direct democracy as well as radically anarchist and anti-statist positions. 72 Daniel Aarão Reis Filho, “Anarquismos, anarquistas,” in História do anarquismo no Brasil, ed. Rafael Borges Deminicis and Daniel Aarão Reis Filho, vol. 1 (Niterói: Eduff; Rio de Janeiro: Mauad, 2006), 19. 73 Michel Foucault, “As manhas do poder,” O inimigo do rei, September/ October 1979, 8-10. 74 Gustavo Simões, “Por uma militância divertida: O inimigo do rei, um jornal anarquista,” Verve, no. 11 (April 2007): 172, brackets added. 75 “Apresentação,” Barbárie, July 1979, 2. 76 “Quem tem mêdo,” Barbárie, July 1979, 3. 77 Ibid. 78 Michel Foucault, “As malhas do poder,” Barbárie, Summer 1981, 23-27; Foucault, “As malhas do poder (final),” Barbárie, Summer 1982, 34-42. Ubirajara Rebouças translated this lecture from the original French into Portuguese. For the translation of both parts of the

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lecture back into French on the basis of the Portuguese version, see Foucault, “Les mailles du pouvoir,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 2, 1976-1988, 1001-1020. For a translation into English on the basis of the French translation, see Foucault, “The Mesh of Power,” Viewpoint Magazine, September 12, 2012, https://www.viewpointmag. com/2012/09/12/the-mesh-of-power/. 79 Cláudio Luiz Pereira, “Apontamentos sobre os devaneios soteropolitanos do arquivista feliz,” Primeiro encontro dos Programas de PósGraduação da UFBA, Mimeograph, 2010, 8. 80 For Foucault’s visit to Recife, see Fabiana Moraes, “Na ‘gaiola de ouro’ da nossa consciência,” Pernambuco: Suplemento cultural do Diário Oficial de Pernambuco, April 2012, 10-13. See also Roberto Machado, Impressões de Michel Foucault (São Paulo: N-1 edições, 2017), 206-211, 223-229. 81 Nunes was the first to publish about Foucault in Brazil. The local press covered Foucault’s visit to Belém. See “Michel Foucault chega a Belém para ministrar seminário,” O Liberal, November 8, 1976. For a documentary about Foucault’s visit to Belém, see Grupo de Estudo Mediações (GEDAI), Michel Foucault em Belém, YouTube video, 20:50, posted by “Breados1,” December 2, 2015, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_FZuv0OvAas 82 Benedito Nunes, “Entrevista com Benedito Nunes,” Interview by Márcio Benchimol de Barros and Ernani Chaves, Trans/Form/Ação 31, no. 1 (2008): 22, brackets added. 83 Maia, “Henfil e o império do silêncio,” 195. 84 Mark Poster, Foucault, Marxism, and History: Mode of Production Versus Mode of Information (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1987).

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Mauricio Pelegrini

FOUCAULT IN IRAN, FOUCAULT IN BRAZIL: POLITICAL SPIRITUALITY AND RELIGIOUS COUNTER-CONDUCTS 1 “El deber de todo cristiano es hacer la revolución.” –Christians for Socialism

Michel Foucault visited Brazil several times between 1965 and 1976.2 A civil-military dictatorship ruled the country at the time. Its rule lasted until 1985. Foucault’s visit to São Paulo on one of his last trips to Brazil coincided with one of the most brutal events in the history of the dictatorship: the arrest, torture, and murder of the journalist Vladimir Herzog. The government ruled this crime a suicide. As Foucault became aware of the event, he immediately interrupted his academic activities in São Paulo to take part in protests against the death of Herzog. A few days earlier at a student assembly at the University of São Paulo (USP), Foucault read a brief statement against the blatant repression of the Brazilian state.3 Just a few days later, on October 31, 1975, he attended a great ecumenical mass at the Sé Cathedral, which was the main church of the São Paulo Archdiocese led by the Archbishop Dom Paulo Evaristo Arns. The mass gathered about eight thousand people, including university students, union members, and great religious authorities, such as the rabbi Henry Sobel and the Archbishop of Olinda and Recife, Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara. The latter was known for his left-wing positions.4 Although the deceased journalist was Jewish, Arns was the most important contributor to the ceremony, which had been the greatest act against the dictatorship at that point. A member of the Franciscan order, Arns played an important role in resisting the 1

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dictatorship. He was the organizer of the largest descriptive document of the crimes and tortures committed by the civilmilitary government, the book Brasil: Nunca Mais (Brazil: Never Again).5 On his trip, Foucault entered into brief contact with the Brazilian Catholic movement, which elaborated several resistance strategies based on the development of liberation theology throughout the period of the dictatorship. A few years later, in 1978, he would have the occasion to much more closely observe another religiously-inspired resistance movement to an authoritarian government: the Iranian revolution against the dictatorship of Mohammad Reza Shah Pahlavi. THE POLITICAL SPIRITUALITY OF THE IRANIAN REVOLUTION Foucault traveled to Iran in September and November 1978 at the invitation of the Italian newspaper Corriere della Sera. The dictatorial regime of Muhammad Reza Shah Pahlavi, which took power in 1941 through a coup supported by the United States and England, showed clear signs of its decline. Uprisings, public demonstrations, and rallies were increasingly frequent and repressed with increasing violence. After a period of intense revolutionary movement, the following year’s almost unanimous election of the Grand Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini as the supreme leader of the country gave rise to an Islamic government. The newspaper articles written by Foucault about Iran were not limited to a mere description of events. They sought, rather, to understand the social and historical roots of the movement of disputing forces. The final outcome of this experience was a set of fifteen articles. Corriere della Sera published 2

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the bulk of the articles and some of them also appeared in French periodicals. During the period of the uprising, those articles were immediately translated into Farsi and read by the protesters. In France, however, they were not well received and sparked a controversy about Foucault’s overall stance on the revolutionary events. The new theocratic government’s elimination of the rights of several minorities (mainly women and homosexuals) promoted a subsequent identification of Khomeini’s regime with the revolutionary movement, which was, in fact, dispersed, contradictory, and multifaceted in its genesis. The only common ground between the new theocratic government and the revolutionary movements was a negation of the regime of the Shah.6 The concept of political spirituality appears as Foucault’s great theoretical innovation in the totality of his reports on Iran but it is also one of the main sources of misunderstandings of his analysis. To understand the scope of this concept, it is imperative that we locate its articulation within Foucault’s work. The term appears only one time in his reports on Iran, at the end of the article “What Are the Iranians Dreaming [Rêvent] About?” Foucault posed two questions regarding the political will demonstrated by Iranians in their demand for an Islamic government: There are also two questions that concern me even more deeply. One bears on Iran and its peculiar destiny. At the dawn of history, Persia invented the state and conferred its models on Islam. Its administrators staffed the caliphate. But from this same Islam, it derived a 3

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religion that gave to its people infinite resources to resist state power. In this will for an ‘Islamic government,’ should one see a reconciliation, a contradiction, or the threshold of something new? The other question concerns this little corner of the earth whose land, both above and below the surface, has strategic importance at a global level. For the people who inhabit this land, what is the point of searching, even at the cost of their own lives, for this thing whose possibility we have forgotten since the Renaissance and the great crisis of Christianity, a political spirituality. I can already hear the French laughing, but I know that they are wrong.7 There is only one other use of this term in the work of Foucault. It appears in a discussion with several historians that took place in May 1978. The discussion was published in 1980 in a book about the nineteenth-century penitentiary system edited by Michelle Perrot, L’impossible prison. Foucault offers the following comment in response to a provocation about the differences between his method and Max Weber’s ideal type: The question I won’t succeed in answering here but have been asking myself from the beginning is roughly the following: What is history, given that there is continually being produced within it a separation of true and false? By that I mean four things. First, in what sense is the production and transformation of the true/false division characteristic and decisive four our historicity? Second, in what specific ways has this relation operated in Western societies, which produce 4

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scientific knowledge whose forms are perpetually changing and whose values are posited as universal? Third, what historical knowledge is possible of a history that itself produces the true/false distinction on which such knowledge depends? Fourth, isn’t the most general of political problems the problem of truth? How can one analyze the connection between ways of distinguishing true and false and ways of governing oneself and others? The search for a new foundation for each of these practices, in itself and relative to the other, the will to discover a different way of governing oneself through a different way of dividing up true and false – this is what I would call ‘political spirituality.’8 To understand political spirituality, however, one must not restrict oneself to the purely literal use of the term, but instead look for a mode of conceptualization capable of making the connection between the political and the religious. From this perspective, it is possible to detect other references to the concept of political spirituality. Still, in the context of the article “What Are the Iranians Dreaming [Rêvent] About?,” Foucault emphasizes the movement “that would allow the introduction of a spiritual dimension into political life, in order that it would not be, as always, the obstacle to spirituality, but rather its receptacle, its opportunity, and its ferment.”9 This movement struck him as an expression of a political will in its efforts “to politicize structures that are inseparably social and religious in response to current problems.”10 It impressed him as well “in its attempt to open a spiritual dimension in politics.”11 Finally, in an interview with journalists Pierre Blanchet and Claire 5

Foucault in Iran, Foucault in Brazil

Brière, Foucault said of the participants in the Iranian movement: In relation to the way of life that was theirs, religion for them was like the promise and guarantee of finding something that would radically change their subjectivity. Shi’ism is precisely a form of Islam that, with its teaching and esoteric content, distinguishes between what is mere external obedience to the code and what is the profound spiritual life; when I say that they were looking to Islam for a change in their subjectivity, this is quite compatible with the fact that traditional Islamic practice was already there and already gave them their identity; in this way they had of living the Islamic religion as a revolutionary force, there was something other than the desire to obey the law more faithfully, there was the desire to renew their entire existence by going back to a spiritual experience that they thought they could find within Shi’ite Islam itself.12 Based on Foucault’s elaboration of such definitions of political spirituality, we can distinguish three dimensions of the concept for analytical purposes: a historical dimension, concerning other temporal experiences; a religious dimension related to Shia Islam; and a subjective dimension associated with the possibility of a transformation of the self. During his trips to Iran, Foucault was impressed with the strength of speeches given by mullahs in cemeteries and in mosques. The speeches were so intense that they drew crowds to listen to them. They were so strong that they were recorded 6

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on cassette tapes and then distributed clandestinely. The speeches compelled Foucault to recall other historical experiences: When the mosques became too small for the crowd, loudspeakers were put in the streets. These voices, as terrible as must have been that of Savonarola in Florence, the voices of the Anabaptists in Münster, or those of the Presbyterians at the time of Cromwell, resounded through the whole village, the whole neighborhood.13 These references go a distance in elucidating Foucault’s famous phrase about political spirituality as a possibility that the Western world had forgotten ever since the Renaissance. The three movements, which occurred, respectively, in fifteenth-century Italy, in sixteenth-century Germany, and in seventeenth-century England are examples of the intense relationship between political revolt and religious movement that formed as contests over political power found their strength and vocabulary in religious belief. Herein lies the first sense of political spirituality: the problematization of the relation between religion and politics, not as ideology or mystification, but, rather, as a challenging force. Iranian Shi’ism, in this sense, would not present a significant novelty, but would resume the long-lost Western experiences. The religious ceremonial in Iran provided the momentum to risk life in revolt, outside the revolutionary structures that have come to mark the Western world since the eighteenth century. The revolt also put the Iranian men and women in the face of millennial sacrifices and promises, in a dramatic theater that paralyzed the army through demonstrations that took place every forty days, according to the rhythm of a religious calendar 7

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that referred to a power considered forever damned. For Foucault, the overlapping factors “produced, in the middle of the twentieth century, a movement strong enough to overthrow an apparently well-armed regime while being close to old dreams that the West had known in times past, when people attempted to inscribe the figures of spirituality on political ground.”14 Religion, in the Western Renaissance and in modern Iran, was the very way of living the revolt. The historical dimension of the concept of political spirituality begs the following questions: were the revolts above all religious and is political spirituality always necessary for a movement of revolt? Philippe Chevallier points out that Foucault perceived the limit of a purely historical explanation to the connection between spirituality and politics. He states: What if the expression ‘political spirituality’ meant, in essence, not happy marriage, recent matrimony, but a divorce between the two domains? Therefore, political spirituality should be thought of as an irruption, a tear of time, which cannot be set in history to take a specific institutional form. If it settles there, it becomes simply political, whether it is the policy of the mullahs or the policy of the pro-American liberals of that time.15 It is necessary for something within the revolt to interrupt the movement of history in order for such a political spirituality to exist. In recovering other historical experiences, Foucault seeks to show the limit of the concept. Its reactivation in the Shi’ite east is not the resumption of a temporal continuum but, rather, the irruption of a new event. 8

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However, if medieval spirituality could lead to disastrous consequences, Iranian spirituality could also follow a similar path. Foucault was particularly interested in apprehending the movement of revolt as something that is historical but also escapes history. In his words: Revolts belong to history. But, in a certain way, they escape from it. The impulse by which a single individual, a group, a minority, or an entire people says, ‘I will no longer obey,’ and throws the risk of their life in the face of an authority they consider unjust seems to me to be something irreducible. Because no authority is capable of making it utterly impossible: Warsaw will always have its ghetto in revolt and its sewers crowded with rebels. And because the man who rebels is finally inexplicable; it takes a wrenchingaway that interrupts the flow of history, and its long chains of reasons, for a man to be able, ‘really,’ to prefer the risk of death to the certainty of having to obey.16 It is in the suspension of history that political spirituality finds its proper place, even if one must resort to history to understand it. Herein lies the second dimension of the concept of political spirituality, namely the religious facet in the form of the specificity of Shiite Islam in relation to other religions that were the historical focus of the experience of political spirituality. In emphasizing the particularities of Shi’ism, Foucault was not aspiring to justify a new form of government, as his critics charged. He sought, rather, to describe the political, social, and 9

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religious situation in Iran. As Cavagnis points out, it was not about debating if Muslim spirituality is better than the dictatorship of the Shah so much as about developing a descriptive analysis. He writes, “Political spirituality is therefore a descriptive or comprehensive schema, not a normative or apologetic one. It is a methodological or conceptual proposition attempting to account for and problematize the historical reality of the 1978 uprising.”17 Foucault also questioned the Iranian will to found an Islamic government, wondering whether it would constitute a reconciliation, contradiction, or novelty. The following question is at the core of his interrogation of Shi’ite spirituality: Is Shia Islam essentially a religion of contestation? Cavagnis suggests a negative answer to this question. Otherwise, the revolution would just be an endless repetition of facts. And Shia Islam, as Foucault himself pointed out, was not essentially revolutionary. The clergy had a dubious relationship with the secular authorities throughout Iran’s history. What then appeared in the revolt was a transformation in the conception of Islam. Cavagnis observes: It seems that Foucault perceived such complexity when he evoked, in ‘What are the Iranians Dreaming About,’ the ‘novelty’ or ‘faith in the creativity of Islam’ at work in the uprisings, a reverse principle to the idea of a simple return to an essential content that it would suffice to ‘rediscover.’ In fact, something new happened in the 1978 uprisings, a transformation of the conception of Islam by the Iranians themselves.18

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This reinvention of Islam through the revolutionary experience is due to the theology of Ali Shariati, who was a sociologist allegedly killed by the Shah’s regime and whose influence on the demonstrators was greater than that of Khomeini himself. Shariati did not advocate a clerical government, since he thought that Shi’ism, in its essence, had not yet fully manifested itself in Iran. The support of the clergy for the governments was a misrepresentation of Shia’s truth. For Cavagnis, Foucault’s comprehension of the Islamic idea of the state derives from Shariati’s theology. Cavagnis writes: Foucault repeats several times that the ‘Islamic government,’ in 1978, is not strictly speaking a project or a draft of a political program . . . . On the contrary, it is a short-circuiting of any political structuring that Foucault notices through a rejection of the regime in place, of course, but also a rejection of any partisan and programmatic organization.19 Foucault reports in his writings that by “Islamic government” no one in Iran understood a regime in which the clergy would play a leading role. The expression designates something that would refer to the past, but aims at a future. In Foucault’s words: It is something very old and also very far into the future, a notion of coming back to what Islam was at the time of the Prophet, but also of advancing toward a luminous and distant point where it would be possible to renew fidelity rather than maintain obedience. In pursuit of this ideal, the distrust of legalism seemed

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to me to be essential, along with a faith in the creativity of Islam.20 The Islamic government desired by the demonstrators was not the theocratic religious government that it turned out to be. And the political spirituality manifested in the cry for Islamic government was not the desire for a clerical government. Consequently, Foucault talks about spirituality and not about political theology, moving away from a legalistic and legal definition of religion. What the revolutionaries manifested was not the desire to install Islamic law as the constitution of the country, nor the will to obey more faithfully the religious code. It was, rather, the faith that Islam was capable of being a creative center for the emergence of a new order and a new existence. This insight is at the core of the political spirituality expressed by the Iranians. As Cavagnis points out: [Foucault] prefers to study prefers to study the relationship between uprising and spirituality, understood as a way of relating to time, to oneself and to others, to a way of conducting oneself that goes beyond any legal form. The ‘Islamic government,’ for the protesters of 1978, did not therefore designate a political government in the classical sense - that is to say legal but a self-government defying in a way any legal government imposed by an external law, whether it is secular or religious.21 Shia Islam would not bring in itself, in its essence, in its code, a germ of subversion and revolt. However, as it was the vocabulary of the demonstrators, it could lead to another way for them to govern themselves. Once again, we must refer to the 12

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theology of Shariati to understand this new reading of Shi’ism. According to Shariati, Muhammad declares himself to be the last of the prophets not because his prophecy is valid until the end of time, but because after him man does not need to be guided any longer in his existence. The prophecy is concluded after the arrival of Mohammad and the accomplishments of Greek, Roman, and Islamic civilizations. Armed with this basic insight from the sacred books of the Bible and the Quran, one does not need new prophecies, and one can only rely on oneself in the guidance of one’s life.22 Shi’ism, as conceived by Shariati, would then be a practice of freedom, the spiritual vehicle for a technique of the self. As Cavagnis writes, “‘Political spirituality’ . . . is not therefore an essential content of Shi’ism that Foucault discovered, but rather a practice of freedom taking the form of a spiritual practice consisting of a transformation of oneself.”23 The last dimension of political spirituality to be considered is thus the subjective one. As Foucault points out in the previously quoted interview with Blanchet and Brière, Shi’ism was the “promise and guarantee” of the possibility of radically changing subjectivity and completely renewing existence.24 We can only understand the act of revolt in the desire for the renewal of subjective experience. According to Foucault: Yet, whatever the economic difficulties, we still have to explain why there were people who rose up and said: We’re not having any more of this. In rising up, the Iranians said to themselves – and this perhaps is the soul of the uprising: ‘Of course, we have to change this regime and get rid of this man, we have to change this corrupt administration, we have to change the whole country, the political organization, the eco13

Foucault in Iran, Foucault in Brazil

nomic system, the foreign policy. But, above all, we have to change ourselves. Our way of being, our relationship with others, with things, with eternity, with God, etc., must be completely changed, and there will only be a true revolution if this radical change in our experience takes place.’25 It is clear that the desire for radical change in existence along with a politically consistent collective will, which provided strength to the Iranian revolution, still relied on traditions and institutions filled with a negative content, such as anti-Semitism, chauvinism, and exclusion. Foucault recognizes this altogether important detail.26 However, in terms of a political spirituality, it would be necessary to foreground the creative force encouraging the revolt and rendering its destiny unclear at the very moment of insurrection. The fact that a theocratic authoritarian government had been established at the end of the revolution does not invalidate the force of political spirituality as a radical will. The example of the Iranian movement will not be forgotten: The Iranian movement did not come under that ‘law’ of revolutions which brings to visibility, so it would seem, the tyranny lurking within them, beneath the blind enthusiasm. What constituted the most internal and the most intensely experienced part of the uprising bore directly on an overloaded political chessboard. But this contact was not an identity. The spirituality which had meaning for those who went to their deaths has no common measure with the bloody government of an integrist clergy. The Iranian clerics want to authenticate their regime by using the signifi14

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cations that the uprising had. People here reason no differently when they discredit the fact of the uprising because today there is a government of mullahs. In both cases, there is ‘fear.’ Fear of what happened in Iran last autumn, something the world had not produced an example of for a long time. Hence, precisely, the need to grasp what is irreducible in such a movement – and deeply threatening for any despotism, whether that of yesterday or that of today.27 It is the revolt that introduces subjectivity into history. It is this dimension of political spirituality that Foucault was able to observe more intensely in the Iranian movement. The will to completely modify oneself interrupts the continuous movement of history, thereby modifying the regime of truth to which the subject is submitted. We shall once again consider the last definition of political spirituality, as expressed by Foucault after the Iranian texts: “the will to discover a different way of governing oneself through a different way of dividing up true and false.”28 Therefore, political spirituality is a perpetual recalcitrance, the will for a continuous transformation of the subject by himself or herself. Building on this effort to understand what Foucault construed as political spirituality through his Iranian experience, I would now like to return to Brazil in 1975, when he only briefly witnessed a bishop in action against the dictatorship. I want to revisit this moment to demonstrate another example of political spirituality. I will use Foucault’s concept of political spirituality as a conceptual support for understanding liberation 15

Foucault in Iran, Foucault in Brazil

theology and its fields of action in Latin America as a counterconduct to the various authoritarian governments that were established in the region during the 1960s and 1970s. LIBERATION THEOLOGY AS POLITICAL SPIRITUALITY Between 1961 and 1965, the Second Vatican Council brought to the Catholic Church a necessary liturgical reformulation and a belated adjustment to the modern world. The socalled aggiornamento (updating) of the Church was intended to adapt Catholic doctrine to current times in order to maintain its social relevance. A few years later in 1968, the Second General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate was convened in Medellín, Colombia to reflect on the impact of the Second Vatican Council on Latin American reality. Stressing the particularities of Latin America, especially poverty and economic dependence, the bishops in Medellín extended the concept of the Church of the Poor proposed by the council, insisting that the poor should not only be objects of Christian charity but also subjects of their own action and liberation. We can affirm that Medellín is the main line of provenance of liberation theology, perhaps the greatest Latin American contribution to theological thinking. Liberation theology has as its sign of emergence the book of the Peruvian friar Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation, originally published in Spanish in 1971.29 In Brazil, Medellín’s reflections coincided with the hardening of the dictatorship through the publication of Institutional Act No. 5 (AI-5) in 1968. AI-5 effectively promulgated a state of exception, allowing authorities to arbitrarily arrest “subver16

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sives,” who were considered enemies of the regime. Throughout the succeeding ten years in which AI-5 was operative, practices of imprisonment, murder, and torture became commonplace in Brazil. As for the Church, it can be said that it was one of the great supporters of the coup of 1964, mainly through Tradition, Family and Property, an ultraconservative movement of Catholic inspiration. It actively participated with sectors of the middle class, small businessmen, and a part of the Brazilian clergy in the Family Marches with God for Freedom in the weeks prior to the coup of March 31.30 However, this initial support for the regime was an expression of a sector of the Church that had seen its influence decline since the 1950s, especially among the popular strata, who converted to umbanda, Pentecostalism, or simply abandoned religion.31 Within the Catholic hierarchy, religious counter-conduct movements began to emerge. They acted directly in popular neighborhoods and the countryside to develop a leftist form of militancy that united laymen and young priests. These laymen and priests found in the Medellín discussions the theological vehicle for their actions in opposition to the military government. They were therefore sometimes arrested and tortured in the same way as the Marxist guerrillas.32 Gradually, the Catholic opposition wing to the dictatorship gained importance to the point that in the early 1970s the Church could already be considered the greatest force of opposition to the regime. As the historian Ralph Della Cava noted, “In the absence of viable voluntary associations and political parties, the Churches in general and the Catholic in particular had by now [1973] become the single largest opposition force to military rule.”33 From this perspective, Brazilian Catholicism 17

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can be thought of as a political spirituality in precisely the terms used by Foucault to analyze the Iranian revolution. It was a force that contested a government that was considered unjust. I propose, then, a sketch of liberation theology from the perspective of the three dimensions pointed out in the first section of this article: historical, religious, and subjective. In terms of the historical dimension of liberation theology, it is necessary to highlight the geographical and temporal particularities of its appearance as a specific movement of contestation. Liberation theology emerged in Latin America in the 1970s, a period marked by a series of civilian-military coups and bloodthirsty dictatorships in the region, especially in Chile, Brazil, and Argentina. Michael Löwy points out that a convergence of factors created the conditions for the emergence of what he calls “Liberationist Christianity.” For him, this radical Christian line has its symbolic birth in January 1959, “at the moment when Fidel Castro, Che Guevara and their comrades marched into Havana, while in Rome John XXIII issued his first call for the convening of the Council.”34 Liberationist Christianity was not a movement born in the hierarchy of the Church, which aimed objectively to maintain its influence over the poorer population, nor did it arise from the bottom up, simply out of popular uneasiness. For Löwy, the emergence of this religious current occurred in the movement from the periphery to the center, from marginal or peripheral movements in relation to the ecclesiastical institution, such as lay movements, religious orders, and foreign priests.35 Moreover, the importance of the peripheral aspect of liberation theology lies not only within the institution but in also the fact that Latin America itself has always been on the periph18

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ery of the global capitalist order. The Brazilian sociologist Fernando Henrique Cardoso and the Chilean economist Enzo Faletto made the latter point at the time. They were the creators of dependency theory, which exercised an enormous influence in the sociological thought of the left.36 For Cardoso and Faletto, dependent capitalism would be one of the main factors responsible for maintaining social inequalities and poverty in Latin America. The vocabulary of dependency theory was soon absorbed by the religious movements of liberation, as can be seen in the declaration of principles of the Chilean movement Christians for Socialism: The working class is still subject to exploitation and its attendant conditions: i.e., malnutrition, lack of housing, unemployment, and limited possibilities for further education and cultural development. The cause of this situation is specific and clear. It is the capitalist system, resulting from domination by foreign imperialism and maintained by the ruling classes of this country. The system is characterized by private ownership of the means of production and by ever growing inequality in the distribution of income. It turns the worker into a mere cog in the production system, stimulates an irrational distribution of economic resources, and causes an improper transfer of surplus goods to foreign lands. The result is stagnation, which prevents our country from escaping its situation of underdevelopment. . . .

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The union of all workers, whatever their party loyalty may be, is critical at this juncture. Our country is being offered a unique opportunity to replace the existing system of dependent capitalism and to promote the cause of the laboring class throughout Latin America.37 The “preferential option for the poor,” a formula set forth by the Third General Conference of the Latin American Episcopate in the Mexican city of Puebla in 1979, crystallizes in a few words liberation theology at the same time as it closes a historical cycle with the conservative rise begun by the election of Pope John Paul II. It produces a direct relationship between Latin American poverty and the class struggle as well as economic dependence. For friar Gutiérrez: Development must attack the root causes of the problems and among them the deepest is economic, social, political, and cultural dependence of some countries upon others – an expression of the domination of some social classes over others. Attempts to bring about changes within the existing order have proven futile. This analysis of the situation is at the level of scientific rationality. Only a radical break from the status quo, that is, a profound transformation of the private property system, access to power of the exploited class, and a social revolution that would break this dependence would allow for the change to a new society, a socialist society – or at least allow that such a society might be possible.38

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Overcoming poverty and dependency would require concrete historical transformations, since the current social order would not allow the necessary liberation. For the Peruvian theologian, the concept of liberation is more comprehensive than development since it incorporates the lessons of the Gospels and advocates a radical change of the human experience in all its aspects. The religious dimension of the political spirituality of liberation theology is thus characterized by the possibility of theologically reinterpreting Christianity so that the proposal of social revolution is considered not only compatible with Catholic teaching but also its direct consequence. In the terms of Gutiérrez, “The class struggle is a fact that Christians cannot dodge and in the face of which the demands of the gospel must be clearly stated.”39 In the formulation of the group Christians for Socialism the direct link between Christian faith and revolution appears even more explicitly: The real-life presence of the faith in the very heart of revolutionary praxis provides for a fruitful interaction. The Christian faith becomes a critical and dynamic leaven for revolution. Faith intensifies the demand that the class struggle moves decisively towards the liberation of all men – in particular, those who suffer the most acute forms of oppression. . . . The specific nature of the Christian contribution should not be viewed as something prior to revolutionary praxis, as something readymade that the Christian brings with him to the revolutionary struggle. Rather, in the course of his real-life experience in that struggle, faith reveals its capacity to provide creative contributions

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which neither the Christian nor anyone else could have foreseen outside the revolutionary process. . . . Christians involved in the process of liberation vividly come to realize that the demands of revolutionary praxis force them to rediscover the central themes of the gospel message – only now they are freed from their ideological dress. The real context for a living faith today is the history of oppression and of the struggle for liberation from this oppression. To situate oneself within this context, however, one must truly participate in the process of liberation by joining parties and organizations that are authentic instruments of the struggle of the working class.40 Although the Marxist vocabulary often seems to stand out from the theological work, it is necessary to emphasize the effort to reconcile Catholic doctrine with the concrete reality of Latin American poverty through the Marxist interpretation of capitalist society, considered as the most adequate theory for the needs of social transformation. The proposal of liberation theologians was to build a new Church that would enable the radical change necessary for the realization of the gospel. This task would require a personal commitment in the process of liberation, as indicated in the final section of the previous quote. Therein lies the subjective dimension of political spirituality, in which the so-called poor would become agents of their own liberation. In Brazil, the experience of the Ecclesiastic Base Communities (CEBs) was the main vehicle for personal transformation through community organizations that distrus22

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ted major political projects and valued local initiatives such as cooperatives.41 The CEBs were the major instruments for articulating liberation theology in Brazil, and they were also spaces for political formation, since they were not under such fierce surveillance by the dictatorship, unlike other social spaces.42 At their peak, there were about eighty thousand communities, constituting the largest space for political evangelization in the country and influencing the formation of various social movements and political organizations that gained prominence in the political reopening process of the 1980s, such as the MST (Landless Workers’ Movement), CUT (Trade-Union Confederation), and most importantly, the PT (Workers’ Party).43 During the dictatorship, the CEBs were a space of discussion and personal transformation, acting as substitutes for the political activities prohibited by the regime in the urban peripheries and rural areas. It would not be an exaggeration to affirm that the formation of the popular strata for the exercise of politics and citizenship during this period had a religious vocabulary as its main vehicle of realization. Trying to understand liberation theology as political spirituality means affirming its potential for subjective transformation and its force of political contestation on the basis of the experience of religion as opposition to an unjust government. It means, in other words, understanding liberation theology as an active counter-conduct at a particular historical moment. What Foucault saw in Iran and later in Poland was also present in Brazil throughout more than a decade of intense struggles against the civil-military dictatorship.44 As Löwy nicely sums up: 23

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During the 1970s, after the wiping out of the underground Left, the Church appeared, in the eyes of civil society and of the military themselves, as the main adversary of the authoritarian state – a much more powerful (and radical) enemy than the tolerated (and tame) parliamentarian opposition, the MDB, Brazilian Democratic Movement. Various social movements, in defence of human rights or of workers’ and peasants’ unions, found refuge under the Church’s protective umbrella. Through the voice of its bishops, the Church criticized, in an increasingly direct and explicit way the violations of human rights and the absence of democracy. But that was not all: it also denounced the mode of development imposed by the military, its whole programme of ‘modernization’, as inhuman, unjust, and based on the social and economic oppression of the poor.45 When analyzing the Iranian movement, Foucault clearly perceived that political spirituality is no guarantee that a fairer government will succeed what was being contested through a religious vocabulary.46 As a counter-conduct, political spirituality does not amount to an immediate solution. It is much more of a will to conduct oneself in another way, a manner of refusing the governmentality of an unjust government. Liberation theology lost much of its influence in the late 1970s. Within the Catholic hierarchy, John Paul II’s rise to the papacy gradually rearranged the structure of the Church, gradually replacing the progressive bishops with conservative ones, especially in Latin America. The high point of this persecution was the censorship imposed on the eminent Brazilian 24

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theologian Leonardo Boff in 1984 as well as the removal of his brother, the theologian Clodovis Boff. At the same time, the opening of the military regime and the revocation of AI-5 alongside the end of the ban on political parties brought into existence new social spaces of political articulation, thereby weakening the influence of Catholicism on many social strata. Besides, in spite of its radical Marxist position, liberation theology failed to be progressive in the field of morals and customs. It maintained a conservative position in relation to women’s rights, sexuality, and contraceptive methods.47 It thus moved away from the everyday experiences of the Brazilian population. However, the importance of liberation theology as a political force, the organization of CEBs in Brazil as a social force, and the work of bishops such as Arns and Câmara cannot be denied. These bishops fought against various human rights violations committed by the dictatorship. They publicized arbitrary arrests and the torture of prisoners of the state. For more than a decade in Brazil, “a Igreja se fez povo” (the Church became the people). CONCLUSION During his visits to Iran, Foucault had the care and patience to interview actors from different segments of society. His engagement with these actors alongside his keen capacity for observation enabled him to write indispensable texts for understanding the uprisings against Shah Pahlavi. What caught Foucault’s attention was the importance of the Islamic character of a revolt that in its origin was scattered and multifaceted. In one of his first published articles on the events in Iran, 25

Foucault in Iran, Foucault in Brazil

Foucault asks and answers the following question: “Do you know the phrase that makes the Iranians sneer the most, the one that seems to them the stupidest, the shallowest? ‘Religion is the opium of the people.’ Up to the time of the current dynasty, the mullahs preached with a gun at their side in the mosques.”48 Religions here break with the role accorded to them in vulgar Marxism, where they would always be mystifying, pacifying, and preventing popular revolt through the control of subjectivities. For Foucault, there are clearly historical moments in which the religious vocabulary serves instead as a force of insurgency, as a subjective impulse for social transformation. He also recovers from Marx the complete passage in which the celebrated sentence appears, showing that there is almost always a forgotten ambiguity in it. Marx affirms, “The wretchedness of religion is at once an expression of and a protest against real wretchedness. Religion is the sigh of the oppressed creature, the heart of a heartless world and the soul of soulless conditions. It is the opium of the people.”49 Foucault adds, “Let’s say, then, that Islam, in that year of 1978, was not the opium of the people precisely because it was the spirit of a world without a spirit.”50 He thus uses the concept of political spirituality to understand how a religious experience can stimulate and sustain revolt at historically specific junctures. Foucault’s conceptual apparatus in his Iranian writings can, then, be used to examine other moments in which religion served as a force of contestation. It served, as I have shown, as such a force through liberation theology, which fomented struggles against dictatorships throughout Latin America in the 1970s.

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Like the Iranian Shiites, advocates of liberation theology saw no contradiction between their religion and Marxist ideas. In their founding statement, the Chilean bishops of Christians for Socialism declared: As Christians we do not see any incompatibility between Christianity and socialism. Quite the contrary is true. As the Cardinal of Santiago said last November: ‘There are more evangelical values in socialism than there are in capitalism.’ The fact is that socialism offers new hope that man can be more complete, and hence more evangelical: i.e., more conformed to Jesus Christ, who came to liberate us from any and every sort of bondage. Thus it is necessary to destroy the prejudice and mistrust that exist between Christians and Marxists. To Marxists we say that authentic religion is not the opiate of the people. It is, on the contrary, a liberating stimulus to revivify and renew the world constantly.51 Many clerical and laic believers embraced the cause of fighting against the Brazilian dictatorship through the promise of constantly renewing the world. They did not see an obstacle to historical and subjective transformation in their faith, but, rather, the vehicle through which they could express their desires to behave in another way freed from the authoritarian yoke. With their struggles and their denunciations of abuses of power, they became one of the greatest forces of opposition to the regime, contributing to its closure and replacement by a democratic and free society. Their example continues to show us that it is never useless to revolt. 27

Foucault in Iran, Foucault in Brazil

NOTES 1 Unless otherwise noted, all translations are my own. 2 For an analysis of the Foucault’s visits to Brazil, see Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil: presença, efeitos, ressonâncias (Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina, 2016). 3 José Castilho Marques Neto, “No táxi com Michel Foucault,” Revista Cult, n. 225 (July 2017), 21-23. 4 For a report of the ceremony, see Elio Gaspari, A ditadura encurralada, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Intrínseca, 2014), 196-197. 5 Arquidiocese de São Paulo, Brasil: Nunca mais, 41th ed. (Petrópolis: Vozes, 2014). 6 For an in-depth analysis of Foucault’s texts on Iran, see Janet Afary and Kevin Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution: Gender and the Seductions of Islamism (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2005); Behrooz Ghamari-Tabrizi, Foucault in Iran: Islamic Revolution after the Enlightenment (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016); Marcelo Hoffman, Foucault and Power: The Influence of Political Engagement on Theories of Power (New York: Bloomsbury, 2015), 93-121; Mauricio Aparecido Pelegrini, “Michel Foucault e a revolução Iraniana” (master’s thesis, Universidade Estadual de Campinas, 2015). 7 Michel Foucault, “What Are the Iranians Dreaming [Rêvent] About?,” in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 208-209, italics in the original. 8 Michel Foucault, “Questions of Method,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, vol. 3, Power, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 2000), 233. Julien Cavagnis notes that although the round table took place in May (before the voyages to Iran), Foucault completely revised the text for publication in 1980. Therefore, it is very likely that the expression “political spirituality” was added after the discussion. On this point, see Julien Cavagnis, “Michel Foucault et le soulèvement iranien de 1978: retour sur la notion de ‘spiritualité politique,’” Cahiers Philosophiques, n. 130 (2012): 51-71. 9 Foucault, “What Are the Iranians Dreaming [Rêvent] About?,” 207.

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10 Ibid., 208. 11 Ibid. 12 Michel Foucault, “Iran: The Spirit of a World without Spirit,” in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 255. 13 Michel Foucault, “Tehran: Faith against the Shah,” in Afary and Anderson, Foucault and the Iranian Revolution, 200-201. 14 Michel Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?,” in Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 3, Power, 451. 15 Phillipe Chevallier, “La spiritualité politique, Michel Foucault et l’Iran,” Projet, n. 281 (2004): 79-80, http://www.revue-projet.com/ articles/2004-4-la-spiritualite-politique-michel-foucault-et-l-iran/. 16 Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?,” 449. 17 Julien Cavagnis, “L’Islam chi’ite et la révolte: réflexions sur l’approche foucauldienne des sources religieuses du soulèvement iranien de 1978”, Rodéo, n. 2 (2013), 61, italics in the original. 18 Ibid., 64. 19 Ibid., italics in the original. 20 Foucault, “What Are the Iranians Dreaming [Rêvent] About?,” 206. 21 Cavagnis, “L’Islam chi’ite et la révolte,” 66, brackets added. 22 Ibid., 66. 23 Julien Cavagnis, “Michel Foucault et le soulèvement iranien de 1978,” 70. 24 Foucault, “Iran,” 255. 25 Ibid. 26 Ibid., 260. 27 Foucault, “Useless to Revolt?,” 451-452. 28 Foucault, “Questions of Method,” 233. 29 Gustavo Gutiérrez, A Theology of Liberation: History, Politics, and Salvation (New York: Orbis, 1973).

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30 See Elio Gaspari, A Ditadura Envergonhada, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Intrínseca, 2014); Jorge Ferreira and Angela de Castro Gomes, 1964: O golpe que derrubou um presidente, pôs fim ao regime democrático e instituiu a ditadura no Brasil (Rio de Janeiro: Civilização Brasileira, 2014). 31 Eder Sader, Quando novos personagens entraram em cena: experiências e lutas dos trabalhadores da Grande São Paulo, 1970-1980 (Rio de Janeiro: Paz e Terra, 1988), 150. 32 Ibid., 151. An auxiliary of Dom Hélder Câmara was kidnapped and martyred with his body exposed by his killers. 33 Ralph Della Cava, “The ‘People’s Church’, the Vatican, and Abertura”, in Democratizing Brazil: Problems of Transition and Consolidation, ed. Alfred Stepan (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 147, brackets added. 34 Michael Löwy, The War of Gods: Religion and Politics in Latin America (New York: Verso, 1996), 41. 35 Ibid. 36 See Fernando Henrique Cardoso and Enzo Faletto, Dependency and Development in Latin America (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1979). 37 Christians For Socialism Movement, “Declaration of The 80 (April 16, 1971),” in Christians and Socialism: Documentation of the Christians For Socialism Movement in Latin America, ed. John Eagleson (Maryknoll, NY: Orbis, 1975), 3-5. 38 Gutiérrez, Theology of Liberation, 57. 39 Ibid., 192. 40 Christians For Socialism Movement, “Final Document of the Convention (April 30, 1972),” in Christians and Socialism, 172-173, italics mine. 41 Löwy, War of Gods, 62. 42 Della Cava, “‘People’s Church’, the Vatican, and Abertura”, 149-150. 43 Löwy, War of Gods, 81.

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44 Chevallier, “Spiritualité politique – Michel Foucault et l’Iran,” 82; Michel Foucault, “The Moral and Social Experience of the Poles Can No Longer Be Obliterated,” in Essential Works of Foucault, vol. 3, Power, 465-473; Hoffman, Foucault and Power, 123-147. 45 Löwy, War of Gods, 87. 46 Michel Foucault, “‘Il ne peut pas y avoir de sociétés sans soulèvements’  – Entretien avec Farès Sassine,” Rodéo, n. 2 (2013), 34-56. 47 Löwy, War of Gods, 53. For a feminist approach of theology, see Ivone Gebara, Out of the Depths: Women’s Experience of Evil and Salvation (Minneapolis: Augsburg Fortress, 2002). For the trajectory of the feminist theologian Ivone Gebara, her formation in the theology of liberation and her persecution by the Vatican, see Margareth Rago, A aventura de contar-se: Feminismos, escrita de si e invenções da subjetividade (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2013). 48 Foucault, “Tehran,” 201. 49 Karl Marx, Critique of Hegel’s ‘Philosophy of Right’, trans. Annette Jolin and Joseph O’Malley (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1970), 131. 50 Foucault, “Iran,” 255. 51 Christians For Socialism Movement, “Declaration of The 80 (April 16, 1971),” 4.

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FOUCAULT, SUBJECTIVITY, AND SELFWRITING IN BRAZILIAN FEMINISM 1

When Michel Foucault returned to Brazil in the first half of the 1970s he soon became aware of the violence of the military regime established in the country through the military coup of 1964, which would last for twenty-one years. Indeed, he himself decided to deliver a statement of protest against the violence of the state, political persecution, and assassinations at an assembly convened by students of the School of Architecture and Urban Planning (FAU) at the University of São Paulo (USP) on October 23, 1975. It would, however, have been hard for Foucault to notice the fast and deep changes in social and cultural life and in the sensibilities, habits, and customs of the population. These changes affected us directly through the intense modernization that came from the so-called economic miracle and the development of the means of communication. Brazil was entering the global era, which also meant the emergence of new modes of conceiving experience, morals, sex, marriage, the social status of women, homosexuality, and other issues. Even accounting for the violent political repression and censorship that directly targeted social movements as well as the silencing of the protests of workers, peasants, and students at the turn of the seventies, there were new political, artistic, musical, and theatrical groups on stage that brought new forms of expression not linked directly to the conceptions or party 1

Foucault, Subjectivity, and Self-Writing in Brazilian Feminism

lines of the traditional left, such as the Brazilian Communist Party (PCB), or other dissident groups, such as the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB), the Revolutionary Popular Vanguard (VPR), and Popular Action (AP), among others. The very visit of Foucault to Brazil between 1973 and 1976 at the invitation of intellectuals, including philosophers, psychiatrists, and doctors, came as result of a deep paradigm shift in the manner of thinking about social change. It followed from the verification of the “bankruptcy of the left” and the feeling that it was necessary to get in touch with other ways of thinking, with different perspectives. This is also the context in which the American feminist Betty Friedan was invited to come to Brazil in 1971 on the occasion of the publication of her book The Feminine Mystique. She was received with misogynous reservations even by leftists, as in the case of the “boys” of the alternative periodical Pasquim. In the sixties, women began to learn about the American feminist movement and the civil rights movement. They began to get to know Angela Davis, the Black Panthers, and student movements in the United States. In 1972, the magazine Nova, a Brazilian version of the American magazine Cosmopolitan, began to publish discussions of “hot” topics previously unimaginable in the mainstream press, such as the sexual pleasure of women and education of the public about the clitoris and female orgasm. Feminist ideas spread rapidly, mainly after the “political opening” of 1974, but the assassinations continued, as in the case of the communist journalist Vladimir Herzog on October 25, 1975. Foucault attended Herzog’s ecumenical memorial service amidst a huge crowd of outraged people. The so-called 2

Margareth Rago

new social movements were clandestinely organizing themselves on a piecemeal basis while a new working class was taking shape in the new processes of organization of factory work. It was clear that an old left was on the way out, whether through the effect of political repression or the failure of its own interpretations, while new battlefronts were slowly emerging. Feminists provoked astonishment by taking the stage in the second half of the seventies. Second wave feminism burst out vigorously at that moment in Brazil. Women have occupied the public sphere since then, going into male professions and challenging cultural practices, the sexual division of labor, and hegemonic ways of acting and thinking. They have, in short, pointed to other possibilities of existence. It is not difficult to note the positive marks of the feminist presence in the public and social spheres, the “cultural feminization” of Brazilian life in the last four decades. Foucault also produced and published his interrogations of different forms of power and freedom at the time, from his lectures in Rio in 1973 through Discipline and Punish and volume one of The History of Sexuality all the way up to his works in the 1980s on the modes of subjectivation, the aesthetics of existence, and techniques of the self in Greco-Roman antiquity. A new and more comprehensive conceptual framework made it possible to name and interpret the transformative, subversive, and critical practices that the feminist movement progressively built and experienced, as it became a mass movement in postdictatorship Brazil. Going beyond Marxist analyses, other readings of feminist non-submissiveness and counter-conducts in Brazilian society made it clear that women were questioning 3

Foucault, Subjectivity, and Self-Writing in Brazilian Feminism

the mechanisms and rationalities of power that shaped their bodies and gender, the dispositif of sexuality and, in more recent decades, neoliberal governmentality. They were also engaged in producing feminist arts of living based on ethical references, the courage of truth, solidarity, and the demand for social justice. THREE BRAZILIAN FEMINISTS: IVONE, CRIMEIA, AND GABRIELA I propose to focus on the experiences of the subjective constitution and political invention of three well-known Brazilian feminists who were in their twenties when Foucault returned to Brazil and the feminist movement started to reorganize itself: the feminist philosopher and Catholic nun Ivone Gebara, the former political prisoner Crimeia Alice Schmidt de Almeida and the founder of the Autonomous Movement of the Sex Workers and the NGO DaVida, Gabriela Silva Leite, who recently passed away. Born in São Paulo in 1944, Ivone received her doctorate in both Philosophy from the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo and Religious Sciences from the Catholic University of Louvain in Belgium. She lived in Camaragibe, a municipality of Recife in the state of Pernambuco, from 1973 until recently. She taught Philosophy and Theology for seventeen years at the Theological Institute of Recife and worked, at the request of the leftist Catholic Archbishop Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara, in the Department of Research and Assistance, which was in charge of the formation of pastoral agents for work among poor people.2 The Institute was closed in 1989 because of pres-

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sure from conservative and obscurantist forces inside the Church. Crimeia was born in a working-class family in the harbor city of Santos in 1946. She was arrested in 1972 for participating in the Araguaia Guerrilla, which was a revolutionary movement led by the PCdoB from 1966 to 1975 on the Araguaia river banks between the states of Pará, Goiás, and Maranhão. In order to establish rural guerrilla bases, the PCdoB militants moved to the rural region of Pará, which was valued for its mineral wealth by financial groups. The militants worked with local peasants, providing them with heath care, technical assistance, and help in the construction of schools. At the same time, the militants trained in the jungle at night as they planned to set up a guerrilla hub in the region. The National Intelligence Service, which was created in 1964 and backed by United States, sent more than seven thousand soldiers in military campaigns to this area between 1972 and 1975. The army murdered around sixty-nine male and female activists who were, for the most part, very young. Gabriela was born in a middle-class family in São Paulo in 1951. Still bearing her Christian name Otília, she pursued her coursework in the social sciences at USP in 1969 after the unsettling experience of preparatory school. She would call herself Gabriela only later. That was when she decided to become a prostitute and fight for sex workers’ rights. She founded the NGO Davida – Prostitution, Civil Rights, Health in 1992. She also started the fashion line Daspu and became the most important activist for the rights of prostitutes in Brazil.

5

Foucault, Subjectivity, and Self-Writing in Brazilian Feminism

At the end of the seventies, the feminist movement, consisting largely of leftist activists, former political prisoners, and exiles returning to Brazil, decided to come “out of the ghetto” and increase the range of its actions. It got into unions, into political parties, into several organizations in civil society, and it especially allied itself with the women’s movement that was organized in the periphery of some cities with the support of the Church and political groups involved in the fight against dictatorship. Although the women’s movement depended on a large number of women, its demands did not necessarily consist of feminist issues in the seventies. It called for more day care centers, urban transportation, and an improvement in the conditions of life. The women’s movement did not include subjects such as abortion, rape, sexual harassment, and domestic violence in its agenda because it was highly influenced by the Church. Even the leftist wing of the Church in the form of the liberation theology movement “criticized property but not the masculine property,” as Ivone recalls.3 The contact between the two movements – the feminist movement and the women’s movement – was immensely rewarding for all involved. It was rewarding for the former because it was able to reach a much wider network of the female population. It was rewarding for poor women in the periphery because it confronted them with questions about conditions that they would hardly have talked about spontaneously, such as questions about sexual morals, the body, and health. They often suffered silently. Feminists broke with the traditional model of behavior imposed on women, with the established values and moral codes, thereby bringing into question the regime of truth of 6

Margareth Rago

the time. They created new modes of subjectivation, according to Foucault’s concept drawn from his historical investigation of the “arts of living” developed by the ancient Greeks and Romans.4 Even though this concept does not refer to women and Foucault did not address gender issues, his problematization is helpful in considering the contemporary debates among feminist theorists on the production of subjectivity and the construction of what I propose to call “feminist arts of living.”5 In this regard, feminist theorists have investigated how to conceive of subjectivity beyond dualist terms that hierarchically oppose mind and body, the physical and the mental. Drawing directly from Foucault, feminist philosophers, such as McLaren, interpret contemporary feminist practices about ethical and political issues.6 And they all agree that Foucault’s interest in the subjective practices of the ancient Greeks and Romans concerned the present, l’actualité, rather than the past. SELF-WRITING AND THE FEMINIST COURAGE OF TRUTH In this section, I will focus on the autobiographical narratives of Ivone, Crimeia, and Gabriela in their books and interviews. In these contexts, they recall experiences of rupture that were both traumatic and dramatic, experiences of struggle and rebellion in the construction of different ways of living. To use Foucault’s conceptual terminology, I consider these narratives “self-writings” (écritures de soi), as openings to the other, as inter-subjective spaces where the constitution of ethical subjectivities and social transformations are sought.7 Foucault extends the notion of self-writing through parrhesia as a practice constitutive of the arts of living. I suggest 7

Foucault, Subjectivity, and Self-Writing in Brazilian Feminism

that these notions are useful for understanding how Ivone, Crimeia, and Gabriela dare to dive into the intimate depths of their own lived experiences and reinterpret them. These women question the marks of power and violence engraved in their bodies, refuse the biological destiny imposed on them, and build themselves autonomously in their singularities. They point to the elaboration of life stories in need of being written, spoken, and elucidated through an attitude critical of moral values and established truths. Through their life stories, Ivone, Crimeia, and Gabriela point to both a work on the self and a political fight in the defense of social justice, dignity, and ethics. Their self-writings can be seen as counter-conducts aimed at demarcating their own temporality and asserting their difference in the present. Foucault notes that parrhesia may be defined as truthtelling, as frank speech that involves a risk. The practitioner of parrhesia is neither a professor, nor a sage, nor a prophet. As Foucault explains: “La parrêsia . . . c´est une attitude, une manière d´être qui s´apparente à la vertu, une manière de faire” (Parrhesia . . . is an attitude, a way of being which is akin to a virtue, a mode of action).8 In the nineties, Ivone was sent from Recife in the northeast of Brazil to Belgium by the Archdiocese for speaking too much. In an interview with the Brazilian magazine Veja conducted in 1994, Ivone took the position of favoring the decriminalization of abortion.9 She was already well known for her political militancy by then, having worked for many years in the Theological Institute of Recife. But it was her feminist voice, which denounced patriarchal power and hierarchy in religious institutions and questioned the ominous power of 8

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tradition in interpretations of the Bible and the existence of God, which had to be silenced. Prevented from teaching and from public declarations, she was appointed to go abroad to extend her knowledge of theology. As she recalls: I was given a choice of either leaving the congregation or undergoing a process of reeducation and I chose this. Today I still belong to the Sisters of Our Lady (Canonesses of St. Augustine). I stayed there for a year. I liked Belgium. I had been there before. The first two months were bad as I was forced to leave my work and I then did not know what I was going to do. I had no wish to go back to my position at the college. It was a bad time.10 In the beginning of the seventies, Crimeia was imprisoned in the cells of the military dictatorship for her political militancy in the PCdoB. She could escape the extermination of the Araguaia Guerrilla by the army, unlike sixty-nine of her companions, including men and women as well as her own partner André Grabois. But she was forced into silence while pregnant in the cells of Operation Bandeirantes (OBAN) in São Paulo11 during the harsh years of 1972 and 1973.12 Nor was it easy to be a militant in a leftist group that was markedly male. In her autobiographical narrative, Crimeia criticizes the demands of the revolutionary party to which she belonged for many years. Women were given secondary positions in this party and had to struggle to prove their capacity to fight. Having been an active participant in the revolutionary struggle in the Araguaia, where Crimeia went in 1969, she affirms: 9

Foucault, Subjectivity, and Self-Writing in Brazilian Feminism

Long before becoming a feminist, I started noticing that being a woman was much more complicated. When I went to the Araguaia, João Amazonas turned to me and said ‘Whether other women come will all depend on you’ . . . because I was the first. . . . The comrades think that a guerrilla fighter has to be a man since women can’t cope. I don’t know why ‘it will depend on you.’ This is what I said then: ‘Look here, I can’t accept that, because I may succeed or I may not, and that doesn’t mean that women can work out or not, right? I don’t represent women. I am a woman.’13 In another space of protest, Gabriela was sent away from her home and city from the moment in which she broke with the normative codes of female sexuality at the end of the sixties and decided to become a prostitute. In her two published autobiographies – Eu, mulher da vida (I, A Prostitute) from 1992 and Filha, mãe, avó e puta (Daughter, Mother, Grandmother and Whore) from 2009 – Gabriela examines and denounces the forms of exclusion and stigmatization she suffered for saying loud and clear that she was a whore. It is worth noting that until recently the stereotype of the prostitute as a degeneradanata (born degenerate) from Cesare Lombroso and Guglielmo Ferrero’s Criminal Woman, the Prostitute, and the Normal Woman (1893) was widely appreciated and repeated. These scientists as well as medical doctors from the nineteenth century saw prostitutes as inferior women with large hips, short foreheads, and large jaws. They saw them as talkative, irrational, and selfish women in love with extravagant perfumes, spicy

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foods, strong liqueurs, cats, and showing no vocation or wish for maternity.14 In her writings, Gabriela identifies the moments of rupture that marked the tortuous course of her life. In her first book, published by the feminist publishing house Rosa dos Ventos, Gabriela maps the moment of her life crisis at the end of the sixties, highlighting the part in which Otília, an USP sociology student, made a choice for radical change. She saw that in her life there was no more space for “timecards or love affairs of the ‘good morning honey’ kind.”15 In this context of a lack of self-satisfaction, she encountered a sensual and attractive feminine figure with whom she immediately identified and whom she associates with the literary image of Jorge Amado’s famous novel Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon (1958). Otília left the scene little by little, replaced by Gabriela. She inverts the sense of the traditional narrative of the nineteenth-century novel, breaking with the male canons in which the prostitute is in the end regenerated, becoming a “good mother – good wife – good homemaker” when she does not die. Marking out her own multiplicity and inaugurating her own internal reconciliation, Gabriela opens her autobiography with the following statement: This book is a gift of love from Gabriela to Otília. A duel of life between the two. An incoherent bridge, a stubborn passport to cross the customs of my thought. A non-authorized biography of ‘my mes’ [sic].16 In the same manner that Gabriela feels the need to re-read and publicize her interpretation of the past, the result of the forced exile of Ivone is a register of herself in the form of a 11

Foucault, Subjectivity, and Self-Writing in Brazilian Feminism

thesis under the suggestive name of Le mal au féminine: Réflexions théologiques à partir du féminisme.17 In this book, translated into Portuguese in 2000 as Rompendo o silêncio: Uma fenomenologia feminista do mal (Breaking the Silence: A Feminist Phenomenology of Evil), Ivone establishes a difference in the meaning of “evil” for men and women. For the former, it is considered “doing” something that may be undone whereas for the latter it is considered a constitutive part of their being. In Ivone’s words: Being a woman is already an evil, or at least a boundary. In this sense the evil that they do is due to their evil being, a being considered responsible for the Fall or the disobedience of the human to God. There is, therefore, a basic anthropological question revealing a conflict in the very understanding of the human being.18 Ivone observes that not only in the Holy Scriptures but also in the social imagination the very word “woman” is always provocative since male blood is seen as the only one that “rescues and restores life” whereas female blood is seen as dirty, impure, and dangerous.19 Though the book is devoted to the examination of female experiences of pain and suffering in daily life, which allows a space for the discourses of many women, the philosopher also puts herself explicitly into the text with the understanding that reflecting on her own experience of evil is a form of “solidarity with marginalized women.”20 She observes: My word about ‘my evil’ is then a word to be searched for in the midst of memories and interpretations. When I express myself, I at the same time reveal and 12

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hide myself. I show some things and hide so many others! I do not have a total control over the events I write about and over my analysis.21 In its autobiographical dimension, the book shows us the regard for herself constructed by the narrator for herself, starting from a distance in which she is able to reassess the hard moments in the struggle to assert what is elementary, namely, her own existence as a woman. The devaluation of the female is shown in the first pages that assess the presence of evil in the lives of women in general and in her own life in particular, making visible the biopolitical marks of the production identity and stigmas: Men, yes, they are valued for what they are, for their effort toward autonomy . . . I, not being a man, was in search of my own worth, that is, I wanted to be valued for what I was. That was the cause of my being many times accused of rebellion and criticized for losing my time with books and lectures, things utterly useless for women. Becoming myself, making myself valued for what I was, this was a form of pride and of pleasure, a challenge and an adventure, but also a hard cross to bear, for it was upstream all the time.22 In 2005, Ivone published an autobiography entitled As águas do meu poço (Waters from my Well), in which she made an assessment of her course, marking and justifying the moments of radical rupture. I believe that this meeting with feminism as the criticism of a history and of dogmatic masculine thought opened the doors for me to think about my life in 13

Foucault, Subjectivity, and Self-Writing in Brazilian Feminism

another manner. I dare to leave, not unafraid, the admirable perfection of the masculine philosophical and theological dogmatism in which I was formed. I dare leave the definitions I need to adapt myself, for, as they say, they constitute the order of the world, of the correct world, of the world wished by God. I dare doubt what was proclaimed as truth and freedom. . . . I feel myself a trailblazer.23 The abandonment of previous references, old models of constructing subjectivity, and action are also made evident in Ivone’s text. “I feel now,” she writes, “in an ‘end of models’ perspective, leaving behind me the codes of behavior coming from outside and which were imposed by some recognized authority.”24 This is the context in which the feeling of being a stranger in transgression also gains strength. As Ivone explains: I had learned so well that thinking was a prerogative of men that I sometimes felt myself a stranger in my condition of woman philosopher. But this feeling never lasted long. . . . I liked uncommon people, people outside the norms recognized by society.25 Ivone has been seen as a protester, a transgressor, and a radical, above all inside the Church, since up until the eighties there were very few female practitioners of parrhesia who dared to publicly speak and subvert the regime of religious truths. The fight being fought there is one of the most extraordinary, as it directly questions the divine figure and its authority, and strikingly criticizes the masculine and authoritarian traditions of religious institutions.

14

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I criticize that which makes of religion a space for the domestication and domination of women. I felt in the flesh the exclusion from freedom that was due to my condition as a woman who chose to think about life, for it is dangerous to think in this hierarchical world in which we are asked only to obey.26 In the final moments of his 1984 course, Foucault briefly examines the passage from pagan parrhesia to Christian parrhesia, emphasizing how we pass from frank speech in a situation of risk to a negative pole in Christianity of anti-parrhesia in which the relationship with the truth cannot be established without a fearful obedience and reverence for divine truth. He declares, “Where there is obedience there cannot be parrhesia. We find again what I was just saying to you, namely that the problem of obedience is at the heart of this reversal of the values of parrhesia.”27 I suggest that if Ivone challenges patriarchal power it is because she cannot believe in a mode of knowledge of the self based on fear and on submission to divine will. As a feminist, she questions even that which founds, in Foucault’s words, the disqualification of the old parrhesia. Ivone defends the constitution of a new way of experiencing the self and the world in a brave, daring, and ethical way. Her criticism is far-reaching in its denunciation of “the complicity of religions in the production of violence, especially against women and nature” and their obedience to the logic of the system and its betrayal of the foundations that were the base of her organization.28 The criticism also extends to liberation theology. On the one hand, it had the merit of “recovering the condition of the poor as a fundamental theological question and from it fed a spirituality of freedom from different 15

Foucault, Subjectivity, and Self-Writing in Brazilian Feminism

oppressions, mainly social sins.”29 On the other hand, it failed to break with the androcentrism of traditional theology in its Thomistic and Aristotelian guises, which was responsible for the identification of the universal with the masculine and, hence, with the exclusion of women.30 As Ivone explains, the fear of women’s force as well as of their bodies and vital capacities contributed to different forms of power and control over them. “It suffices,” she tells us, “to remember how much Christian morality emphasized the fact that women are more subject to sin than men, defending their (the men’s) spiritual superiority.”31 In an interview conducted in 2008, Ivone highlights her own provocative position through the following statement: For the socialism of the Church has never criticized the masculine images; it criticized property but not masculine property; all theologies have spoken of liberation but failed to criticize the enslavement of women by a male image of God Almighty that was reproduced in the family, in marriage, and in the control of the body.32 These reflections provide a useful framework to think about the activists I focus on in this paper. These women were openly leftist, but they clashed with the traditional left, since they were uncomfortable inside the centralized structure of the revolutionary party. Even though out of the three only Crimeia was jailed, they were all excluded from political, cultural, and social life during those difficult years of military dictatorship when Foucault visited us. However, in their struggles inside and outside of the organized feminist movement they put into action 16

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strategies to combat the power of men, political parties, the state, and masculine science as well as the power of the church in academic production and religion. In the interviews I conducted with Crimeia, she reviewed her experiences of jail and torture at the peak of the repression by the authoritarian regime. Looking back at her own stories, she emphasized the growing difficulties of continuing her pregnancy at the time she was arrested, from the lack of hygiene in her tiny cell to the mounting pressures and threats of kidnapping her baby after she was transferred from São Paulo to a military hospital in Brasília. Crimeia observed suddenly, amidst many memories, “there was a moment in jail when I forgot words, I could not set them down on paper.”33 This impossibility of writing, difficult to understand at first, can be connected with another moment of her work of memorizing, a moment that showed the difficulty of existing publicly, of having a name, a history, memoirs, which are absolutely necessary references to be in the world, to be identified. In her own words: When I went to Araguaia I stopped being Crimeia, I was known as Alice and this implies a much deeper change than can be imagined. It can only be felt when you live through it, because you may be talking to somebody, maybe somebody you don’t know, and you say ‘oh when I was a little girl I used to play this game, I lived in such a place, this is what my father did.’ This cannot happen when you are underground. This is giving information about yourself. So I never lived anywhere before, never had a father or mother, brothers, friends, never studied anything. Do you know what nothing is?34 17

Foucault, Subjectivity, and Self-Writing in Brazilian Feminism

Crimeia, Alice, and Cri were the names and code names she received during her militancy. They produced a frightening experience of personal instability through the threat of the loss of her personal identity. This is not about the subjective shifts we seek as a form of becoming autonomous in the face of constraints to be what we have not chosen, as Foucault pointed out in his reflections on the modern mechanisms of subjection promoted by the state.35 It is, rather, about the struggle to guarantee one’s own identity threatened by the violence of reactionary political forces that aim at destroying the individual psychically and annihilating her vital impulse. The pain of the tortured person is twofold on account of the loneliness that comes from not sharing the experience, on account of not being part of a social group with whom she could live emotionally the pain again and reflect on the events, count the dead, and evoke those who disappeared. Crimeia captures this loneliness: After that came the time of the ‘political opening’ and you do not need to invent histories anymore. You may have your own history and it is a very fantastic history. Nobody has lived it. And how many did not believe it. They thought of it as a fantasy. For at first, after the amnesty, you start seeking those who disappeared, and to look for them you need to tell the story, ‘why are you looking,’ ‘what’s your connection to this?’ Then you begin. Then you talk of the guerrilla in the Araguaia, and people say ‘but this never existed!’36 In the eighties, Crimeia took part in a traveling group made up of members of the Commission of Family Members 18

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of the Persons Killed and Disappeared for Political Reasons. For ten days in October and November of 1980, this group went in search of the remains of the stories silenced in the south of Pará state. In the places where the armed struggle had happened, in the municipalities of Marabá, of Conceição do Araguaia, and of São João do Araguaia, they looked for the testimonies of the inhabitants who had witnessed or heard of the events. Links with the past were forged anew, painfully. The landscapes of the past slowly gained new configurations and new reliefs. It was so with the testimony of Maria Raimundo Veloso, fifty-year-old dweller of Metade village. As she rummaged through her memories of the contacts with militants at that time, she recalled on October 26, 1980: They (the guerrilas) invited everybody to participate in liberation. Now, nobody understood this liberation. They talked about those problems, did a lot of charity. After they left for the jungle, they came again to my house. They explained to me that I should unite with the neighbors. If I knew how to sew, I should teach my neighbors. If I could read, I should teach my neighbors. The bread we had should be shared. Now, I did not understand this liberation thing. I came to understand it when I read the Bible. I then understood a little of this liberation.37 The work of the committee went on at the Institute of Forensics at USP. The committee was made up of Crimeia and her family, also victims of the authoritarian regime. It found photographs of shot and torn bodies, police registers, small notes, and the strange scribbling “members of the Terror” on the bodies of brutally eliminated militants. For Crimeia, it was 19

Foucault, Subjectivity, and Self-Writing in Brazilian Feminism

both a collective and personal fight, in which the remaking of the course of other lives and the reinsertion of them in the public sphere immediately led to her own history, to a personal memorization, and to an emotional strengthening. She thus evaluated this political work that was subjective and fundamentally ethical, in which feelings of rage, indignation, and a desire for justice mix: There are many factors involved. On one hand, you reconstruct your own memory, that is, in pieces. One other hand, I have always said to myself that I could be one of those that disappeared. I know more about them than anybody and I have, at least with them, a responsibility to reconstitute this history. It is not mine alone. It belongs to those who have lost the right to speak. So I think there are many things interconnecting one with the other, that is, memory. At bottom, what is the history of a country? This is it. Only, shall we say, the story I am telling is very traumatic, a story of much pain, much loss, much suffering, but this is the history of Brazil. This is the history of the world.38 Political militancy in the region consisted of an approach to the local peasants, drawing attention to their lack of support from public authorities and showing the importance of the demands for better conditions of life, health care, housing, education, and work. According to Crimeia: We spoke of how forgotten the region was by the state, that it was necessary to build a school, that there was no health center. Though there are, for example, 20

Margareth Rago

other comrades who survived and say that they did no work of a political nature, I did. I spoke of the lack of a school. For instance, there was a little school some five kilometers from my house with a blind and semiilliterate teacher. I mean it is a lot of contempt for the school, isn’t it? For she could hardly write, and then how could she correct what the boys wrote? . . . We talked of the need for a health center, of what we could and couldn’t do . . . You try to do something, so some of the comrades went to teach, and I, for example, went to work in health. And I said ‘I can’t do it all. I know very little. I have no school. You have to have a health service.’39 The PCdoB itself sent Crimeia to Araguaia after she had studied nursing in Rio de Janeiro. She worked as a nurse, as a doctor, and as a midwife, accomplishing an enormous number of tasks in accordance with the immediate needs of the inhabitants of Araguaia. In her words: I was a midwife. I delivered a lot of babies and treated diseases, malaria, leishmaniasis, things of that sort. This is such a cruel country that I found a small book in the school’s library and I even stole the book, as I was going to the country, when I studied at the school . . . in Rio, right? I take possession of public property when it is in my interest. This little book was like this. It was a book of historical value. I can’t remember the author. A little book by some doctor, English if I am not mistaken, who wrote on the treatments he applied during the First World War when he had no resources. What value can this book have here in this library in 21

Foucault, Subjectivity, and Self-Writing in Brazilian Feminism

Rio de Janeiro? However, I am going to the country and it will be of value to me.40 In living together with the population, new ways of learning about life in the countryside were acquired. New bonds of friendship were forged. The social difficulties became demands for the elaboration of a program of revolutionary action of the party. Crimeia notes: This was the perspective from which you went to talk to people, to speak of their needs. This was the occasion we conducted a survey of the main demands of the population and wrote a program that was to be known as the ‘Program of Twenty-Seven Points.’ The twenty-seven points dealt both with the rural and urban regions – and what was urban there was very rural. This was it then: facilities to make the products flow without a middleman, there was then a need for municipal or state boats to carry the products . . . These twenty-seven points are still valid for the region. Most of them came to be. There is nothing communist about them. Nothing. So, for example, a rural school for capable, trained teachers, for I always remembered the blind and semi-illiterate teacher. A hospital was a system of medical assistance. We proposed to have an ambulance that would move around.41 The denunciations of sexual and gender violence gain strength in Crimeia’s testimony when she narrates the experience of being pregnant in jail in the DOI-CODI in São Paulo and then in a military hospital in Brasília.42 If the condition of 22

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being a mother spared her some but not all physical tortures, rape, and other forms of bodily sexual violence, it did not spare her psychological sexual violence. Besides, the constant threats of kidnapping her baby prevented a less tormented life. However, the deep desire to ensure the birth of the child renewed her strength. As Crimeia recalls: Not all tortures were done because I was pregnant. Now, on the other hand, from a psychological point of view torture is very great, another type of torture, because simply being a prisoner, subject to death, means the death of your son.43 The category of gender organizes this narrative of the self, making evident the psychological, sexual, and physical violence of the bodies of the female prisoners, which were seen above all as double transgressors for going beyond the universe of domesticity and for challenging social and gendered codes. In Crimeia’s feminist discourse the body is emphasized as a dimension constituting language itself. As she says: Naked, I was always naked at the interrogations. And one of the things I always refused to do was to strip. And they would then tear the clothes from me because they wanted us to take our clothes off for extra humiliation. With all that, my clothes were all torn. They would be violently torn. They had one button less, one seam less each day. You were always arranging yourself . . . what kept me going through it all was the rage I felt at them. That kept me going. For when they took your clothes off it was very embarrassing, when you were in front of strangers, not only strangers but ene23

Foucault, Subjectivity, and Self-Writing in Brazilian Feminism

mies. I would have felt better naked in the middle of the street. And it took me a long time to feel that. I won’t feel it! I would then cross my little legs, cross my little arms. I aimed at covering my breasts and ass, and I would be there like a lady: ‘Yes, sir, no.’44 It is not easy to find testimonies on sexual violence perpetrated against female political prisoners during military dictatorship in Brazil. However, some brief references to cases of rape and sexual abuse can be found in the report Torture in Brazil prepared by the Archdiocese of São Paulo and published in Portuguese as Brasil: Nunca mais in 1985.45 Many women testify about the various hideous forms of abuse they suffered, as does Inês Etienne Romeu, a young bank worker who was incarcerated in a private “house of terror” in Petropolis for a long time, or Elsa Pereira Lianza, a 25-year-old engineer who submitted to electric shocks to her sexual organs.46 As for Gabriela, the prejudices faced in her defense of the rights of sex workers were very strong, especially in the absence of support from groups on the left who perceived prostitutes through the Marxist category of lumpenproletariat. The NGO DaVida began in 1992. . . . It was a very difficult beginning. There was some opposition from the Institute for Religious Studies (ISER). Of all our financial backers only one remained, one from the US, which helped us with our infrastructure. Nobody else. . . . When I left ISER we were closing a project with the European Community and we needed an institution. . . . We had no place to take the headquarters of DaVida. I have friends in the samba school Estácio 24

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and one of them had a very large plot of land and offered it for us to build something there. There we went and put up a large wooden shed . . . I know many people in that place. I stayed in that red light district for many years.47 This identification with transgressive imaginary female figures also comes close to the one that links Gabriela to the prostitutes and fuels her fight for them. As Gabriela affirms, her experience of many years as a professional prostitute makes her a most singular person, for she speaks from the interior of this so distant and unknown universe. Moreover, prostitutes that came from the poorer classes, had college degrees, and became political activists were exceedingly rare in the eighties. Gabriela also chose to change her name, an act that can surely be read as the assertion of a different subjectivity, the definition of a new, more independent, free, sensual, daring, and transgressive way of being. In her words: In my birth certificate my name is Otília Silva Leite. Gabriela is a very old name, much more a part of me than Otília. It is really the name I chose. I changed it when I went into prostitution. This was in the early seventies. I have a lawsuit moving on in the courts to add Gabriela. I will be Otília Gabriela. I have both of them. Everybody calls me Gabriela, except my mother.48 We have to consider the historical context in which she operated in order to understand how radical her choices were and how far they reached. The break she enacted was enormous for a generation that was raised for marriage and maternity in the fifties and sixties to the point that her mother is the only person 25

Foucault, Subjectivity, and Self-Writing in Brazilian Feminism

not to recognize her as Gabriela. Moreover, we can say that Gabriela is, as she interprets herself, a feminist despite clashes with feminists themselves, when we take into consideration her fight for the rights of poor women that live in conditions of absolute social abandonment. Gabriela founded the NGO DaVida that fights for better working conditions and for the quality of life of prostitutes. Since the eighties, when this movement was born in Brazil, they have been called “sex workers,” with the understanding that their activity is work like any other and deserving professional recognition from the state. It is not possible to consider the important transformations in the lives of women in Brazil nowadays without mentioning the experiences of the feminist movement. Along their different paths, facing taboos and deep-rooted prejudices, breaking with the stereotypes of their time, and opening new forms of political, professional, and personal action, the feminists above asserted new ways of being and new ethical codes. They are singular and exemplary figures, and we should recognize their merits and victories. We come out more empowered when we observe their political achievements, such as the creation of the Union of Women of São Paulo and DaVida, or when we think of the forms of theoretical production now in existence in Brazil, such as the provocative reflections and strong criticism brought to feminist studies through Ivone’s philosophical reflections (alongside those of other well-known feminist scholars), or when we come to know the intense work in the sphere of religion undertaken by feminist theologians in their fight for the decriminalization of abortion, for a different reading of the Bible, and for new interpretations of the sacred texts, among other fundamental subjects.49 26

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NOTES 1 Ricardo Lopes translated this article. 2 Dom Hélder Pessoa Câmara (1909-1999) was one of the founders of the National Conference of the Bishops of Brazil (CNBB) and a renowned human rights activist. 3 Ivone Gebara, interview with the author, January 4, 2008, São Paulo. See also Margareth Rago, “Reinventing themselves, reinventing Brazil: feminism, subjectivity and politics,” labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas, nos. 20-21 (July/December 2011-January/June 2012), https:// www.labrys.net.br/labrys20/brasil/margaingles.htm. 4 Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1986); Foucault, The Care of the Self: Volume 3 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1988). 5 Margareth Rago, A aventura de contar-se: Feminismos, escrita de si e invenções da subjetividade (Campinas: Editora da Unicamp, 2013). See also Dianna Taylor and Karen Vintges, eds., Feminism and the Final Foucault (Urbana and Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 2004). 6 Margaret A. McLaren, Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity (Albany: State University of New York Press, 2002). 7 Michel Foucault, “L’écriture de soi,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 2, 1976-1988, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald with the assistance of Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Quarto/Gallimard, 2001), 1234-1249. 8 Michel Foucault, Le courage de la vérité: Le gouvernement de soi et des autres II, Cours au Collège de France (1983-1984) (Paris: Gallimard/ Seuil, 2009), 15. In this regard, McLaren writes: “The practice of parrhesia is necessary to a democracy and telling the truth to one’s friend is necessary if one is to provide true moral guidance. Parrhesia has both a moral and a political aspect. Morally, the parrhesiast speaks the truth, regardless of the consequences. Politically, parrhesiasts are concerned with the affairs of the city, and the practice of truth telling is indispensable to a democracy.” Feminism, Foucault, and Embodied Subjectivity, 153. 9 Ivone Gebara, interview with the author, February 16, 2008, São Paulo.

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10 Gebara, interview with the author, January 4, 2008. 11 Bandeirantes Operation (OBAN) was an information center that practiced torture. The army created it in São Paulo in 1969. 12 Jacob Gorender, Combate nas trevas: A esquerda brasileira: das ilusões perdidas à luta armada, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Ática, 1987); Taís Morais and Eumano Silva, Operação Araguaia. Os arquivos secretos da guerrilha, 2nd ed. (São Paulo: Geração Editorial, 2005). 13 Crimeia Alice Schmidt Almeida, interview with the author, January 8, 2009, São Paulo. João Amazonas (1912-2002) was a Marxist theorist, political revolutionary, and leader of the Communist Party of Brazil (PCdoB). He had been involved in the communist movement since 1935. 14 Margareth Rago, “Foucault, Hysteria and the Spider,” labrys, études féministes/ estudos feministas, no. 25 (January-June 2014), https://www. labrys.net.br/labrys25/recherches/margareth.htm. 15 Gabriela Silva Leite, Eu, mulher da vida (Rio de Janeiro: Rosa dos Tempos, 1992), 9. 16 Ibid., 11. 17 Ivone Gebara, Le mal au féminin: Réflexions théologiques à partir du féminisme (Paris: L’Harmattan, 1999). 18 Ivone Gebara, Rompendo o silêncio: Uma fenomenologia feminista do mal (Rio de Janeiro: Vozes, 2000), 31 19 Ibid. 20 Ibid. 21 Ibid., 85 22 Ibid., 87 23 Ivone Gebara, As águas do meu poço: Reflexões sobre experiências de liberdade (São Paulo: Brasiliense, 2005), 26. 24 Ibid., 30. 25 Ibid.

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26 Ibid., 68. 27 Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011), 336. 28 Ivone Gebara, Teologia Ecofeminista: Ensaio para repensar o conhecimento e a religião (São Paulo: Editora Olho D’água, 1997), 53. 29 Ibid. 30 Ibid. 31 Ibid., 84. 32 Gebara, interview with the author, January 4, 2008. 33 Crimeia Alice Schmidt Almeida, interview with the author, January 15, 2009, São Paulo. 34 Almeida, interview with the author, January 8, 2009. 35 Michel Foucault, A hermenêutica do sujeito: Curso dado no Collège de France (1981-1982), trans. Márcio Alves da Fonseca and Salma Tannus Muchail (São Paulo: Martins Fontes, 2004), 305. 36 Almeida, interview with the author, January 8, 2009. 37 “Depoimento de Maria Raimunda Veloso à Comissão dos Familiares e dos mortos e desaparecidos políticos, em 26/10/1980. Relatório da caravana dos familiares dos mortos e desaparecidos na Guerrilha do Araguaia,” Revista da Ordem dos Advogados do Brasil Ano X/XI 12/13, n. 27/28 (September/December 1980-January/April 1981): 289. 38 Almeida, interview with the author, January 8, 2009. 39 Ibid. 40 Ibid. 41 Ibid. 42 The Department of Information Operations - Center for Internal Defense Operations (DOI-CODI) units institutionalized the use of torture and other violent methods against the opponents of the regime after 1969. Each state had its own DOI subordinated to CODI, which had the

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role of centralizing the operations. The largest DOI-CODI was in São Paulo. At its peak, it had nearly 250 agents occupying a large building on Tutóia street in the Paraíso neighborhood. 43 Almeida, interview with the author, January 8, 2009. 44 Ibid. 45 Arquidiocese de São Paulo. Brasil: Nunca mais (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1985), 46-50. For the English version, see Archdiocese of São Paulo, Torture in Brazil: A Shocking Report on the Pervasive Use of Torture By Brazilian Military Governments, 1964-1979, trans. James Wright, ed. Joan Dassin (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1998), 28-32. 46 Archdiocese of São Paulo, Torture in Brazil, 28. 47 Gabriela Silva Leite, interview with the author, January 25, 2008, Rio de Janeiro. 48 Ibid. 49 The Union of Women of São Paulo is an autonomous feminist organization that was created in 1981 by the former political prisoners Maria Amelia Teles and Crimeia Alice Schmidt de Almeida, among other feminist activists.

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Oswaldo Giacoia Junior

BEYOND A CRITIC OF HUMAN RIGHTS: FOUCAULT IN BRAZIL 1

Can Michel Foucault be considered a philosopher or a historian? It is very difficult to answer this question, above all because Foucault’s thought escapes the technical compartmentalization of thought into specialties – its institutional fossilization into scientific or university disciplines, for example – that reproduce, on the intellectual plane, the technical division of work in global administration societies. Foucault was always a nomadic thinker. In his defiant words, “‘Do not ask who I am and do not ask me to remain the same: leave it to our bureaucrats and our police to see that our papers are in order.’”2 If Foucault’s work can be brought close to philosophy, it can only be done so, then, as a permanent interrogation, as an exercise in irony, or as a distancing from oneself, a displacement, an alternation of the sight, a skin shedding, an objectivity reached from the multiplication of angles and perspectives. For example, such an interrogation would involve seeing the present from that which is its other: from classical antiquity, from the Greeks, from the Romans, or from the beginning of Christianity. For philosophy is, for Foucault, a diagnosis of the present, an ontology of ourselves, which can only be effectuated through the contrast with its other, in the dispersion produced by historical sense, in an archeo-genealogy that reconstructs the historically diverse modalities of the constitu-

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Beyond a Critic of Human Rights: Foucault in Brazil

tion of a consciousness of oneself. As Foucault explained in an interview from 1967: It is very possible that what I have done has to do with philosophy, especially inasmuch as, at least since Nietzsche, philosophy has as a task diagnosing, and no longer one of trying to state a truth that can be valid for all and for all times. I seek precisely to diagnose, to realize a diagnosis of the present: to say what we are today. Excavation work beneath our feet characterizes, since Nietzsche, contemporary thought, and, in this sense, I can declare myself a philosopher.3 In other words, philosophy amounts to an essay and straying, a traverse and experiment. It involves knowledge as passion and an unreserved opening, a relation that transforms oneself on the plane of thought. Foucault affirmed this view of philosophy toward the end of his life. In his words, “The ‘essay’ – which should be understood as the assay or test by which, in the game of truth, one undergoes changes, and not as a simplistic appropriation of others for the purpose of communication – is the living substance of philosophy.”4 Foucault’s work bears a filiation with traditions springing from the Enlightenment. He made the connection to the Enlightenment explicit when, close to the end of his life, he reflected on Immanuel Kant’s critical program. The relation between Aufklärung and revolution has its widest formulation in Foucault’s analyses of governmentalization, which delve into European society’s obsessive preoccupation, since the 16th century, with the problem of governing populations. In the search for ways of governing, Foucault detects a counter move2

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ment aligned in an opposite direction. He describes it as a critical attitude. It does not exactly have the form of a theory. It constitutes more of an ethos: how not to be governed. Therefore, against the governmentalization movement, which is a shepherding technology for directing conduct, the West has also developed a critical attitude. Kant’s thought offers the philosophical expression of this attitude: Our age is, in especial degree, the age of criticism, and to criticism everything must submit. Religion through its sanctity, and law-giving through its majesty, may seek to exempt themselves from it. But they then awaken just suspicion, and cannot claim the sincere respect which reason accords only to that which has been able to sustain the test of free and open examination.5 Foucault’s thought continues the tradition captured in these words. It is in this sense that it is possible to realize the relevance of Foucault’s contributions to contemporary ethical-political debates. His genealogy pierces the appearance of human rights and the fundamental guarantees consecrated in the rights declarations of modern democratic states as strictly contemporary to the biopolitical management of life. These rights and guarantees are correlative to the insertion of life into the mechanisms and calculations of political power. These phenomena may be considered the obverse and reverse, or two faces of the same coin, which configures the historical form of modern nation-states and constitutes an indispensable element in the development of capitalism. These two faces may also be com3

Beyond a Critic of Human Rights: Foucault in Brazil

prehended as indefectible poles in the power-knowledge relation: the pole of the exercise of power and the pole of resistance to it. If this correlation of events makes sense, then one cannot but recognize that it testifies to the twofold character of historically relevant phenomena. It also brings to light the connection of central elements operating inside the power-knowledge dispositif particular to political modernity. What the present work aims to show is that the figure of political sovereignty is also linked to Aufklärung and the rise of the human sciences. If it is undeniable that, above all as an effect of the Second World War, conventions and declarations of human rights multiplied in supranational organizations to the point of undermining the bond between human rights and the nation-state, it is also true that the connection suggested above is historically undeniable. And it is also the case that the concept of “man” to which the international human rights movement refers under the aegis of public international right still remains essentially the same as the one in Aufklärung. These reminders give way to the formulation of the present work’s core hypothesis: the modern concept of man, which corresponds to the declarations of fundamental rights, illustrates the Foucauldian theoretical theme of the historicity of the universal. Such a concept acquires its full configuration inside a picture of events in which integration defines the profile of man as a universal subject, which to this day we know as “Western man.” The hypothesis is, therefore, that “universal-man,” the subject of fundamental inalienable rights peculiar to modern constitutional states is the product of a dispositif understood as a “thoroughly heterogeneous ensemble consisting of discourses, institutions, architectural forms, regulatory decisions, laws, administrative measures, 4

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scientific statements, philosophical, moral and philanthropic propositions – in short, the said as much as the unsaid.”6 As is well-known, the axis of the Enlightenment’s theoretical and ethical-political program was the material promotion and moral elevation of man by means of the free use of reason, particularly scientific rationality, in its modern and experimental form. Emancipated from the tutelage and vassalage ensured by ignorance and superstition, humanity would find in the sciences and the techniques springing from them the conditions to successfully solve the most important human problems in order to guarantee its dominion over the forces of nature and achieve justice in the relations between men. So, the progress of humankind would be the result of an inseparable combination of the development of theoretical knowledge and the techno-programmatic appropriation of nature, on the one hand, and its usage for the benefit of the ethical-moral dimension of human nature, on the other. In this triumphalist utopia, which celebrates the merry nuptial between an emancipated human understanding and the “nature of things,” Foucault detects the biopolitical investment of bodies and populations by disciplines and social insurance regulations, respectively. This investment serves as the provenance and emergence of the typically modern historical figure of subjectivity: that of the subject/subjected man who appears in history along with the advent of the human sciences. He is a subject insofar as he possesses a rationality that affirms itself in and through the human sciences. He is subjected insofar as, in this same movement, the subject of knowledge also becomes the field of incidence – the sujet – of games of truth and power practices, objectified and reified into relations of knowledge 5

Beyond a Critic of Human Rights: Foucault in Brazil

and subjection. Man, in the form of the generic subject’s universal, such as is still imposed on us today, reveals itself, therefore, as a historical figure. Deleuze already recognized the inescapable historicity of the universal when referring to the Foucauldian thesis of the “modern invention of man.” He wrote, “From classical age to modernity, we go from a state where man does not yet exist to a state from which man has already disappeared.”7 In this context, it is helpful to recall the polemical passage from The Order of Things about the recent dating of man in Western culture: As the archaeology of our thought easily shows, man is an invention of recent date. And one perhaps nearing its end. If those arrangements were to disappear as they appeared, if some event of which we can at the moment do no more than sense the possibility – without knowing either what its form will be or what it promises – were to cause them to crumble, as the ground of Classical thought did, at the end of the eighteenth century, then one can certainly wager that man would be erased, like a face drawn in sand at the edge of the sea.8 In this manner, Foucault registered the historicity of universal “man” as an intricate problem presented to knowledge. For him, man’s figure arises amidst all the mutations that affect knowledge and its order, in the passage from the classical era to modernity. It arises from an analytic of finitude that considers man as the referential pole of all the positivity to which the 6

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faculty of representations has access: for there can only be representation (therefore, opening to the world) if something that presents itself as real is given to a subject, a subject that, in these conditions, cannot but be finite. Besides, man arises in the open space between the transcendental and the empirical (because the figure of man constitutes a possible object for science and a subject whose synthetic activity produces every representation, including scientific ones). Man finds a reflection surface in the permanent relation between the cogito and the unthought-of – an opening in which three domains of knowledge proper to modernity are inscribed: biology, philology, and political economy. And it is from these fields that psychology, sociology, linguistics, and anthropology will take root. But Foucault’s importance is impoverished and even banalized if we freeze him in the unilateral figure of the “critic of human rights.” Foucault, the name of many masks, is plural and much more complex than what those who oppose him think he is. This same critic of modern humanism was an uncompromising combatant for human rights. Militancy for Foucault entailed inseparable relations between life and thought, the best expression of which is his Collège de France course from 1983 to 1984, The Courage of Truth.9 His militancy with regard to human rights finds an unparalleled expression in his experiences in Brazil, which is the reason I now want to look back at these experiences. In the beginning of October 1975, Foucault arrived once again in São Paulo. There, he delivered a series of lectures on the history of sexuality at the School of Philosophy, Literature, 7

Beyond a Critic of Human Rights: Foucault in Brazil

and Human Sciences (FFLCH) at the University of São Paulo (USP). On that occasion, Foucault got to know about a series of arbitrary arrests carried out in the country by political authorities. USP students organized a demonstration in which they denounced the violent imprisonment of teachers, students, and employees. Foucault attended the assembly and delivered a speech in support of the protest. In the speech, he announced that he would suspend his course before its scheduled conclusion. Days later, the press would announce that journalist Vladimir Herzog was found dead, supposedly hanged, in the facilities of the Second Army in São Paulo on October 25, 1975. On the day following the death, the command of the Second Army’s Detachment of Information Operations and Internal Defense Operations Center (DOI-CODI) issued an official note indicating that Herzog had committed suicide in his cell. On October 27, Herzog’s funeral took place and USP students staged a strike right afterwards. Fortunately, these facts were registered in published material, meaning that I am not forced to limit myself to my personal memory of those events. Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues recounts that Foucault suspended his course at USP and participated in an ecumenical funeral service for Herzog on October 31.10 Years later, Foucault recalled the service in moving detail: The Jewish community didn’t dare hold a funeral service. It was the Archbishop of São Paulo, Dom Evariste [sic], who organized the ceremony, which was moreover inter-denominational, in memory of the journalist in the Cathedral of St Paul. It drew thousands and thousands of people into the church, on to 8

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the square and so on, and the cardinal in red robes presided over the ceremony, and he came forward at the end of the ceremony, in front of the faithful, and he greeted them shouting: ‘Shalom, shalom.’ And there was all around the square armed police and there were plain clothes policemen in the church. The police pulled back; there was nothing the police could do against that.11 Another decisive political intervention by Foucault was on behalf of the boat people. It took the form of a manifesto titled “Confronting Governments: Human Rights,” which was published in Libération in June 1984 days after his death.12 The term “boat people” got to be known as the designation given to the refugees escaping from the Indochinese Peninsula, especially Vietnam, in boats and ships after the war with the United States. They were stateless people and clandestine immigrants. Worldwide outrage followed, giving birth to the International Committee against Piracy in Geneva. Foucault’s intervention at that time was with respect to pirate vessels in which around eight hundred thousand people tried to “illegally” escape southeast Asia in search of better living conditions. The boat people exposed themselves to abuse, violence, maritime storms, pirate attacks, the refusal of asylum and refuge, and ejection from waters demarcated by territorial borders. It seems to me we can find here a concrete example of what Foucault understood by a “new right.”13 In his words, “Amnesty International, Terre des Hommes, and Médicins du monde are initiatives that have created this new right – that of private individuals to effectively intervene in the sphere of international policy and strategy.”14 Foucault points in the direction of a law uncontaminated 9

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by the principle of sovereignty. This law is protected by an extraordinary international citizenship founded on the abuses of power and the unfortunate condition of the victims of such abuses, whosoever they might be. It springs from a chain of universal solidarity, founded on intolerable misfortune and dereliction. Foucault’s appeal to a “new right” has a profound resonance in our present. Large numbers of immigrants are escaping atrocities and misery in their homelands. They are agglomerating in an inhuman condition in the archipelago of the Pelagie Islands to seek refuge in Europe. They do not find the elementary humanitarian and cosmopolitan right of hospitality. The European Parliament is attempting to transform into law an initiative that establishes quotas for the acceptance of immigrants by countries in the European community. In this context, Foucault’s appeal to a “new right” seems to take on a greater urgency. It is therefore especially regrettable that the Board of Governors of the São Paulo Foundation of the Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo (PUC-SP) has vetoed the creation of a “Michel Foucault and the Philosophy of the Present” Chair at that university. It refused to even judge the merit of the appeal presented by the initiative’s proponents. The refusal, which unanimously contradicted the decision previously taken by the university’s teaching and research commission, provoked outrage in national and international academic communities. As a matter of fact, the proposition did not aim at instituting a permanent chair for the study of Foucault’s work, in and by itself, but, as the title itself indicates, the competent and rigorous study of the history of contempo10

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rary philosophy, which, incidentally, has been a tradition at PUC-SP. In conclusion, it is worth recalling that Foucault’s lecture series “Truth and Juridical Forms” was delivered at the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio) in 1973. That year, PUC-Rio published Roberto Machado and Eduardo Jardim Morais’s translation of the lecture series in something of a textbook. In 1996, PUC-Rio and the Nau publishing house re-edited it. It is also worth remembering that the philosophy center of the Instituto Sedes Sapientiae in São Paulo has Foucault’s work as one of its main references. These facts may well contribute to a reconsideration of the decision to veto the creation of a “Michel Foucault and the Philosophy of the Present” chair at PUC-SP. NOTES 1

Unless otherwise indicated, all translations are my own.

2

Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge and the Discourse on Language, trans. A. M. Sheridan Smith (New York: Pantheon Books, 1972), 17.

3

Michel Foucault, “‘Qui êtes-vous professeur Foucault?’,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 1, 1954-1975, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald with the assistance of Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Quarto/ Gallimard, 2001), 654.

4

Michel Foucault, The Use of Pleasure: Volume 2 of The History of Sexuality, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage Books, 1990), 9.

5

Immanuel Kant, Critique of Pure Reason, trans. Norman Kemp Smith, unabridged edition (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1965), 9.

6

Michel Foucault, “The Confessions of the Flesh,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Writings and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon,

11

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trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 194. 7

Gilles Deleuze, “L’Homme, une existence douteuse,” in L’île déserte: Textes et entretiens 1953-1974, ed. David Lapoujade (Paris: Les Éditions de Minuit, 2002), 128.

8

Michel Foucault, The Order of Things: An Archaeology of the Human Sciences (New York: Vintage, 1996), 387.

9

Michel Foucault, The Courage of Truth (The Government of Self and Others II): Lectures at the Collège de France, 1983-1984, ed. Frédéric Gros, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2011).

10 Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil: Presença, efeitos, ressonâncias (Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina, 2016), 93. 11 Michel Foucault, “On Religion (1978),” in Religion and Culture, ed. Jeremy R. Carrette (New York: Routledge, 1999), 107. 12 Michel Foucault, “Confronting Governments: Human Rights,” in Essential Works of Foucault, 1954-1984, ed. Paul Rabinow, vol. 3, Power, ed. James Faubion, trans. Robert Hurley et al. (New York: The New Press, 2000), 474-475. 13 Ibid., 475. 14 Ibid.

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FREEING OURSELVES: THE EXPERIENCE OF THE PRISONS INFORMATION GROUP (IN LIGHT OF FOUCAULT’S 1973 RIO LECTURES) 1

In 1973, Michel Foucault travelled to Brazil to give a series of lectures titled “Truth and Juridical Forms” in the Languages Department of the Pontifical Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (PUC-Rio). Brazil was not the only foreign country he visited. He also went to Japan, Poland, Tunisia, and Sweden, among other countries. His trips to the United States in the 1980s are well-known. Work on the impact of Foucault’s journeys to the Far East, Eastern Europe, the “Tropics,” and the “New World” is still developing. What can already be inferred, however, is that his travels did not have the objective of spreading a eulogy of a European culture that would be superior, rational, disciplined, civilized, and modern. It was Foucault himself, who, after all, was leaving the “Old World” with the diagnosis of the crisis of reason, of the disciplines and images of man and the subject of Western knowledge, as his lectures at PUC-Rio highlight so well.2 On the other hand, Foucault’s five visits to Brazil from 1965 to 1976 come up in some book-length analyses, most notably those of Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues and Roberto Machado.3 Conde emphasizes how Foucault was a tireless journeyman. In her words: “Travels were unsettling experiences for him, susceptible to contributing to the forging 1

Freeing Ourselves

of new sets of problems, concepts and diagrams.”4 Conde captures the feelings of strangeness many experienced in relation to the constant changes in Foucault’s thought: “‘When he returns he is already other!’ cried those who, in praise or disapproval, revealed the impact provoked by the changes in the life and writings of Michel Foucault.”5 In the context of this observation, Conde does not fail to mention Foucault’s participation in a roundtable upon the completion of his lectures at PUC-Rio.6 On that occasion, Foucault offered the following critical observation about the persistence of power relations after the experience of revolution: Someone here said that revolutionaries seek to take power. At that point, I would be a lot more anarchistic. It must be said that I am no anarchist in the sense that I do not admit this entirely negative conception of power, but I do not agree with you when you say that revolutionaries seek to take power. Or rather, I agree, adding ‘Thank God! Yes.’ For authentic revolutionaries, to conquer power means to take possession of a treasure from the hands of one class to deliver it to another class, the proletariat in this case. I believe that is the way revolution and the seizure of power are conceived. Observe then the Soviet Union. There we have a regime in which power relations in the family, in sexuality, in the factories, in the schools are the same. The question is knowing if we can, within the current regime, transform, at the microscopic level – at the school, in the family – power relations in such a way that, when a political-economic 2

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revolution occurs, we would not find, afterwards, the same power relations that we find now. This is the problem of the Cultural Revolution in China…7 Here Foucault updates a certain anarchistic attitude in relation to power but he makes a point of emphasizing two differences: he does not believe that all power is evil and he does not admit a wholly negative conception of power.8 To transform power relations at their microscopic levels, Foucault sought another relationship with activists and developed his reflections on the importance of the production of new forms of subjectivities for such a transformation. In the following pages, I take up Foucault’s concerns by highlighting the novelty of his experience of militancy on behalf of the Prisons Information Group (GIP) in the period right before his lectures at PUC-Rio. THE NOVELTY ACTION

OF

THE

GIP’S

POLITICAL

Foucault, Daniel Defert, and others created the GIP, which operated between 1971 and 1972. The GIP interests me on account of the following topics raised by the editors of Dits et écrits: the context of the struggles around prisons from which the group as well as Maoists and other important leftist militants emerged; the specificity of the actions of the GIP, which made a point of collecting information inside the prison system through questionnaires clandestinely distributed among prisoners and their families; and the acts in support of the group from specific intellectuals, such as judges, physicians, and social workers.9 The GIP had manifold effects but I will restrict myself to two of them: the appearance of prisons as a relevant subject for 3

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discussion in the daily press and French radio and the questioning of the traditional leftist discourse, which distinguished between the proletariat and the “lumpenproletariat.” The GIP thus helped modify militancy in the aftermath of May 1968. According to Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, the history of the GIP goes beyond a biography of Foucault to relate to the intellectual conjuncture after May 1968, the political and social situation in the early 1970s, and prison policies in France from the end of the Second World War.10 The demonstrations of May 1968 brought together a large array of social groups, such as students, peasants, and workers. In this context of intense social struggle, the action of the Maoist, non-Leninist organization Proletarian Left (GP) stood out. The GP had, at its origin, two tendencies: a libertarian tendency and a Marxist one. The organization was disbanded in 1970 and its members went underground. In this manner, the police started to treat the actions of the GP as illegal and directly related to crime. It was from this moment that the GP began to receive the support of many intellectuals, including Jean-Paul Sartre. He actively supported the movement of the GP militants and was one of the intellectuals to defend the establishment of a “popular” justice as a means of struggle when faced with the justice of the State. The latter was denounced on all sides for its overt partiality. This debate lasted from 1970 to 1975. However, Sartre’s position was not a unanimous one. Foucault’s opposition to the popular court can be clearly understood in his dialogue with the Maoists from 1972. He engages in a genealogy of the popular court and

4

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arrives at the conclusion that “the revolution can only take place via the radical elimination of the judicial apparatus.”11 In September 1970, GP militants in prison started a hunger strike to obtain the status of political prisoners.12 This manner of political demonstration was by then quite common and had been used in the collective actions of prisoners at the time of the war in Algeria between 1958 and 1961. After twenty-five days, the hunger strike had aroused only a lukewarm reaction in French public opinion. In January 1971, there was another hunger strike that had a greater impact in the press and generated more support. In an act of solidarity, students and professors ended up participating in the hunger strike. On February 8, 1971, a press conference took place to discuss all these events and communicate the end of the hunger strike. It is at this event that Foucault, Pierre Vidal-Naquet and Jean-Marie Domenach announced the formation of the GIP. As Artières points out, the GIP was born through the discussion of “popular” courts among leftists and the struggle of imprisoned Maoists who, as I have already noted, claimed the status of political prisoners.13 He goes on to suggest that the GIP participated in a rupture because prison had become the venue of struggle for the first time, and common prisoners as well as political prisoners were actors in this fight. Artières makes this rupture explicit through an elaboration of important differences between the GIP and other leftist movements of the time. Among these differences, the GIP took an interest in the common prisoners, who were commonly seen as lumpenproletarian, and it did not have the objective of speaking for prisoners or setting itself up in spaces of exploitation.14 These differences clearly resonate in Foucault’s critique of the mili5

Freeing Ourselves

tancy of the traditional left and the way of action specific to the intellectual. He did not propose to speak in the name of the “masses” or try to work alongside the downtrodden in factories, mines, or other spaces. Defert also draws attention to the arrival of the GIP as first associated with the defense strategies of the GP but then as autonomous in relation to the Maoist militants.15 Still, according to Defert, the leaders of the GIP had resources in a traditional strategy in the history of communist movements, that is, alliances with great personalities among French intellectuals and organizations involved with the defense of civil rights. This was the reason why Sartre’s support was basic. By contrast, Foucault always favored effective work in place of “university chatter.”16 Defert speaks of the mode of manipulation Foucault loathed the most: the spectacular operations of personalities that presented themselves at the doors of prisons in the presence of photographers in the name of citizens being repressed and attacked by the police.17 Foucault also gestured to the similarity and difference between the GP and GIP in the choice of the initials that represented the group: the GIP showed the reference to and approximation with the GP, but it also had the “I” of its specificity, which meant the difference that specific intellectuals should introduce in the formation of the GIP.18 The GIP thus stood out for a political action that differed from the other leftist groups of the time. The anarchists also participated in the events that involved revolts in the French prisons in the early 1970s, but they expected violent action executed outside the prisons from the GIP, and they did not like the proximity the group had with Maoists. For their part, the Maoists expected the violence to originate in the interior of 6

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the prisons, which would be a sign of the politicization of the inmates. There were also the demands from the philanthropic and Christian tradition, which acted directly on the prisons. It expected the proposal of reforms and improvements of the prison system from the GIP. The GIP did not share these expectations. As Defert asserts, “The objective of our group was, first of all, to render the prison inoperative as an instrument of political repression.”19 The GIP facilitated an unprecedented mobilization around the prison. Suddenly, “the penitentiary institution wavered” and “it was even imagined it could disappear.”20 Defert thought that May 1968 had paid no attention to prisons, which were treated as if they did not symbolize forms of power. Common law prisoners were still subjected to the old Marxist suspicion of being lumpenproletarian in some political discourses. Artières reminds us that the GIP rejected this suspicion.21 It did not necessarily affirm that “all common law prisoners are political prisoners” so much as consider “the prison to be a daily venue of politics.”22 Solidarity between political prisoners and common law prisoners, as between proletarians and lumpenproletarians, had not always existed. The division, according to Foucault, dates from the nineteenth century. It set up a break between a politically organized and unionized proletariat, on the one hand, and a lumpenproletariat, on the other hand.23 From this moment on the solidarity between revolutionary movements and prison movements, which had a great importance in all the political revolutions of the nineteenth century (1830, 1848, and 1870), was broken.24 But this connection appeared again in France when, at the time of the war in Algeria, there were many 7

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Algerian prisoners in French prisons claiming the status of political prisoners, as also happened with political prisoners in the period following May 1968, principally among Maoists. The GIP also played a great role in the questioning of this division, since, with the formation of the group, “the inmates learned that there was a movement abroad interested in their fate, a movement that was not simply a Christian or lay philanthropic movement, but a movement of political contestation of the prison.”25 Despite his differences with Marxists, Foucault drew inspiration from Marxism at the time he was distributing questionnaires at the gates of the prisons. Soon after May 1968 there was a movement of students, intellectuals, and political militants to go into the factories to get to know the conditions of workers and radicalize them. This movement was known as établissement. Though its method was different from the method of the GIP, a parallel can be drawn between them.26 They both used the distribution of questionnaires to workers or prisoners as the principal means of gathering information on conditions in factories and prisons, respectively. Moreover, in an attempt to renew Marxism amid the workers of Italy in 1961, Raniero Panzieri had accomplished a very similar project, collecting information directly from workers. All three groups re-activated a much older tradition of workers’ inquiries from the nineteenth century, as exemplified by Karl Marx’s 1880 “A Workers’ Inquiry.”27 The objective of the GIP was to seek information inside the prisons. In order to accomplish this goal, a questionnaire was written that was meant for the inmates and their families. In this manner, the words of the prisoners could break the 8

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silence, short-circuiting the production of all authorized discourses. The questionnaires were answered anonymously and the questions concerned all aspects of prison life.28 They were clandestinely distributed inside prisons because the administration of the prisons would not permit the inmates to have access to any type of mail that alluded to their imprisoning. For the GIP, it was not then a matter of, as in the case of the établis, “putting themselves in the place of the prisoners, but of making their conditions known, respecting their voices.”29 The group considered the regime inside the prisons intolerable.30 The GIP had no pretense of making the prisoners conscious of their situation. “They,” Foucault said of the prisoners, “possessed this conscience for a very long time, but it did not have the means of expressing itself.”31 In this sense, the conscience, reactions, indignations, and reflections on the situation in the prison existed in individuals, but they did not appear. It was necessary for the information to circulate, precisely by divulging the content of the questionnaires. “The method,” Foucault explained, “may be surprising but it is still the best. It is necessary for the information to appear; it is necessary to transform the individual experience into collective knowledge. That is, into political knowledge.”32 Defert affirms that information is a struggle, as it brought into the public space knowledge about the daily experience of the inmates.33 Prison conditions received, through the action of the GIP, a greater visibility in the French press, making it impossible for the prison administrations to disavow the information divulged through the questionnaires.34 In all the rebellions that occurred in French prisons in 1970 and 1972 there was a general objective. “‘It is necessary,’” as the pamphlet of a 9

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group of young lawyers from Lyon declared, “‘to end once and for all the mystery kept by the administration on what happens inside prisons.’”35 The GIP, according to Artières, made possible the emergence of a discourse belonging to inmates.36 The action of the group “is, by the originality of its procedures, a noteworthy mark in the history of prisons and, in a wider sense, of the social movements of the 1970s.”37 Artières suggests that the GIP is a political heritage left by Foucault, as it brought prison to the field of present day concerns, making visible the problems that surrounded it. Foucault also showed clearly the lack of dignity in speaking for others when he gave the inmates and their families the right to speak. In defending the view that the masses have no need of intellectuals to know their conditions or even reach an awareness of them, Foucault adopted the posture of a specific intellectual. This refusal to speak for the other and focus on the singular through the testimonies of prisoners clashed with other positions at the time. Defert maintains that when Sartre faced the same prison rebellions he insisted on “declaring that the inmates fought in the name of all, as if it were not dignified to fight for oneself.”38 The practice of the GIP implicitly interrogated the relationship between intellectuals and workers. In place of the intellectual being charged with the mission of taking knowledge to the inmates, it was the testimonies of inmates in the questionnaires that made up the knowledge of the conditions in the prisons. The practice of the GIP thus inverted a commonplace hierarchy in the production and dissemination of knowledge. The group had as its slogan letting the prisoners speak.39 It had no hierarchical organization or head. The GIP 10

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was an anonymous organization underpinned by three personalities: Foucault, Domenach, and Vidal-Naquet. But they were only a support. Anyone who had anything to say about the prisons could participate in the group. A GIP communiqué from 1972 likely authored by Foucault insisted that the GIP was not an intellectual tribunal or a subversive group that sought to inspire inmates from outside the prison. It insisted that the group never wished to speak for inmates, but to make them and their families speak for themselves.40 As far as Foucault was concerned the problem was not to propose a model prison or the abolition of prison, as the mechanisms of marginalization present in the prisons were immersed in all social relationships.41 The objective was “to offer a critique of the system that explains the process by which present day society pushes a part of the population to the margins.”42 During the time the GIP was active Foucault was also involved in the elaboration of his studies of the prison. In 1972, he taught his course Théories et institutions pénales at the Collège de France.43 The following year he continued to speak on the subject of penal systems in his course La société punitive.44 When he came to Brazil in 1973, he dealt with this subject in the third, fourth, and fifth lectures of “Truth and Juridical Forms.”45 Foucault’s involvement with the GIP was not only intellectual or concerned with the production of scientific knowledge about prisons. He was not conducting sociological research with prisoners about their life conditions. Foucault postponed the writing of Discipline and Punish for two years so that inmates would not suppose that his militancy about the prisons was only speculative. He drastically changed 11

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his militancy and thought after his participation in the group. The prison rebellions he had witnessed left him with important lessons about power relations. In his words from the end of the first chapter of Discipline and Punish: “That punishment in general and the prison in particular belong to a political technology of the body is a lesson that I have learnt not so much from history as from the present. In recent years, prison revolts have occurred throughout the world.”46 BACK TO THE ROUNDTABLE IN RIO In conclusion, I return to the roundtable in which Foucault participated after the delivery of his lectures “Truth and Juridical Forms” at PUC-Rio in 1973. I want to focus on the roundtable to bring out Foucault’s dialogue with a nonidentified interlocutor on the definition of archeology. Foucault does not define it as an art, a theory, or a poem, but as a practice. His interlocutor teases him: “Is archeology a miraculous machine?”47 Foucault’s answer points to archeology as a critical machine that calls into question certain power relationships. Besides, its liberating and critical function is remarkable. Coupled with genealogy, archaeology short-circuits the naturalness and necessity of the way power relationships operate in modernity, creating conditions of possibility for liberating ourselves from the infinite reproduction of the same type of relationships, even those of revolutionary experiences. Foucault argues, “I would say, in a much more pragmatic manner, that my machine is intrinsically good; not in so far as it transcribes or supplies the model of what happened, but in so far as it can furnish out of what has happened a model such as will permit us to free ourselves from what happened.”48

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Foucault’s wager on a model that “will permit us to free ourselves from what just happened” brings me back to the experience of the GIP. I am therefore going to highlight the possible parallels that we can establish between this experience and the themes discussed in the Rio roundtable. Still elaborating the meaning of archaeology, Foucault describes it as a “historical-political activity” that would not simply be translated through books, speeches, or articles.49 As a matter of fact, he even mentions the inconvenience of the obligation to reunite all of the meanings and objectives of archaeology in one book. Foucault concludes the question and answer session of the roundtable in the following manner: “It seems to me that it is about a simultaneously practical and theoretical activity that should be accomplished through books, speeches, and discussions, such as this one, through political actions, painting, music.”50 To consider the relations that exist between the GIP and the responses that Foucault elaborated after the delivery of his lectures in Rio in 1973 is therefore to try to understand the communication that he maintained between theory and practice, thought and militancy, discourse and life, as indicated in the passage above. I want to proceed to highlight some of the resonances that the GIP could have provoked in Foucault’s reflections on archaeology in the roundtable discussion. For example, when Foucault responds to the questions of Maria Teresa Amaral and Affonso Romano de Santa’Anna on the study of discourse for strategy, he goes back to the Sophists to explain that the practice of a discourse cannot be separated from the exercise of power. “To speak,” Foucault affirms, “is to exercise power, to speak is to risk his power, to speak is to risk getting or losing 13

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everything.”51 I venture to suggest that Foucault understood the perceptions about the materiality of discourse and the battle around it while he and the GIP struggled for the disclosure of the abysmal living conditions that the prisoners confronted inside French prisons. The struggle for the disclosure of these conditions created a transformation in the mode by which public opinion and the French press informed a daily life that had been characterized by silence and a lack of knowledge about the prisons up to that point. Foucault also could have understood “discourses” as “events” through the cut introduced by the words of the prisoners and their family members in the GIP questionnaires. This cut produced a battlefield, a strategic game, and a dispute not only with the low visibility given to topics about the prison in the French press, but also with the way in which political militancy and the fields of philosophy and history dealt with these topics. This theme allows me to get back to the discussion of Foucault’s struggle for another political militancy, principally through his own approximation to anarchism, as indicated in the introduction. Foucault’s critique of Marxism reappears in his response to Hélio Pelegrino’s question about psychoanalysis. “Even in Marxist theory,” Foucault declares, “we can find many examples of the renewal of power relations.”52 I suggest that Foucault’s years of political militancy on behalf of the GIP left him preoccupied with the non-renewal of old examples of the functioning of power. I also wonder whether there would not be a resonance between the struggle that the GIP undertook on behalf of prisoners and Foucault’s understanding of the fundamental role of juridical practices in his study of power. We know that Théories 14

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et instutions pénales and La société punitive treated these practices and how GIP militancy contributed to the elaboration of these studies. We also know how Foucault’s reflections in these courses introduced historical elements for the diagnosis of emergence, provenance, and difference in relation to struggles in French prisons in the twentieth century. In this regard, I refer to how the GIP attempted to engage in the production of another conception of knowledge conveyed by prisoners and their family members, thereby short-circuiting conventional relations between discourse and power. In the roundtable, Foucault suggests this battle of discourses in his comments on the rupture between rhetoric and philosophy in his response to Machado’s observation about the existence of other discourses in the history of knowledge.53 Let me conclude my observations with Foucault’s words: The problem is to reintroduce rhetoric, the orator, the struggle of discourse inside the field of analysis, not, as with the linguists, to do a systematic analysis of rhetorical procedures, but to study discourse, even the discourse of truth, as rhetorical procedures, ways to win, produce events, produce decisions, produce battles and produce victories.54 NOTES 1

Ricardo Pinheiro Lopes translated this contribution with the assistance of Marcelo Hoffman. It reproduces some heavily modified parts of Priscila Piazentini Vieira, A coragem da verdade e a ética do intelectual em Michel Foucault (São Paulo: Intermeios/FAPESP, 2015). These parts are reproduced here with permission from Intermeios.

2

Michel Foucault, “La vérité et les formes juridiques,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 1, 1954-1975, ed. Daniel Defert and François Ewald 15

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with the assistance of Jacques Lagrange (Paris: Quarto/Gallimard, 2001), 1406-1514. 3

Roberto Machado, Impressões de Michel Foucault (São Paulo: N-1 edições, 2017); Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault: Presença, efeitos, ressonâncias (Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina, 2016).

4 Conde, Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault, 20. 5

Ibid., 23.

6

Ibid., 23-24. The rountable featured Helio Pellegrino, Chaim Katz, Roberto Machado, Luis Costa Lima, Milton José Pinto, Luís Felipe Baeta Neves, Rose Marie Muraro, Marcos Tavares do Amaral, Luís Alfredo Garcia Rosa, Maria Cecilia Baeta Neves, Miriam Taques Tamler, Magno Machado Dias, Roberto Oswaldo Cruz, Lea Porto de Abreu Novais, Maria Teresa Amaral, and Affonso Romano de Sant’Anna.

7

Foucault, “La vérité et les formes juridiques,” 1510-1511.

8

Foucault revisited this complicated relationship with anarchism at many moments in his life. One of the most important moments happened seven years later, with the proposal of an “anarcheology.” In this regard, see Michel Foucault, On the Government of the Living: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1979-1980, ed. Michel Senellart, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014), 78-79.

9

Daniel Defert, François Ewald, and Jacques Lagrange, Introduction to “(Manifeste du G.I.P.),” by Michel Foucault, in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 1, 1954-1975, 1042.

10 Philippe Artières, Laurent Quéro, and Michelle Zancarini-Fournel, eds., Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons: Archives d’une lutte, 19701972, (Paris: Éditions de l’IMEC, 2003), 16-19. 11 Michel Foucault, “On Popular Justice: A Discussion with Maoists,” in Power/Knowledge: Selected Writings and Other Writings, 1972-1977, ed. Colin Gordon, trans. Colin Gordon, Leo Marshall, John Mepham, and Kate Soper, (New York: Pantheon Books, 1980), 16. 12 Artières, Quéro, and Zancarini-Fournel, Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, 27.

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13 Philippe Artières, “Uma política menor. O GIP como lugar de experimentação política,” in Foucault: filosofia & política, ed. Guilherme Castelo Branco and Alfredo Veiga-Neto (Belo Horizonte: Autêntica Editora, 2011), 320. 14 Ibid. 15 Daniel Defert, “L’Émergence d’un nouveau front: les prisons,” in Artières, Quéro, and Zancarini-Fournel, Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, 315. 16 Michel Foucault, “Le grand enfermement,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 1, 1954-1975, 1169. 17 Defert, “L’Émergence d’un nouveau front,” 317. 18 Ibid., 320. 19 Ibid., 321. 20 Artières, Quéro, and Zancarini-Fournel, Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, 11. 21 Ibid., 28. 22 Ibid., 28. 23 Michel Foucault, “Prisons et révoltes dans les prisons,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 1, 1954-1975, 1293-1300. 24 Ibid., 1294. 25 Ibid. 26 Artières, Quéro, and Zancarini-Fournel, Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, 29. 27 Ibid., 47. 28 The GIP produced reports based on the questionnaires distributed inside and outside the prisons. For an overview of these publications, see Defert, “L’Émergence d’un nouveau front,” 324-325. 29 Artières, Quéro, and Zancarini-Fournel, Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, 48.

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30 Michel Foucault, “Enquête sur les prisons: brisons les barreaux du silence,” in Dits et écrits 1954-1988, Vol. 1, 1954-1975, 1045. 31 Ibid., 1045-1046. 32 Ibid., 1046. 33 Defert, “L’Émergence d’un nouveau front,” 324. 34 Artières, Quéro, and Zancarini-Fournel, Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, 49. 35 Ibid., 216. 36 Artières, “Uma política menor,” 320. 37 Ibid., 321. 38 Defert, “L’Émergence d’un nouveau front,” 326. 39 Michel Foucault. “Le grand enfermement,” 1172. 40 Michel Foucault, “Je voudrais au nom du GIP dissiper un malentendu...,” in Artières, Quéro, and Zancarini-Fournel, Le Groupe d’Information sur les Prisons, 193. 41 Foucault, “Le grand enfermement,” 1174. 42 Ibid. 43 Michel Foucault, Théories et institutions pénales: Cours au Collège de France (1971-1972), ed. Bernard E. Harcourt in collaboration with Elisabetta Basso and Claude-Olivier Doron and with the assistance of Daniel Defert (Paris: Gallimard/Seuil, 2015). 44 Michel Foucault, La société punitive: Cours au Collège de France (19721973), ed. Bernard E. Harcourt (Paris: Gallimard, 2013). 45 Foucault, “La vérité et les formes juridiques,” 1438-1491. 46 Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, trans. Alan Sheridan (New York: Vintage Books, 1995), 30. 47 Foucault, “La vérité et les formes juridiques,” 1512. 48 Ibid. 49 Ibid., 1513. 18

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50 Ibid., 1513-1514. 51 Ibid., 1500. 52 Ibid., 1509. 53 Ibid., 1502. 54 Ibid. These words seem to invite a comparison with Foucault’s analyses of rhetoric and philosophy from the early 1980s. Obviously, such a comparison is well beyond the scope of this contribution.

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Edson Passetti

PENAL ABOLITIONISM: AN ANARCHIST PERSPECTIVE FROM BRAZIL

Michel Foucault was very fond of Brazil and of what was most intense here, its youth. He went through delicate situations during the civil-military dictatorship and journeyed along the coast of the country, marking its ethical, aesthetic, and political presence.1 Discipline and Punish: The Birth of the Prison, published in Brazil in 1977, is his most widely read, quoted, commented, and sold book to this day.2 The book has become mandatory for any researcher grappling with prisons, incarcerations, disciplinary controls in general, illegalisms, rights, governments, subjections, and resistance. It has definitely exceeded the narrow boundary delimited by criminology and the sociology of interactions. Discipline and Punish also facilitates a confrontation with criminal law and incarcerations (as do penal abolitionists). But those who decide to walk with Foucault adopt above all his methodological suggestions, inhabit the crossroads he identified, and locate new junctions. How can we confront the continuity of prisons? Foucault’s precious onslaughts on penal and prison reforms intensively situate the ostensible efforts of disciplinary society in strengthening normative and repressive apparatuses in the same manner as they hammer at the ontology of crime, child pedagogy, the phantasmagoria that envelops the formation of each human being in the modern colonization of his soul, the establishment of an efficient pastorate, the government of factories over their 1

Penal Abolitionism: An Anarchist Perspective From Brazil

workers, the consolidation of the contract in relations, the techniques in the government of subjection, and, most importantly, the manner in which subjects govern themselves. All of this brings with it, at the same time, knowledges that organize themselves, surveillance that expands, and seizures of workers to compose the uniformed and civil police force, including informers, to work against workers. They establish the modern humanist prison and the system of normative rewards as new ways of punishing. Torture of a different proportion was concentrated in the private sphere and gradually criminalized by penal law. But this transformation did not happen immediately, or rather, the criminalization of the conduct of parents who violate children appears only in the second half of the twentieth century when disciplines yield to controls, when the state finds measures to publicly preserve the body and the soul of the child even under the private power of their parents. The child as a family investment is conceived as potential human capital. Therefore, a child must not be tortured, though he must be punished even with mild violence, as recommended by psychoanalysis, to be educated as a future good citizen. Systemic theorists from the United States point to this imperative by emphasizing that politicization begins in the child through rewards and punishments. As the principal objects of the moral investment of the adults who govern them, children are expected to be profitable human capital and active bourgeois-democratic citizens. Despite all the so-called advances in criminal law in protecting and guaranteeing the rights of the child and so-called adolescents, criminal law remains directed at containing those children who disobey, transgress, defy, and infringe. It is intended especially 2

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for poor young people, for their incarceration in prisons. Children and young people who are silent or who turn away and passively refuse are often referred to a medicalization (prescribed by pediatricians, psychologists, and psychiatrists) to remove them from the confinement caused by alleged disorders in order to make them fit and, finally, resilient. Young people in austere institutions are also medicalized with the purpose of containing inherent resistances to the prison and instituting resilient behavior consistent with neoliberal rationality. Children have always been the main targets of criminal law in the society of disciplines and the society of controls. Previously, the tactics to make children docile prevailed through the introduction of religion, trades for work, basic schooling, and a variety of technical assessments so that, at the end of a given period, children would be able to socialize, which is to say, to work and to make up a family according to the bourgeois model. To all this today, an interest grows in building a resilient subject, a self-entrepreneur so that when he leaves prison he will participate in the life of his community of origin as a subject of law. Prison itself comes to be considered as one of the positive equivalents in the endless list of so-called adversities to be shouldered and surpassed by each incarcerated individual, as a proactive element inherent in the investment in resilience. Resilience amounts to nothing more than a prison enhancer and the actual veneer of punishment. It is an innovative task shared by the state with civil society organizations. However, if the state and civil society organizations are not unaware that life in prison produces a world apart (sometimes called “a world of crime”) consisting of relations between prisoners, bureaucracy, and society, there is a difference today. 3

Penal Abolitionism: An Anarchist Perspective From Brazil

These relations occur not only by means of partnerships with organized civil society, but also by the undertakings of adult prisoners who share the government of prisons with the administration of the institution. Everything is organized in the form of an enterprise and its government invests in the containment of rebellions, which occur only during the violent clash between factions of corporate illegalisms aimed at controlling the government and prison market. This pattern has been increasingly evident in Brazil through bloody confrontations in adult prisons, such as those widely reported in the media in 2016 and 2017. Ultimately, by any angle, statistics prove that juvenile prisons are adult prison recruitment centers. But there is still life in these prisons: healthy escapes occur regularly there. To face the modern prison is simply not to ignore that the relation reason-religion governs it: there is a sin, a guilt, an irreparable error, an exclusion, an education to live in conformity with morality, an individual to be adjusted, and, finally, the consecration of the just and the moral of the domain leading obedient and subjected citizens. The souls governed by the supernatural and the naturalized social mingle. If in the communist illusion there will be a world without incarcerations only in the future, in the anarchist fringe it is in the present that we face the prison and criminal law. Militancy organized by a higher consciousness and anarchist militancy as the inventor of subjective and anti-hierarchical practices face each other in this field of resistance. The steamroller, as we know, is somewhere else. Criminal reformers (liberal and conservative) declare without shame to this day that prison is useless, that it is a school for delinquents, and a space for additional penalties with criminal and economic negotiations in continu4

Edson Passetti

ous illegalism, further penalizing the family, and spreading stigmas. But they do not give up on the prison. They find a new philanthropic figure in the application of alternative penalties and community service provisions for crimes considered “light,” such as the ideal and real reduction of the prison building and the realization of zero tolerance. The effect was expected, even if criminological discourse claimed the opposite: more criminalizable conducts and new penalties to be carried out in the open, involving, in certain cases, the very ones condemned doing the monitoring of others. Critical criminology does not account for this effect. In fact, it responds to neoliberal rationality through its generic argument about class justice. More high security prisons, the shared management between the penitentiary administration and non-governmental organizations and, most surprisingly, prison management with political-business prisoner organizations have emerged. All these developments go through and often come from juvenile prisons governed by penalties euphemistically called socio-educational measures in Brazil. Incarcerations expand, penalties increase, and private torments do not end. Nonetheless, free individuals, whether democrats or not, want more punishments in an incessant and overwhelming fight against offenders, harassers, delinquents, transgressors, disruptors, the inventive (os inventivos), and the anti-normative (os anti-normativos) by means of so-called moderate and monitored conduct against impunities. For the purpose of this argument, before prison and criminal law we are bound to morality. Prison in the Judeo-Christian cultural tradition is not external to us, and it is impossible to delimit one

5

Penal Abolitionism: An Anarchist Perspective From Brazil

inside and the other outside it. As Foucault put it, prison is the image of terror. In a nutshell: we’re all stuck! Are we? Penal abolitionism is not a utopia. It emerged from the 1968 event, which conservatives and moderates cry out to be forgotten. Penal abolitionism maintains that each infraction should be seen as a problem situation. From end to end, this claim directly confronts criminal law, its economy of penalties and supposed universal validity, to show that it is selective and that punishments only hinder the profusion of practices of liberty. Punishments hinder these practices by seeking to accommodate them in dominations based on representation, on the continuity of more or less violent exploitations in moral adjustments. A problem situation is one where two or more are confronted with an event between forces that are not equal and a loss occurs. It concerns what can be settled between those involved without being subjected to an inquiry, to the theater of a court, to a penalty, where wills are always abducted by those who speak for those involved (the lawyers and the technicians) and a higher authority (the judge), mediated or not by a jury that follows procedures regarding the evidence and the morality of conventional conduct (culpable or willful). Penal abolitionists have gone beyond the limits of criminology, and have taken it to an inventive place by listing possibilities. In his brief work, the radical Dutch jurist Louk Hulsman avoided accommodating the rhetorical critique of criminology to criminal law, to morality, and to the vicissitudes in the conjuncture.3 Hulsman sought to stop criminal language and its punitive power by suggesting the introduction of the principle of civil law conciliation to scale the solutions to each problematic situation. He elaborated possible models for resolutions of 6

Edson Passetti

a simple problem situation (conciliation between parties, compensation to a party injured by the State) or more complex ones (education and therapy such as youth education for freedom and not for liberation, circumstantial release, adjustments to the rules through rewards), thereby avoiding sentences and an economy of penalties. In considering each case as a singular case, which cancels out the ontology of crime and the economy of penalties, the resolution of a problem situation promotes a general follow-up of each case in common agreement between those involved and the authorities. Yes, to put an end to criminal law, abolitionists (who do not defend “socially accepted cells” and restorative justice) resort to civil law where there is no defendant and enforce the principle of conciliation. In a nutshell, penal abolitionism aims to stop the effects of surveillance and punishment derived from modern criminal law and from prison and other repressive institutions that make up the carceral archipelago. For restorative justice, however, punishment remains normal and designed to punish more and better, in a style consistent with neoliberal rationality. For this very reason, restorative justice is connected with the most varied forms of punishment outside conventional incarcerations, characterizing what I call the elastification (elastificação) of prisons. The penal abolitionism instituted by Hulsman does not want to be a school, but only to situate the possible, since there is already a society without penalties (and practices that precede, obviously, any philosophical statement), in which the effects of a problem situation are agreed upon between those involved without the need for the police or court. But if there is a lateral need for the equation between forces, there is noth7

Penal Abolitionism: An Anarchist Perspective From Brazil

ing better than counting on the horizontalization of these knowledge authorities dispensed from the aforementioned hierarchies. But that alone is not enough. It is necessary to simply introduce the principle of civil law, conciliation. With that done, there is no more place for criminal law. This is a struggle and not a dispute for rights, because struggling for rights in our society is always a struggle for life! We need to separate ourselves from the prison that governs our subjectivities. It is a question of considering penal abolitionism as a heterotopia of journey, and not as a utopia, to the extent that it also intercepts prison in morality and produces a twist in subjectivities. Otherwise, there will always be someone to ask: what to put in place of the prison? There is no place to be filled, but rather it is about how to produce and occupy the vacuum. Dealing with a problem situation nowadays involves stopping police stations, speeding up procedures, and locating offenders, victims, prosecutors, lawyers, technicians, and judges in a horizontal relationship. It is trying to find a response path for each case without the use of prison or personal or electronic monitoring. Addressing a problem situation implies removing the violent sequestration of the bodies involved in this situation. It also seeks to compensate the victim and principally reduce the costs for the state of the penal system (which would be enviable to neoliberal rationality, but it prefers the continuation of the incarcerations because this is also its moral income). The problem situation is only about the special event that involved persons and their response path, which definitely entails the closure of prisons.

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And what about problem situations that do not fit the models proposed by Hulsman? It was in the direction of this last question that the anarchist abolitionists of the Nu-Sol (Center of Anarchist Sociability) began to discuss the response path. For Nu-Sol, however, it is not a matter of applying models, but of finding answers in the course of the conversation that indicate the solution in progress to stop the infraction without resorting to any punitive measures. Accompanying Foucault, the construction of models, as Hulsman proposes, is worrisome in that it makes possible another dangerous form of power relations directed most likely by pedagogues, psychologists, psychopedagogues, and psychiatrists. It allows for the composition of a new productive ensemble of substitutive truth that does not at all guarantee the power of freedom among those involved. And all those who experience the solution of the problem situation are involved. A response path suggests follow-ups, comings and goings, revisions, surprises, a way of dealing with each case by each one involved in it. If for Hulsman the central question is criminal law and prisons, for Nu-Sol, with its anarchist penal abolitionism, the main issue is punishment. The problem situation and the response path are not restricted to the penal system but precede and succeed it. They are in relations. And it is in this way that anarchisms construct these heterotopias of journey. For capitalism, its faith and fulfillment depend on the belief in utopias, on the government of thought that inhibits inventive practices, insurgent knowledges, and disturbing statements. The neoliberal utopia of capitalism is founded on merit, competence, and competition, making the subject human capital and a social agent of law, an innovator that governs through 9

Penal Abolitionism: An Anarchist Perspective From Brazil

the dissemination of the democratic practices of the political regime for mutual relations. Committed to increasing punishments through criminal law, reforms, and cooperation, this innovator governs others toward peace, or rather, toward a culture of peace as a resilient subject. For anarchist penal abolitionists, as a potent minority, it is of interest to bring about the solution of the problem situation in any event. It is well known that we live in an era of neoliberal rationality based on the end-of-impunity slogan, which generates more selectivity in the system, the bureaucratization of punitive decisions with bodies of mediation and small-claims courts, calls for the active participation of communities in the management of penalties for minor crimes, the spectacularization of restorative justice, and the production of jobs for technicians in the follow-up of penalties in the open. Finally, in re-establishing the infraction as delinquency through the choice of the criminal, neoliberal rationality strengthens austere institutions and practices of punishing more and better. This rationality broadens the theory of broken windows that grounds zero tolerance, and cunningly maintains a strong relationship with the strand of minimal criminal law, since rather than reducing penalties, it works as a further derivation. Even with the introduction of tolerance and new normalizations of conduct by the profusion of minority rights, punishment remains constant and untouchable. It is the terminal that guarantees the more or less violent flows of power relations. For neoliberal rationality and its democratic flows, to end punishment is something unbearable. Punishment is what guarantees rights, norms, and laws. Without being simplistic, exploitation and domination seem untouchable. To deal with 10

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them is simple, as the penal abolitionists exposed. Or, as Foucault pointed out, after exhausting what we know about exploitation and domination, the question becomes ethical. It involves the ungovernable, practices of freedom, the confrontation with the unbearable, and simply the revolt. I once heard during a talk that it is very easy to be a penal abolitionist. It is not. If it were, penal abolitionists of the first uprising from 1968 would not have accommodated minimal criminal law. The executors of restorative justice would not have used the penal abolitionist mask. Many would not see penal abolitionism as proselytizing, as a utopian discourse, as an anarchist provocation, or as so many other pejorative words and phrases that accompany its rejection. The penal abolitionist discourse invaded criminal law, boosted its current reforms, and will continue to push criminology to ruin its syntax. No, it is not easy to practice penal abolitionism in view of the constant rise of prison reformers and knowledges about the nature of punishment, its naturalness and its arrogance. The joy of penal abolitionism is of Foucauldian interest. We are no longer in the time of the Prisons Information Group (GIP) and its interventions. Today, prisons, like the Brazilian ones, are under the shared government of the prison administration and illegalisms in their interiors. These illegalisms are tolerated and directed to contain the revolts against the prison, to stimulate the competition between organized factions, and to adjust the prison population to its moral entrepreneurial rationality, with its own rapid and brutal exercises in justice, with macabre connections to families and communities. We are in Rio de Janeiro! In other words, there was an adjustment to a new standard in which families of the incarcerated connect 11

Penal Abolitionism: An Anarchist Perspective From Brazil

the outside and inside of the prison. We are no longer in the time of conventional criminal law. It dismembered into minimum criminal law, which works as a constitutive part of punishing more and better counting on technicians, community, and even offenders (all cloaked in restorative justice practices). The obsession with the end of impunities, including the corruption of politicians, opened the space for a new selectivity in punishment through plea bargains to “criminals” who do not offend society, which is to say, entrepreneurs, managers, and politicians. It also produced a proliferation of alternative sentences and measures of community service, all of which revolve around the remote possibility of forgiveness by the penal system, penalty reduction programs resulting from partnerships at work, or education with organized civil society. The microfascism expressed in the motto “a good criminal is a dead criminal” stimulates the proliferation of militias and, consequently, its direct link with illegalisms. Rio de Janeiro! The prison serves to produce income for corporate illegalisms. Rio de Janeiro, São Paulo, Brazil! NOTES 1

Heliana de Barros Conde Rodrigues. Ensaios sobre Michel Foucault no Brasil: Presença, efeitos, resonâncias (Rio de Janeiro: Lamparina, 2016).

2

Michel Foucault, Vigiar e punir: Nascimento da prisão, trans. Lígia M. Pondé Vassallo (Petrópolis: Vozes, 1977).

3

Louk Hulsman and Beradete de Celis, Penas perdidas: O sistema penal em questão, trans. Maria Lucia Kara (Niterói: Luam, 1993); Louk Hulsman, “Conversas com um abolicionista do system penal: Entrevista com Louk Hulsman,” Verve 1 (2002): 106-121; Louk Hulsman, “Conversas com um abolicionista do system penal (parte 2): Entrevista com Louk Hulsman,” Verve 2 (2002): 186-209, https://revistas.pucsp.

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Edson Passetti

br/index.php/verve/article/viewFile/4619/3209; Louk Hulsman, “Temas e conceitos numa abordagem abolicionista criminal” Verve 3 (2003): 190-219, https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/verve/article/ view/4942/3492; Louk Hulsman and Jacqueline Bernat de Celis, “Aposta por uma teoria da abolição do sistema penal,” Verve 8 (2005): 246-275, https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/verve/article/ view/5088/3616; Louk Hulsman, “Abolicionismo penal e deslegitimação do sistema carcerário: Uma conversação com Louk Hulsman,” Verve 21 (2012): 134-153, https://revistas.pucsp.br/index.php/ verve/article/view/30723/21250, Anamaria Aguiar e Sales, “Louk Hulsman e o abolicionismo penal,” (PhD diss., Pontifical Catholic University of São Paulo, 2011), https://tede2.pucsp.br/bitstream/ handle/3303/1/Anamaria%20Aguiar%20e%20Salles.pdf.

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