Year: 2026
Type: article
Abstract: This article aims to analyze the biopolitical and necropolitical inscriptions in the speeches of former President Bolsonaro during the Covid-19 pandemic, proposing the theoretical category of Brazilian-style Thanatobiopolitical Inscription. Using the archeogenealogical method, the study mobilizes the categories of discursive formation, statement, archive, biopolitics (Foucault, 1996; 1999; 2005), and necropolitics (Mbembe, 2018), in articulation with the analysis of a corpus of presidential declarations between March and December 2020 (Poder360). The results indicate that such statements operated as discursive practices of naturalizing death, minimizing the health crisis, and displacing state responsibility, configuring a political rationality that, under the mask of liberal capitalism, instituted a discursive and institutional making die. It is concluded that the Brazilian-style Thanatobiopolitical Inscription does not constitute a mere juxtaposition of biopolitics and necropolitics, but rather an original theoretical contribution that describes its own regime of enunciability, in which power asserts itself as the defense of the economy, but materializes in the selective administration of death, corroding the Foucauldian logic of caring for life and radicalizing necropolitical sovereignty. In this sense, the theory is anchored in the very discursive formation of discursive formation, that is, in the ability to interrogate statements from within their own regimes of production, showing that Bolsonaro’s denialism not only occupies a discursive position but also establishes a new historical a priori that reconfigures the limits of the sayable and the thinkable in the field of public health and the politics of death in Brazil.
Source: Revista Fim do Mundo
Author: Adriano Menino De Macêdo Júnior
Institution: Universidade do Estado do Rio Grande do Norte
Topic: Foucault, Power, and Ethics
Subfield: Sociology and Political Science
Field: Social Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: diamond
OpenAlex ID: W7140217325
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