Vida nua e subcidadania: a construção social da desigualdade sob o paradigma da exceção

Abstract

Inequality as a mass phenomenon in peripheral countries, and on a lesser scale in central societies, would traditionally be understood, both in common sense and science, as a deviation, an abnormality of the system, whose aim is to promote equality and well-being of all, without distinction of color, gender, race, nationality, social status and sexual orientation. However, what we see from the reflections of the Brazilian sociologist Jessé Souza and the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, leads us to understand the promises of modernity as a legitimizing discourse of the various forms of inequality and the role that the law assumes in this project. Understanding about the production of sub-citizens, as well as the production of naked lives, as structural phenomena, starting from the reflections on the elements and the form of constitution of Western politics and morality, is perhaps the main point of convergence between the two authors. The reflections that the work covers expose the very legitimating effect of the different forms of social inequality and domination that democratic principles, such as the dignity of the human person, can generate, which, in the last instance, can be understood in both authors, from the relationship between man and animal, humanity and animality.