What is happening in Brazil?

In historical and sociological terms, what is happening is the rupture of a pact of governance between the oligarchies and the political parties that represented the popular strata and left thinking.

In political and immediate terms, there is a process of usurpation of the state by these oligarchies. And this is accompanied by a dynamics of social subjectivity based on the hate against the popular classes and, mainly, against the PT – which represented them, politically, in the last decades. A hate often irrational and fuelled by false news and post-truths. A hatred that has been generating a pattern of behaviour similar to fascism.

But the most interesting thing, in my view, is to perceive the intersubjective dimension that involves this historical moment and the political life of Brazil – and this, because of my professional competences – is what I would like to talk about in this blog, focusing on exploring the Brazilian intersubjectivity.

In a way, I have the impression that, with the ongoing political, economic and social crisis, Brazil is, effectively and perhaps on the poorest way, rediscovering itself: rediscovering its past, history and updating its conservative and prejudiced essence. The country is meeting again its founding violence and exposing, in a clear way, the class hatred that, albeit concealed, has nourished its social formation.

A unique moment, therefore, propitious to understand what Brazil really is and the reasons why we have always tried to hide our historical conflicts.

Above all, I find it interesting that, with the experience of the present, all the great myths that guided the idea of ​​Brazil, or rather the formal and agreed discourse on the "national" identity, are overturned. It is as if the extreme violence of slavery returned, to deny, on the one hand, the erudite markers of Brazilian identity – the theses of patriarchalism, cordial man, anthropophagy, cultural synthesis, the union between house and street, patrimonialism – as well as the popular and banal markers of this identity – the themes of "jeitinho", the praise of miscegenation, the ideas of harmony, generosity, eroticism.

All these markers, between scholars and popular, as a whole, were always at the service of the dissimulation of founding violence in Brazilian society. The always present and generative violence. Gerative in the sense that it re-does, it re-produces, as a negative dialectic, though concealed in the obscurity of its veils of representation, throughout history.

What is happening is, in short, the unveiling of the profound violence of our social formation, as if the country were stripped of its conventional and misguided garments taken by the pulsion to retrieve its essences.

The verb undo is not without purpose. Apparently, Brazil is undoing itself.

But maybe that's not it at all. Maybe he's just meeting up again. Revealing itself, overcoming itself.

Offering a opportunity to be accountable with the past.