Let's start with the central issue: sovereignty. The latter first and foremost defines control, whether consented or not, over bodies. It is no coincidence that, of the three monopolies of the modern State, that of force is the one that guarantees the others (the legal norm and taxes). Society brings together bodies before, metaphorically, bringing together souls. In a democratic and law-oriented field, control is accepted voluntarily. Individuals and groups allow limits on their movements in exchange for their own free movement. Political power defines rules for everyone's actions. Even the simplest walk on the sidewalks presupposes the sovereignty that marks what is allowed or denied to bodies. The individual who goes in the opposite direction to that established by customs and runs over others commits an act of insubordination that, repeated and exasperated by others of the same character, can overthrow a government. We usually don't pay attention to the smallest gestures of our muscular strength. But they are connected to others and others in a chain that requires discipline and respect for sanctioned forms of behavior.
Marcel Mauss still has a lot to teach us about bodies and gestures. [1] Bodies synthesize desires, pains, emotions, everything that in classical philosophy is called “passion”. Desires are first born in the body and, repeated or reinforced there, they pass to a state of refinement that we call “soul”. The pains, the emotions, the feelings follow the same path. No reader, no! The accumulation of notions elaborated by D'Holbach, Diderot, Hobbes or Locke is not repeated here. Aristotle's contribution comes before us, explicitly assumed by Thomist scholasticism: Nihil est in intellect quod non prius fuerit in sensu. Spinoza would say: the soul is a metaphor for the body, not the body a metaphor for the soul. A government that well manages individual bodies guarantees them freedom of movement, as long as it is not to the collective detriment or harm of other individuals. We have the right to live and orient ourselves wherever we want, but the same right must be guaranteed to our equals. If we do not have this right or if only some of us enjoy it, sad, reactive, resentful passions are born in our bodies.
Analyzes of the electoral campaign and the Bolsonaro government insist on highlighting grotesque speeches and acts carried out by ministers and supporters of the president in Congress, churches and streets. The chancellor's insults about the USA, the Western world, climate storms, and the alleged communism that has infiltrated the press are notorious. The delusional speeches of Minister Damaris, the minister dedicated to education, the president's speeches on matters of custom and ideology form a delusional system that deserves analysis. In opposition sectors, such nonsense is echoed, always followed by a smile or laugh from liberals or parties on the left.
I believe that such a procedure is a danger to life in democracy. Let us always remember that during the 1964 dictatorship, the tyrannical Costa e Silva was the subject of jokes in opposition to the regime. I remember some of them. “This math problem can be solved by any boy.” So resolve it president. “Call a boy!” Someone knocks on the door of the room in the hotel where the dictator is staying. “Between!” he says. Oh! The president's favorite deodorant brand? “O IOIO” (in place of 1010). At the same time that many laughed, Institutional Act number 5 was created and edited. The laughter turned yellow. I don't need to mention how much Hitler, before coming to power, was the laughing stock of German liberals, conservatives, socialists and communists.
I return to bodies and resentment. Studies on that passion have long been published in Europe and the USA. The classic by Elias Canetti, who studies the modern masses, could have the subtitle “resentment”. It is a passion dissected by names like Nietzsche and Max Scheler. In their writings, which do not agree on all aspects of the phenomenon, the two thinkers show how much ressentiment highlights a powerless hostility of the weak against the strong. He's all about revenge. In fact, an important study by Antonio Candido on revenge refers to Nietzsche's thought, via Gramsci, not by chance. [2] When discussing the Count of Monte Cristo, Candido follows the intricacies of a struggle that generates hatred and religions of hate. Resentment and revenge are bathed in the basins of vanquished impotence, from which leak the concepts of an enemy to be crushed in every way. Resentment can be combined with indignation at injustice, but it should not be confused with it. [3]
The current victories of the extreme right, in the world and in Brazil, can be understood in connection with resentment, revenge, individual or collective attacks of hatred. Dani Rodrik, professor of International Political Economy at Harvard, writing about the “politics of resentment” says that twenty years ago it was already possible to predict that the carelessness of non-populist politicians in the face of social or economic inequalities helped give rise to governments like Trump's. and peers in Europe and around the world. To explain this fact, Rodrik analyzes the so-called “globalization”. Whenever governments gave greater importance to international economic links, waves of nationalism exploded among those harmed by liberal sectors. To face the bleeding of countries' wealth, two strategies emerged in pre-Nazi Germany, for example.
The first, that of socialists and communists, followed social changes. The second, the Nazi, emphasized the national question. In your book Has Globalization Gone Too Far? [4], Rodrik indicates that the internationalization of markets for goods, services and capital opens the gap between professionally integrated and qualified cosmopolitan groups – and thus achieve advantages – and the rest of society. Two types of politics are exacerbated: the identity choice around nationality, ethnicity, religion and another between low and high incomes, which returns to the question of classes.
Given the change in leftist struggles, which greatly attenuate the class struggle to collaborate with capital and the parliamentary model, the new shocks are not mainly operated with classist strategies. The shrinking of jobs due to technical innovations weakens unions and parties more loyal to the class struggle. In the void established between the privileged who still have access to jobs and the mass of those without the means to survive (a huge, monstrous and unprepared reserve army, without even moving their hands to their mouths) rise the demagogues of the extreme right. And then we have the well-known slogans: “no job?”. The Chinese's fault. Do you suffer from crime? The fault of the Mexicans who invade our land. Terrorism? The cause lies with Muslims. Weak economy? It's the northeasterners' fault and so on. And we have the essential fact: demagogues bring to light the resentment of those who are truly excluded or who imagine themselves threatened by the “other”.
Anyone who has ever dedicated themselves to thinking about the experience of resentment has certainly read Nietzsche's writings in Genealogy of Morals. [5] But if you also analyzed Max Scheler's book [6], the volume by Marc Ferro [7] and reached Peter Sloterdijk's book, Anger and Time [8] knows the intricacies of the problem. Resentment, warns Ferro, highlights how flawed the chronological division between what was and what is is: in it, the past is more present than the present because the persecuted, if he wins one day, becomes the most vengeful persecutor. This is the core theme of the book mass and power written by Elias Canetti: the masses are divided into hordes of flight and persecution. One moment they attack the “enemy”, but soon the situation is reversed, they are seen and persecuted as enemies. In today's social networks things can be more complex: the chasing horde can be chased at the same time they are stalking, simply by leaving one application and moving on to another.
A resentful person, according to Scheler, is someone who injects poison into themselves, which makes them lose their sense of values and the strength of their judgment. With resentment comes the sinister court of envy, jealousy, malice, baseness that make social life a permanent impossibility. Gilles Deleuze summarizes: the resentful person is a painful being, “the sclerosis or hardening of his conscience, the rapidity with which all excitement stiffens and freezes in him, the weight of the traits that invade him are many cruel sufferings”. In the subject affected by the disease of resentment, the worst thing is not his evil, but his drive towards depreciation. He wants “others” to be bad, he needs the badness attributed to others to feel like he is good. “You are bad, therefore I am good”. [9]
Far-right policies use and abuse resentment. Trump is the result and epitome of such a practice. [10] No Forum for a new global governance the topic of resentment was dealt with broadly, although not in depth. [11] Joséphine Staron, in a thought-provoking writing on the subject, also cites Spinoza to demonstrate the strength of that passion when shared socially. What would resentment be from a Spinoza perspective? It is a “collective desiderium, that is, sadness, impotence and deep resentment in the face of an unsatisfied desire. Resentment, whether individual or collective, is exalted in the desire for revenge against the oppressor (real or presumed), and is reinforced in the feeling of impotence to overthrow the established order. The individual of ressentiment considers himself an object of contempt by others, an eternal victim of those others. It is characteristic of the resentful person to attribute the responsibility for their state – impotence – to real or supposed causes, scapegoats. The expression of resentment in Western societies tends to focus on antagonisms between supportive groups, when the latter become, as symbols, responsible for the injustice suffered”.
Staron does not cite the scholium of proposition 32 placed in the book Third of Ethics mentioned by her. Here it is: “we see, then, how the nature of men is ordinarily disposed in such a way that they feel compassion for those who suffer evils and envy those who are doing well, and this (...) with all the greater hatred the more they love the thing they love. imagine being in the possession of others. We see, moreover, that from the same property of human nature it follows that men are merciful and also envious and ambitious. If we want to consult experience lastly, we will see that it teaches us all this, especially if we focus on the first years of life. Because experience shows that children, because of their constantly oscillating body, laugh or cry simply by seeing others laugh or cry and want to imitate everything they see being done by others, and, finally, they want for themselves everything they imagine delights others because, in effect, the images of things (...) are the very affections of the human body, that is, ways in which the human body has to be affected by external causes and be willing to do one thing or another.” [12]
The human hordes, trapped under the tutelage maintained by demagogues, the so-called leaders, are fickle, envious, ambitious, resentful. But they do not summarize the people in their entirety. In the people, sad passions such as resentment and happy ones coexist, which reduce “as far as possible, the empire of sadness, fear and hatred”. [13] Manifestations of resentment can begin in individuals, groups, parties, churches or any other collective. But if they are not managed and do not undergo relevant mitigation, they take over entire populations, making political and social coexistence impossible. The crowd is fearful, if it does not fear. But the hate-filled hordes remain in resentment awaiting revenge. And such negative affect is a powerful synthesizer of forces that can explode in moments of crisis and also elections.
Let's talk about Mr. Bolsonaro and the alleged nonsense said or committed by him and his ministers. Since before 2018, we have seen a barrage of slogans directed at resentful hordes. And every step of the Bolsonaro campaign was carried out with those masses in mind. Let's start with the gun sign, imposed even on children and adopted by priests, pastors, judges, teachers, military personnel, journalists. Since the times of the dictatorship, but especially after it, fascist preaching based on the Salim Maluf model has cast the shadow of insecurity on citizenship. Yes, there are gangs that operate on the sidelines and against the law. But Salim Maluf nurtured as much as he could, with powerful help from the “police” media on radio and TV, the feeling of abandonment in the face of outlaws. The bars, Maluf and his followers proclaimed, should lock up criminals. But the “right” citizens were trapped in their homes. Repeated propaganda thrived. The loss of security, half real and half imaginary, generated resentment and the desire for revenge. The latter was satisfied in part by the Malufista cry “a Rota na rua” and by massacres such as Carandiru, as well as other mass murders such as the one that occurred on the Castelo Branco highway. Let us add the dragnets on the beaches and squares, especially in Rio de Janeiro, the fear of the violence that prevails in the favelas (generated by the Rio and Brazilian elites), the robberies of tellers in banks and fine or not so fine restaurants, always hammered in the eyes and heard by the police media. The ground was ripe for Bolsonaro, with his weapon-shaped hand to capture resentment and the desire for revenge. In government, he follows the same song directed at those who elected him. It's not foolishness, but exploitation sine ira and studio from the resentment of hordes.
In terms of customs, the choice of Minister Damaris was also not foolish. Until the end of the dictatorship, government brutality was combined with the predominance of men at home and at work. The male was absolute master in his castle, as the dictators ruled the country without restraint. The understanding still prevailed in most courts: if the woman did not maintain marital fidelity, the husband has the right to “wash his honor”. Murderers were acquitted on a large scale. Homosexuals may have been tolerated as long as their lives were kept secret. If they revealed their choice through clothing, language, gestures, they could be killed instantly or arrested. After the dictatorship, with the Constitution of 88, women, through hard struggles, and homosexuals, transgender people and others achieved some protection under the law, being able to escape at least in part the murder committed by “good men”. Even so, cases of murderous attacks on women and homosexuals continue to this day. Laws like Maria da Penha are disobeyed by judges in defiance of the constitutional order. But advances in human rights are seen as attacks on the “normal” family, the danger of dissolving “traditional values”, the threat of turning every boy into a gay and every girl into a lesbian. Hence the effectiveness of slogans such as “boys wear blue, girls pink” and grotesque formulas such as “dick bottle” adopted by Bolsonaro and his internet propagandists, reiterated by the gestures and speeches of the minister who should take care of human rights.
In England, there were, in the past, protests in the name of the freedom to punish one's own slave. In Brazil, when prohibited by law from persecuting and killing women, homosexuals, Indians, blacks, quilombolas, settlers, the “good men”, located in the rich sectors and middle classes, felt threatened and resentful, they lost their “ rights.” Revenge came in the choice of the “myth”. This, therefore, simply repeats the same message to its followers: it is permitted to kill in the name of patriarchy and the Christian religion. Not by chance, the government dismantled the organization that tried to curb torture on the streets, in prisons and in homes. The authorization to kill, encouraged by the decree on the flexibility of the use of weapons, is a repeated message to the resentful public that will take revenge on everything and everyone.
In rural areas, measures that protected the environment have always been seen by large landowners as threats to their profits. Uniting the campaign against the left and against defenders of ecology, Bolsonaro appeases the resentment of farmers and rentiers who felt cornered by the actions of priests (Pastoral da Terra, among others), pastors (rare), politicians and defenders of the landless. The invasions of unproductive properties were felt like stabs in the back of the “legitimate owners”, even if the lands had been the result of ancient or very recent land grabbing. Electing the avenger was a way of directing resentment, now legally armed, to protect sacrosanct property. The permission, by the Ministry of Agriculture, of the terrible mass of pesticides, serves to appease the resentment of landowners. They were partially satisfied, even with the threats, due to Itamaraty's clumsy international policy, of losing crops refused by the European Union, China and Russia.
I end with the measures proposed by the president regarding driver's licenses, negative points at Detran, etc. Yes, there is a fine industry practiced by administrative institutions. The signage is defective or prepared to catch vehicles as if they were flies in a spider's web, a distorted use of the profit brought by fines – instead of traffic education, the money is spent on administrative and other services – without transparency. Almost never does an appeal to judgment by the officials responsible for the service result in fines being corrected, even if an oversight failure is proven. Thus, each penalty imposed on drivers is felt in their body like a painful stab, a perennial injustice. Let's imagine how many fines affect how many vehicle owners per day and we will have the enormous mass of resentful people to whom the president responds with authorized revenge.
So, the nonsense of the president and his supporters has a caricatured side, yes. But they shouldn't provoke laughter. With similar experiments, training in leading masses – every day more numerous, resentful and thirsty for revenge – could lead Brazil to regimes of hordes in which Parliament will be swept away and Justice locked up, as a presidential offspring said, with a jeep and a cable. The Holocaust began with small horde movements, led by the SA. It ended as we know. When unfortunately your friend or friends argue with a resentful supporter of the government, pay particular attention to their face and body stiffened, ready to attack the “enemies”. What he says has little relevance because it comes from the factory of lies, fake news, disseminated by “social networks” or even by the “respectable” press. The other day a person like this repeated that “the truth is that public universities don’t do research”. When it was replied that this statement was not true, the face distorted, the body tensed and what is called “physical effort” almost occurred. The lie that came out of the lips was enhanced by the passionate, resentful body. I immediately remembered Seneca's beautiful treatise on anger: if we are angry, let us look in the mirror and see how ugly and hideous our body becomes. Anger is the politics of the resentful. [14] If we are unable to limit the resentful bodies of those who unconditionally support the government on the extreme right, soon sovereignty will not belong to the people, but to the hordes of persecution that already move their paws with the militias. Marielle Franco's death was a warning. Let us know how to capture the message of death.
[2] - https://archive.org/stream/DaVingancaAntonioCandido./Da%20Vinganca%20-%20Antonio%20Candido._djvu.txt
[3] - A. Grandjean and F. Guénard: Le ressentiment, social passion (Rennes, PUR, 2012).
[4] - Columbia University Press, 1997.
[5] - Second Treatise, in aphorisms 10 and 11. In a broad sense, Nietzsche says that noble morals are born from a yes to oneself, the slave says no to a stranger, another, a non-self. And so nothing in such morality is creative.
[6] - Max Scheler: Resentment. Translated by William W. (Holdheim Lewis New York: Schocken).
[7] - Le ressentiment dans l´histoire (Paris, Odile Jacob)
[8] - Zorn und Zeit (Libella/Maren Sell).
[9] - G. Deleuze, Nietzsche et la philosophie, (Paris, PUF, 1962), pp.133-136.
[10] - Dudas, Jeffrey R.: The cultivation of Resentment, treaty rights and the new Right (Stanford, Stanford University Press).
[11] - Forum pour une nouvelle gouvernance mondiale. Le ressentiment et la nouvelle gouvernance mondiale.
[12] - “If we imagine that someone enjoys something that only he can enjoy, we will try to make it so that he no longer enjoys it” (Ethics, 3, prop. 32). "Videmus itaque cum hominum natura plerumque ita comparatum esse ut eorum quibus male est, misereantur et quibus bene est, invideant et (...) eo majore odio quo rem qua alium potiri imaginantur, magis amant. Videmus deinde ex eadem naturae humanoe proprietate ex qua sequitur homines esse misericordes, sequi etiam eosdem esse invidos et ambitiosos. Denique si ipsam experientiam consulere velimus, ipsam haec omnia docere experiemur praesertim si ad priores nostrae aetatis annos attenderimus. Nam pueros quia eorum corpus continuo veluti in aequilibrio est, ex hoc solo ridere vel flere experimur quod alios ridere vel flere vident et quicquid praeterea vident alios facere, id imitari statim cupiunt et omnia denique sibi cupiunt quibus alios delectari imaginantur; nimirum quia rerum imagines uti diximus sunt ipsae humani corporis affectiones sive modi quibus corpus humanum a causis externis afficitur disponiturque ad hoc vel illud agendum”. Cf. Joséphine Staron: Ressentiment et solidarité: les ressorts d´une articulation au fondement de l´ethos des communautés politiques.
[13] - Balibar, Etienne: “Ultimi barbarorum – Spinoza: the fear of the masses”, in Discourse Magazine
[14] - Cf. Ricardo Antonio Fidelis de Lima: De Ira de Seneca, translation, Introduction and Notes, USP, 2015 (master’s degree). In the Perseus Project.
