Corpus: the political life

Abstract

Ferréz’s latest book, Ninguém é inocente em São Paulo (Nobody is Innocent in São Paulo), resumes the discussion about guilt and innocence, which allows us to remit to Giorgio Agamben’s reading of Primo Levis’ gray zone in Remnants of Auschwitz. The Italian philosopher refers to this gray zone as a zone of irresponsibility, where there is no distinction between victims and hangmen: the oppressor becomes oppressed and the oppressed becomes oppressor. This zone of indistinction doesn’t allow the difference between exception and rule to appear; it is the exact space of the permanent state of exception in which we live. Not by chance we find in Ferréz’s book a short story called “Terminal (Nazista)”, in which we can’t figure if it’s about a bus station or a Nazi death camp: “I tried to look directly to the eyes, those who didn’t have their heads down, didn’t have ocular globes”. What remains to us, then, is to search for an ethical and, therefore, political path to defeat the constant attempt to naturalize the inhuman, the horror and the catastrophe. Agamben indicates, as a way out, the profanation and Jean-Luc Nancy insists on the thesis of the contact: both forms put the body at the core of political affairs. A politics that must not be founded by the politicization of bare life, which keeps the relation of sovereignty, that is, permits the capture and abandonment, the inclusion-exclusion, but, on the contrary, a politics founded in the political potency contained in the center of bare life, because this life is politics itself and has as objective the search of happiness.