Racismo de estado e tanatopolítica: Sobre o paradoxo do nazismo em Michel Foucault e Giorgio Agamben

Abstract

This paper sets out to present the reflections of two contemporary philosophers, Michael Foucault and Giorgio Agamben, seeking to promote a parallel or even an analogy between two notions that permeate the works of these two authors. These notions consist in what Foucault called State Racism and in what Agamben named Thanatopolitics. The context as well as the object in which is effected that intent is the totalitarian politics of the Nazi State. Both authors understand the totalitarian phenomena from a biopolitical point of view. Nevertheless, in analyzing the National Socialist State, Foucault identifies in it a paradox though without examining in much profundity the imbrications that occurred there. On the other hand, Aganbem conceives such a paradox as pertaining to a way of doing politics which brings forth from its beginning the grounds that allowed the emerging of the phenomenon such as it appeared. Moreover, that way of doing politics has been identified by the authors as bringing within it both old elements, such as the glory and blood ideals, and new elements, such as eugenics. The blibliographic research developed here consisted basically in the reading of three works of the refered authors. Those works are, on one hand, Foucault’s Society Must Be Defended and The History of Sexuality I - The Will to Knowledge, and on the other, Agamben’s Homo Sacer: Sovereign Power and Bare Life.