FROM DOROTHY STANG TO MARIELLE FRANCO

MURDERS OF HUMAN RIGHTS DEFENDERS IN BRAZIL FROM A DIALOGUE BETWEEN EMMANUEL LEVINAS AND GIORGIO AGAMBEN

Abstract

This article analyzes the situation of violence practiced against human rights defenders in Brazil from two emblematic cases: the murders of the American missionary Dorothy Mae Stang and the city councilwoman Marielle Franco. It intends, using the phenomenological method, to make an approximation between the works of Emmanuel Levinas and Giorgio Agamben, in order to re-signify the murders of the two human rights defenders. The problem that guides the investigation can be thus summarized: to what extent does murder, in Levinas's perspective, represent the complete annulment of the other by the fact of violence, whereas, in Agamben's view, it represents, in so far as it is unpunished, the apex of the process of continuous caesuras that results in the production of naked life (homo sacer)? It is hypothesized that the death of Dorothy Stang represents, in the context of struggles for the right to land in Brazil, a total lack of responsibility for the other, forming a ‘celebrated injustice”, according to Levinas; Marielle Franco's death, because of its representativeness in the racial and gender equality movement, represents the consolidation of a process of biopolitical caesuras between zoé and bios, that is, between politically qualified lives and lives with impunity, which characterizes the dimension biopolitics with which the Brazilian society is historically structured, based on a rigid social hierarchy.