with Denise Pimenta (PPGAS / USP) and João Felipe Gonçalves (USP)
mediation: Renato Sztutman (USP)
[live stream on Friday's YouTube channel]
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_7nMNIs862VNf2AgrJPPrg
In one of his recent texts on the Covid-19 pandemic, the philosopher Paul B. Preciado exhorts us, in his words, to “learn from the virus”, underlining how it reveals and reinforces “dominant forms of biopolitical and necropolitical management” of the population. Another philosopher, Ailton Krenak, summons us to postpone the end of the world, admitting nature as an “immense multitude of forms”, over which humanity, by placing itself as a “measure of things”, underestimates and runs over; “thousands of people who insist on staying out of this civilized dance, of technique, of planet control (...) are removed from the scene, due to epidemics, poverty, hunger, directed violence "(2019). Starting from these provocations, on the first Friday of the Month 2020 we want to think together from the figure of the virus, trying to deepen discussions about the social impacts of this specific pandemic and other epidemics, in addition to reflecting on the place of the notion of virus in contemporary social thought. In this virtual meeting between different anthropological perspectives, we intend to cross reflect on some of the key concepts and concepts of our discipline, such as: sociality, relationship, social markers of difference, body, substance, health e / disease, visible / invisible, human / non-human, power, politics, State. Thus, we seek to think: what effects can epidemics or the spread of diseases have in different social contexts? How does the figure of the virus, seen as a symptom of the “mode of governance of late liberalism” (Povinelli, 2016), agency past and future? How does it relate to state power and how does it design new grammars for the production of bodies? What place do these diseases occupy in the minds of the Amerindian peoples, who have for centuries overcome devastating scenarios of contact and contagion by non-indigenous diseases?