Racism and necropolitics: a debate between social theory and psychoanalysis

ABSTRACT

Taking Covid-19 Pandemic as a context and analyzer, this article discusses the historical links between racism and the medicalized management of the right to life and death in Brazil. It is based on the understanding that listening and clinical management of situations of psychological distress in the context of the medicalization of life (in Pandemic, and even outside it) necessarily imply making social criticism as well. To this end, we propose a debate that encapsulates clinical theory, the histories of social medicine and psychoanalysis in Brazil, and the concepts of bio and necropoli-tics. Our hypothesis is that if, on the one hand, on its arrival in Brazil, psychoanalysis was “co-opted” by a hygienist medical tradition (which for years polarized the way it was seen in our country), on the other, by its conceptual structure, by the initial counterpoint with Brazilian modernism, and by its current debate on segregation, this praxis can make explicit its anti-racist power and vocation. © 2020. All Rights Reserved.