THE BRAZILIAN COLONIAL EXCEPTION: THE BIOPOLITICAL CAMP AND THE SENZALA

Abstract

There are two pillars that guide the reflections of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben in the beginning of the twenty first century, with the publication of Stato di eccezione and its anchorage in the project Homo sacer: in the first instance, the state of exception became a common technique of government in our political age, at least since its laboratorial use by the totalitarian events of the twenty century; secondly, the exception is the extemporal and originary element of juridical and political constitution. As a ripe fruit of the exceptional dispositive, we can observe that the biopolitical campaign has historically created special spaces for the recruitment of the human life, those we denominate camps, those spaces where everything is again possible. The following article has the objective of investigating the hypothesis if the senzala of the Brazilian colonial period could be considered an ancestral of the biopolitical camp. So nonsense as to suppose that the biopolitical camp arises only in our century, is to suppose that the slavery do not deserve any analysis anymore, is to suppose that slavery is not noteworthy, inclusive for the philosophical look.