The legitimation of death in authoritarian regimes The return of those who have not gone? a volta dos que não foram?

Abstract

Death accompanies the authoritarian regimes of yesterday and today, as a strategy of their modi oporandi and belief systems. The autocrat embodies in his person and promises a saving totality that separates the good from the bad, those who must live and those who must die. The category ‘necropolitics’ reveals a hermeneutic potential that allows us to look at contexts and authors from the past and present in a circular way. This reflection revisits these authors and uses their categories to shed light on current ultra-right-wing governments, with the immediate context being the government of Jair Messias Bolsonaro, which ended in 2022. The legitimisation of death expresses the political continuity between the authoritarian regimes of the past and the present with their violent saving logic. The incarnation of the saviour myth in history establishes the time and space of ruptures with institutional normalities when the parameter of life ceases to be the maxim on which morals and legal norms are based. The reflection will follow an inductive path: it starts from the observation of necropolitics as a practice of the government of then president Jair Bolsonaro, verifies the logic of violence and death on digital networks and exposes the hypothesis of the legitimisation of death by authoritarian regimes.