random thoughts on brazilian politics

Two months ago, a small tempest brewed around the publication of political philosopher Vladmir Safatle's slim manifestic tome The Left that Doesn't Fear Speaking its Name.  The 80-page volume calls for a left that is based around popular and engaged democracy, and defined by the radical igalitarianism of all people. To this latter end, Saftle called for a "politics of indifference" with respect to social differences, where politics would not be invoked in the name of a group or identity, but in the demand for equality.  The "politics of indifference" proved to be quite controversial for the professor, and soon he found himself in a public dispute with Caetano Veloso, the famed tropicalia singer.  In a guest editorial in the Folha de São Paulo, Veloso wrote that Safatle's dismissal of identity politics was a rather unapologetic call to return to some of the bad habits of the old left, who put all their claims in terms of workers' struggle and was resentful of the needs of minorities.  Safatle's response six of staying firm and a half dozen of backtracking:  saying that what he was really driving at was a "post-identitarian politics, radically open to alterity," but where difference would not be legislated but be absorbed into wider horizon of demands for justice.

Perhaps I am too generous in my interpretation of what is clearly the most problematic part of Safatle's book.  In fact, Veloso and Safatle seem to be at impasse about how to democratize society.  Drawing upon the tradition of French/Brazilian philosophers Claude Lefort and Paulo Arante, Safatle argues that democracy is always in excess of a rule of law.  Thus, the differences that are going to define the left's political struggles must be decided democratically and unifiedly.  Veloso's counter reminds us, however, that universality of democratic political action is not a given (far from it).  That is, the calls to difference that Safatle argues will be resolved by participatory action are the very challenges to a universal democratic actor upon which Safatle rests his argument.  This debate, far from being conclusive demonstrates the challenges if not internal limits of participatory democracy.  In fact, for all of its very interesting points, Safatle's text seems to curl back from a full notion of the people precisely at the moments where majoritarian tyrrany might overrun the human dignity and egaltarian participation of the minority.





One thing that I have been very interested, however, is Safatle's critique of coalition, at least on the level of state action.  Safatle argues that the failure of the left in Brazil has been its willingness to enter into coalitions of comprimise.  He writes:

A despeito de sua capicdade de colocar a questão soical enfim no centro do embate político e de compreender o necessário caráter indutor do Estado brasileiro no nosso desenvolviemento socioeconômico, o governo Lula será lembrado, no plano político, por sua incapaicdade de sair dos impasses de nosso presicdencialimso de coalizão.  Como se a governabilidade justificasse a acomdação final da esquerda nacional a uma semidemocracia imobilista...

Despite its success in placing the question of social redistribution in the center of political discussion and to understand the necessity of the state in the question of socioeconomic development, the Lula government will be remembered for its inability to find its way out of the impasses of our coalitional presidentialism.  As if governability justified the ultimate resignation of the left to an immobile semidemocracy...

We might want to call Safatle's version of coalitional presidentalism a coalition of bad aura.   I am currently writing a chapter on what I might call in this context "good coalitions," or the emergence of a group of unified political actors that seemed to organize along lines that could not be politically anticipated by the state.  I wonder if Safatle is so resistent to the idea of coalition because he understands it as essentially undemocratic.  That is, in a participatory democracy, coalition would be superfluous because "the people" decide.   And yet, there is no obvious way that 'the people' will emerge.  In the chapter, I ask how do states react to emergent social organizations that manifest political logics unassimilable into the prelegislated categories of intelligible difference?

Anyways, this post began with a thread that I have since lost.  Just free-flowing now.