Biopolitics, development and the exclusion of severe life

Abstract

The objective of this article is to understand the control and violence exercised by the State through instruments and the rationality of legal, economic and political devices, and their implications for regional development. The article is based on the agambeniana literature, in an intrinsic relationship with the life mentioned in the poem by João Cabral de Melo Neto. Through the reading of the verses and based on the teachings of the Italian philosopher Giorgio Agamben, it is permissible to establish an ambiguous and complex relationship in which the State – based on legal injunctions and economic-political devices – exerts institutionalized violence that not only determines conduct, but segregates the people, causes constant threats, directs and traces financialized premises to the human population, under the obsession of a developmental economic model. This economic model governs, through a legal and bureaucratic apparatus, the life and death of human beings, and is so avid that it liquefies the biopolitical project, transforming human life into merely biological life, especially in peripheral populations. Violence linked to the law and to this process contaminates all new institutions, projects and injunctions, including development projects and actions, in their most diverse adjectives.

Key words: Biopolitics; Economy; Development; Violence.