A história do Homo psicoativus: uma análise arqueogenealógica da redução de danos

Abstract

This research aims to investigate archeogeneously the formation of the discursive and practical field of Harm Reduction, analyzing the set of assumptions, assertions and naturalizations in which this is supported to act on (self) government practices regarding drugs, as well as the modes of subjectivation which are prompted by that self-government. This research used a mapping of the statements that aim to justify the political and economic management of the subject-drug relationship through the Harm Reduction "paradigm", investigating how this "paradigm" operationalizes the government of the subject-drug relationship. The set of articles on Harm Reduction indexed in the Scielo platform in the last 10 years and contents related to a drug prevention program called the Family Strong Program (BRAZIL, 2015) were selected as the corpus of research. From the initial reading of texts on Harm Reduction, it was perceived that the statement about the use of drugs as a universal and human experience functioned as a sort of "preamble" of these researches. It was observed that the systematic repetition of a narrative about the history of drugs from its different uses, and of how man becomes man, also through this use, serves as justification for a series of government practices that competed for the objectification / naturalization of man and consequent production of an anthropological figure, named in this research of Homo psychoativus. The detailed investigation of this naturalization resulted in the displacement of the notion of Homo psychoativus, when it was observed that this, in addition to anthropological correlates, constituted an even more complex device that would address issues related to the governmental nature of drug use, making it possible to: 1. The construction of a narrative that naturalizes the use of drugs from the history of drugs and its different uses; 2. The disqualification of the prohibitionist policy of war on drugs as unreal and ineffective; 3. The establishment of government over "the subject" as the best way to govern possible damages associated with the use of drugs. Homo psychoativus therefore constitutes this kind of boundary surface in which the "paradigm" of Harm Reduction rests in a way to organize, in the mold of a biopower, a calculating management of life that specifically elects the "subject ", their way of living, at the same time as a discursive component of naturalization / justification and as a practical component of intervention. In this way, the Foucaultian tactical indicators present themselves as clues to the exercise of thinking and criticism, by making the automatism of the unthinking practices to which we submit more difficult. Finally, it is emphasized that problematizing the consensuses and naturalizations dealt with by Harm Reduction does not necessarily result in a total abandonment of these practices. In a different way, this work is an attempt to clarify in what kind of evidence rests the knowledge-power relations that subject us, as an exercise of rethinking the type of experience and the modes of subjectivation that are produced from these naturalizations that sentence who we are or who we should be.