A transformação da natureza humana nos governos totalitários e a ascensão do animal laborans na esfera pública: uma leitura biopolítica da obra de Hannah Arendt

Abstract

Our study has the purpose to carry through a biopolitic reading of Hannah Arendt’s work, what means analyzing the relation between life and politics, from the contained biopolitic elements in the autor’s philosophy. To make it possible, we will use to concept from Giorgio Agamben, mainly, the concepts of bare life, state of exception, homo sacer so that, having understook them, we can work on the biopolitic elements of the arendtian’s work, which pass by it in an implicit form. Thus, our intention is to demonstrate that, even in an not explicit way, it has, in the arendtianas reflections, about “ what we are doing” in modernity, that is, reducing the human condition to the mere activity of the animal laborans, worried, exclusively, in preserving its life in biological direction, biopolitics elements that, in our agreement, serve as argument tools to elucidate the reflexive intentions of this author. The two points that we choose for the accomplishment of this research, in intention to point the biopolitic elements in Arendt, are the primacy of the natural life on the political action, resulted from the extreme valorization of the labor in modernity, and the pretension of total domain of the totalitarianism, that used the scenario of the mass societies of century XX, to place in march its ambition of transforming the human nature, reducing the man to a mere animal. Our intention, therefore, is from the analyses of the arendtian’s work Origins of Totalitarianism (1951) and the Human Condition (1958), to demonstrate textually that, exactly for never appearing in its writings, the concept of biopolitcs, configures as a conducting wire so that we can notice the reach and the depth of the politic-philosophical thought of Hannah Arendt, that appears as an authentic interpreter of her time, whose writings continue relevant so that we can understand the political and human reality.