Arte e Educação - Fundação Bienal do Mercosul

the performance of success and prosperity. Political
discourse appears as a strategic game of constant
balancing and operates a strong apparatus for
appeasing the tensions in the collective realm. The
laws, constitutions, charters, contracts, accords and
declarations are after all the material for expressing
that idea of equality. All those documents seek to
create an aura of density around the idea of universal
equality. They are evidence of the triumph
of reason as a form of organizing collective social
life. Difference and otherness disappear, the other
is reduced to being the equal of me. The state of
law depersonalises power, replacing government
by men with government by laws, establishing
political representation in the act of the citizen
choosing representatives and establishing the
contract as the form par excellence of civil life.
On the other side is the impregnation of the social
order by the idea of progress, in other words an
unrestrained movement towards the new, the
original, the better. And the emphasis on the model
of individual success: there develops an accelerated
march of each individual towards exceeding
himself or herself and others. The model of conflict
is transplanted metamorphosed into social life
when everyday modern life begins to consist of
countless individual victories in the countless
battles established within social relations, work
relations, and any kind of interpersonal relations.
One has to win at all cost.
Thus we can see the paradox of this society that
constructs social invisibility through the principle
of formal equality; that spurs a de-politicisation
of conflict through an excess of politics in
interpersonal relations; that makes inequality
feasible through the principle of individual liberty.
The modern State emerges with the defeat of the
king as sovereign and the dissolution of
relationships based on blood, land or labour
associations. It is established impersonally and, in
postulating a common good, establishes a kind of
power of everyone over everyone. The formations
of those communities based on blood, land or
occupation are dissolved and communities of free
and equal citizens begin to be established. Taking
the shape of a kind of abstract universal
community, the State assumes an overwhelming
place of mediation in social relations by law and
control of the market at the same time as observing
and reaffirming the common good and general
interest, now called the public interest. The
communities originating from particular
relationships of absolute origins were broken
down in pursuit, with the help of the model of
universal reason, of a community of abstract men.
In short, the modern liberal State occupies this
paradoxical position of being both the protector
and the persecutor of the individual. It both
postulates freedom and the guarantee of law and
also gives rise to the subordination of one individual
to another. By universalising equality, the
modern State threatens and intimidates the individual
in his liberty. By being free, the individual
can stop being free. So, within a State based on
the principles of equality, liberty and fraternity,
an individual emerges who is insecure and
unprotected. The individual creates a State that
is his own contradiction. And all this is woven
into the model of democracy.
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