Sergio Amadeu da Silveira - Cidadania e Redes Digitais

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c i t i z e n s h i p a n d d i g i t a l n e t w o r k s
“Human Rights are the set of processes of struggle for
human dignity.”
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Joaquín Herrera Flores 1
The convening of the National Conference on Communications (in Portuguese,
Conferência Nacional de Comunicação, or Confecom) by President
Lula is an extremely concrete and compelling background to a political
reflection on the relationship that might connect the democratization
of communications and that of Human Rights. We could even say that
one of the topics for deliberation during Confecom should aim to answer these two
questions: (1) What kind of communications policy would be appropriate to a Human
Rights policy? (2) What is a “human right to communication?”
“The shame of being a man”
In 1991, amid the globalization of a kind of neoliberalism which claimed History
had reached its end, Félix Guattari and Gilles Deleuze published their latest
co-written book: What is Philosophy? 2 The book is a manifesto of resistance 3 which
aims to offer a series of concepts and tools for a “philosophy” that the authors define
as a practice: a process of constitution of the free men, of new people and of a new
earth to come 4 .
In a chapter dedicated to the concept of “geophilosophy,” they develop a pioneering
critique of neoliberal globalization and its rhetoric. We can find there a symbolic
1. With this epigraph I would like to honor the memory of my friend Joaquín Herrera Flores, a Human
Rights activist who has much contributed to the renewal of thinking on the legal field in Europe
and Brazil. His passion for life will serve to us as a powerful reference.
2. Qu’est-ce que la philosphie?, Les Éditions de Minuit, Paris, 1991.Translation into Brazilian Portuguese:
O que É a Filosofia, Editora 34, São Paulo, 2000. Quotes follow the French edition.
3. Those are really the words the authors use to explicit the idea: “Books of philosophy and works of
art (...) have in common [the fact that they] resist — they resist to death, to servitude, to the intolerable.”
4. On pages 9 and 10, Deleuze and Guattari define philosophy as a “general athletics: the agôn.”