Tessituras Abertas : pessimistic, yet persistent in other possible imaginaries

Abstract

The present thesis addresses the compound of aesthetics and politics, motivated by the philosophical inquiry on the political potency of art. By doing so, this thesis also offers an investigation on the enrooted practice of authoritarianism in Brasil, by focusing on the recent institutionalized political events that contributed to the rise of an extreme right-wing government in the country in 2018. The philosophical inquiry on the articulation of aesthetics and politics, I pursued, mainly, through a close reading of the work of Jacques Rancière. By studying his thinking on the autonomous sensible experience of every and all subjects, as one possible lever, through the experience of the sensorium, for the possibility of autonomy, I will argue that the forms of visibility and discourses that define art, especially as an institution, from the perspective of art's political operativity, get blurred. Concomitantly, I examine recent institutionalized political events in Brasil that contributed towards the conditions to the rise of an authoritarian government in the country, as a means, as I will argue, for the reaffirmation and intensification of politics of extraction and neoliberalism, grounded on renewed imperialist relations. Imperialism that, in the 21st century, expresses a new ambition: beyond constituting a political form for the renewal and intensification of capitalism, as it has been since the beginning of the 20th century, in the present, in the face of growing planetary climate catastrophes, it also becomes an instrument to safeguard forms of life - merely framed as natural resources - for the central countries in the capitalist system.