Regina Maria de Souza

Por que matamos o barbeiro?: reflexões preliminares sobre a paradoxal exclusão do outro

This paper discusses exclusion as the effect of mechanisms that are at the same time assimilatory and racist. Racism is here understood as the effect of a process involving both the subjective fear of dealing with the desire of the other/stranger and a fine network of articulated powers. The aim of this reflection is to initiate a dialogue, however timid, with Michel Foucault as well as with authors who recur to a psychoanalytic approach. The intent is not to demonstrate there may have any points of intersection among the various theoretical groups they represent, but rather to point out the need to fashion a tool that explains the bonding of mechanisms of power to the subjects functioning, subject who usually lets himself be entangled by them.

O que ou quem eu sou, afinal de contas? Sou brasileiro ou uruguaio, professor?

The aim of the present paper is to bring about a reflection on the uneasiness of two children, Alicia and Joao, regarding their nationalities, that is, on their ambiguous feeling of belonging regarding their own identities. Dialogues based on philosophical thinking will be carried out about the frontier as a place where the naturalization of equality is extinguished, and naturalization, in which identity is perceived as a cohesive and impenetrable monolithic piece. The opposite is actually what we stand up for: identity is the effect of a never-ending, always unfinished process of subjective transformation, through miscellany, through anguish for not being ONE with oneself or with others. In short, we believe in the multiple and immeasurable universe of the identity process, which makes every subject unique concerning his or her dilemmas.