Abstract

MOREIRA, Jacqueline de Oliveira; DRAWIN, Carlos Roberto; COSTA, Domingos Barroso da  and  SILVA, Ana Carolina Dias. Pandemic and human rights: reflections on the war metaphor and its (ab)uses . Psicol. rev. (Belo Horizonte) [online]. 2020, vol.26, n.3, pp. 1080-1100. ISSN 1677-1168.  http://dx.doi.org/10.5752/P.1678-9563.2020v26n3p1080-1100.

We wonder if linking the Covid-19 pandemic to the signifier "war" could wither away the legal force of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, hitting it to its core: human dignity. We pick up on Clausewitz’s considerations, for whom war consists of the continuation of politics rather than of an unexpected episode, to get to Foucault, who unveils that power relations produce a regulation of life and death, what cast us again in the field of vulnerability, one that the war metaphor either arouses and conceals. At the dramatic moment of the pandemic, the call for war, the supportive call against a common enemy, although justified as an emergency measure and necessary appeal, may also be of avail as the necropolitics obverse (Mbembe, 2016), the visible death produced by the virus enshrouding the invisible death of the excluded and disposable, the usual "killable" ones.

Keywords : Pandemic; Human rights; War metaphor; Necropolitics.

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