On bodies as object: a postcolonial reading of the ‘Brazilian Holocaust’

Abstract

The Brazilian Psychiatric Reform law reconfigured the mental health care model in the country, with the main repercussion being the change from an asylum treatment regime to community-based treatment, carried out mainly in the various types of Psychosocial Care Centers. The Brazilian Anti-Asylum Movement that denounced the corruption of the hospital model system and the violation of human rights in the asylums headed the demand for a change in the assistance model. For example, in the Hospital Colônia from Barbacena (Minas Gerais), around 60,000 people died, fact portrayed in the book 'Brazilian Holocaust' by Daniela Arbex. Based on a phenomenological-hermeneutic approach, in this essay, we will approach Arbex's work in the light of the post-colonial and biopolitical debate, which understands that the modes of production of banal evil found in colonized societies a form of action, perpetuation, and naturalization of the depersonalization of the human, bringing them closer to the notion of object. In the work, we question the treatment given in the past to madness within the asylums as a kind of manifestation of the banal evil in our colonial context, at the same time as we conjecture the resumption of the hospital model discourse in Brazilian public policies.