Carnis facĕre : Aproximação humano-animal e corpos torturáveis na literatura brasileira da ditadura = Carnis Facere human animal rapprochement and tortured bodies in Brazilian and dictatorship literature

The prehistoric human-animal separation, states Giorgio Agamben, has an eminently political function: that of producing the idea of the human. In biopolitical terms, this is the primary conflict that determines and rules all the others. The «anthropological ma- chine» has been able to produce the hierarchical scale whose lowest rung is occupied by the Animal, an expendable body, a non-subject. In totalitarian regimes, State violence acts on the human replicating the conditions of annihilation that humanity directs to the Animal. In literary works such as K. Relato de uma Busca, by Bernardo Kucinski, which re-elaborate the traumas of torture and disappearance in Brazilian society under the military regime, it is possible to detect the traces of a «dehumanization» that is the result of this primordial separation. The reduction of the human being to «mere flesh» – tortured, dissected, dispersed – drives us to the borders of the non-political, where flesh, as wild and inorganic material (Es- posito), is the substance in which the human being is depoliticized.