Um novelo improfanável? : uma arqueologia do dispositivo da propriedade

Abstract

The goal of this thesis was to do an archaeology of modern property, trying to understand that beyond the key of “apparatus”. This can be defined as a heterogeneous set of instruments able to impose subjectification and desubjectification processes, guiding certain conducts. Property is constituted in the Modern Age as an apparatus that operates in three dimensions: Land, Language, and Body. In the first one, archaeology is aimed to comprise the medieval paradigm of the relationship between human beings/things, highlighting the difference between this paradigm and the modern one. Land’s dimension is then analyzed in two areas of incidence of this paradigmatic change: “Sky and Land” and “Land and Sea”, having as intermezzo a critic about protestant ethics. In the first one theological discussions are analyzed as “decelerators” of private property, at the same time that we verified relevant elements of private property in such debates (subjectivism, voluntarism, individual freedom). In the second one, we explored theological and jus-philosophical theories justifying earth and bodies taking in colonizing enterprises (the great sources of necessary accumulation for the nascent capitalism). Also, we show a critical read about how was done this appropriation (that is spoliation) from the examples of Brazil colony and African slavery. In the “Language” section we searched how natural law and the liberal-exegetical doctrine endowed private property with a political sense: Locke understood Property as an inside part of human being, who is able then to externalize it in objects through own work; and with exegetes, the property becomes an absolute right and a mark of virtue. On the other hand, in the “Body” section we analyzed how the biopolitical governmentality paradigm falls on the work/property intricacy. With the industrial model of labor, the property is directly linked to productive bodies, themselves produced and reproduced by the dominant labor model. In the subjective realm, the property supports the legal concepts of person and subject of law and is related, in a broader way, to a kind of proprietary typology of subjects. Such identities – which in the philosophical-political tradition that goes from Locke to Arendt, passing through Hegel and Marx – are always linked to production and the proprietary status that this confers on them, marking a subjection to “laboring” and “doing” and to their respective correlates: appropriation and ownership. From this entire archaeological course, it was possible to conclude that modern property can indeed be understood as a biopolitical apparatus, which, like a skein, intertwines not only the material world and the ways of its enjoyment but also language, law, and subject are entangled in a way that is difficult to disentangle.