Governo ético-político de usuários de maconha

Abstract

This thesis aims to investigate aspects of a history of subjectivity of marijuana users in Brazil by means of descriptions and analyses of rationalities and technologies of both ethical government and political government which ones conform different processes of education by means of formation of subjects. In order to do that, an empirical research was carried out to understand, on the one hand, how the use of marijuana was constituted in Brazil from the beginning to the middle of the 20th century as a thinkable and manageable problem, with the production of knowledges about this drug, particularly in the fields of psychiatry and medicine, thus leading to the advancement of social controls over the practices of alteration of consciousness with the use of that substance. On the other hand, this research aims to understand how such process of objectivation of subjects and their practices in discourses of truth is related to the ways through which, in the beginning of the 21st century, marijuana consumers problematize and act on themselves and the others in an attempt to constitute themselves as subjects of their practices of alteration of consciousness. From research sources ranging from medical and psychiatric studies to interactions between marijuana users in a virtual forum on internet, and by using analytical tools designed by Michel Foucault, particularly the notion of ‘governmentality’, understood as a surface of contact between the government of the self and the government of the others, discourses and practices of control and self-control have been analyzed, enabling the identification of the ways in which rationalities and technologies of police government and liberal government of the conducts of marijuana users differently affected and still affect those subjects, especially considering their class and race positions. The results of the investigation have also pointed out the coexistence of governmentalities in the form of management of marijuana use in Brazil: on the one hand, problematization and police government of the conducts of drug dealers and poor users; on the other hand, possibilities of liberal resistance, stylization of self-controls and defense of forms of self-government by middle and upper class users. It has been concluded that the marijuana user was historically produced in Brazil between the beginning and the middle of the 20th century as a pathological and criminal subject. Such subjectivity has been challenged and reconstructed in our country, especially in the beginning of the 21st century, with the emergence of liberal and neoliberal rationalities and technologies of government of conducts, thus modeling a self-controlled, self-manager marijuana user subject. This production of subjectivity, however, is limited: theoretically, due to the difficulty to found an ethics on the idea of autonomy as total control of the self and, in practice, because of the deep socioeconomic cuts and divisions that characterize the Brazilian society.