Incarceration, justice and love: thinking beyond indifference from levinas

Abstract

The article deals with the disfigured prisoner as a evil personification and his humanity denied by hegemonic discourses in Brazilian society today. The work aims to problematize the stigmatizing vision launched on this social group and to think about new horizons of meaning about prison, respecting fundamental rights and guarantees provided for in the Brazilian Constitution and in the human rights treaties to which the country is a signatory. The study is located interdisciplinarily in human rights and philosophy, has an eminent theoretical-critical character, based on qualitative bibliographic research, as it investigates the image of the prisoner at the time that proposes interventions in this imaginary. Using the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas’ ethics to analyze the restriction of freedom, the work reflects on the human life conditions of recognition in Judith Butler, the endogenous orientalism concept for Rafael Godoi and the criminal justice practices that claim to universality, by Bethânia Assy. As a conclusion, the study observes that the vocation against humanity in the prisoner denies the ethical framework available to avoid the incidence of protective norms against a specific vulnerable group, highlighting that the condemnation for the practice of illicit attitudes does not erase the reality of human infinity in the prisoner, which deserves support. Finally, the authors refute imprisonment as a socially isolated locus and cite actions for the proximity to prisoners to tear apart the ideological barrier built between the self-styled “good citizens” and those labeled “criminals”, not worthy of protection.