When carnival started: political activism in the historic obverse of Homo ludens

Abstract

Philosophy’s debate over the hegel-marxian concept of alienation in Brazil trespasses the border of a merely conceptual issue, and reveals a relevant factual dimension. The philosopher Vilém Flusser, for example, took the social-historical features of Brazilian society in order to depict a critique against the category “alie­nation” and therefore warrant the conclusion that hegel-marxism is embedded in an universalism that does not match specific realities, such as the Brazi­lian. This article is aimed at reevaluate this Flusser’s diagnosis by the means of a case-study focused on the sweepers’ strikes that took place in Rio de Ja­neiro in 2014. We argue that the generalization of Brazilian as the Homo ludens, whose reality occurs in alienation, does not match the historical events we discuss. It is suggested an alternative interpretation for the relation between the “playful” and the “poli­tical”, and thus we obliquely rehabilitate Hegel’s no­tion of alienation from Flusser’s phenomenological critique.