XVII Congress of the Brazilian Studies Association

The right to bury the dead: ethics, aesthetics and justice

• In Event: Skeptical Hope: Performing Beyond The Pink Tide and Neofascism in Brazil

Abstract

Douzinas and Warrington have claimed that a just society presupposes our capacity to reject the world as it is and to develop hope – a hope that some agency might intervene and deliver justice to this society. They suggested that an emphasis on alterity is the only way to deliver justice beyond the limits of the law – and transgressing the borders of aesthetics and authority. In this paper I want to question if the veiled image of justice that emerged from the Enlightened Revolutions ideas’ could deliver justice beyond the law. Starting from the disappearance of the body of Juan de Moraes – an eleven-year old boy killed by police officers in 2011 in Rio de Janeiro, I want to reflect on the deliverance of bodies as a form of justice. To claim and deliver back lost bodies might be one of the oldest forms of justice deliverance in human history. Was justice done when the Trojan King Priam, approached Achilles to take back his son’s body? Is it possible to do justice to Juan? To find an answer, I propose to look into Douzina’s and Warrington’s work on the aesthetics and ethics of justice, and compare it with Luis Alberto Warat’s scholarship on mediation and aesthetics.

Author

• Marcus De Matos, Brunel University London