The social production of violence

Abstract

The article examines violence as social production, drawing on psychoanalysis to discuss human destructiveness. The exposition starts from Freud, the death drive, and civilization and its discontents, to distinguish aggressiveness from violence, the latter understood as abuse of force and power, a fact of culture that exists only in relation to a law. The text draws on Jurandir Freire Costa, Winnicott, Zaltzman, and Bettelheim, and analyzes the cultural disinvestment in the idea of the neighbor. The investigation addresses the precarious installation of the Law in Brazil, the slaveholding legacy, and impropriety as a national way of being. The conclusion points to transgression as a search for new existential possibilities.