From Resistance to Power: Governing of Life, Social Suffering and the Violence of Eviction

The urban transformations witnessed by the city of Rio de Janeiro in the last years multiplied the governing of life mechanisms, producing and reinventing technologies of population control and conduct regulation. I understand the evictions of favelas as a dispositive of life possibilities management in the city, composed by discourses and practices which mark relations and conflicts among several agents in the margins of the state. From an ethnographical point of view, the paper starts by analyzing the ways of resisting to the evidtions, aiming to comprehend how life is produced in a context of precarity and destruction.