Aberrant routes

The book reminds us that despite the republican formula, enlightenment is not a state activity. And anyone who expects to find the vaunted key to this instrumentalisation of self-freedom in today’s schools is mistaken. In the process of cultural homogenisation in which nation states are born, their structural condition lies in acting by means of a centripetal force. The body free of itself is, in this sense, a crime with a very high price. Modern restitutive law has little to say about the logic of punitive proportionality in this area. The phenomenon of maximum punishment for military or school desertion is exemplary in this sense. Deserters or bad students are not so different as delinquents; after all, they are intertwined in the same State reason, a reason that can only be understood by the black hole that it all brings. The cancellation of the diverse by the force of the One, as Clastres said. The reader will find in this book, perhaps, a choking of the gears, in the full sense of obstruction by a foreign body. Leonardo Borges Reis.