In the exteriority of the system: victims, liberation-principle, and normativity in resistance practices against State violence

Abstract

This article analyzes the practices of resistance of the Network of Communities and Movements Against Violence, created in Rio de Janeiro in 2004 by relatives of victims of state violence. The problem consists in understanding whether such practices can be interpreted as forms of production of normativity beyond state law. The research adopts a qualitative approach, based on semi-structured interviews and documentary analysis, articulated with Emmanuel Lévinas’s ethical phenomenology and Enrique Dussel’s Ethics of Liberation. It is argued that the Network’s practices not only respond to oppression, but constitute concrete forms of normativity endowed with their own ethical validity, in light of the liberation principle. The results indicate that actions of welcoming/support, denunciation, production of memory, legal follow-up, and political advocacy structure behaviors, guide collective decisions, and institute criteria of justice independent of legal formalization. It is concluded that the condition of victim does not imply passivity, but can constitute a place of ethical enunciation and transformative praxis, challenging the law to recognize forms of normativity produced in the exteriority of the system.