Quando ignorância é força: ética e o vazio da experiência humana em distopias dos séculos XX e XXI

Abstract

The present dissertation aims to analyze the paths of ethics in the dystopian novels We (Evgeni Zamyatin), Brave New World (Aldous Huxley), 1984 (George Orwell), Fahrenheit 451 (Ray Bradbury), Parable of the Sower (Octavia Butler), Oryx and Crake, The Year of the Flood and MaddAddam (Margaret Atwood), Never Let Me Go (Kazuo Ishiguro) and The Hunger Games (Suzanne Collins), based on the thesis that, in dystopian contexts, different configurations of ethical crisis are established due to tensions between the ideology of dominant institutions and the subject’s freedom, in order to promote the lack of experience as a strategy for maintaining power. For this study, we started with a chronological division of the literary corpus between dystopian novels from the first half of the twentieth century and from this point forward, based on the different political, historical and social contexts of publication that possibly influenced the literary genre. The first group of novels has as important characteristic the utopia of totalitarianism resulting from a post-war scenario, famine, scientific progress, emergence and rise of Nazism; the second group presents the utopia of transhumanism and capitalist scientific progress arising from a moment when capitalism is advancing towards neoliberalism, with emphasis on social marginalization and environmental exploitation. Thus, some concepts of ethics worked on by different theorists were analyzed in order to arrive at the understanding that ethics is the exercise of thinking about the attitudes of human conduct in favor of respect and alterity. Based on this argument, at the end of this study it was noticed that in both groups of dystopias there is a common aspect: in any dystopian scenario, whether in a space of totalitarian state or in a decentralized state, individuals are emptied of their subjectivity and filled with a moral ideology that controls the experience of subjects and that takes the space of ethics in the individual's life.