A stone in the middle of the road: act and transmission in the social bond

Abstract

The extreme situation experienced in Brazil with Covid-19 reveals that the restrictions and risks inherent to the pandemic affect everyone, but definitely not in the same way. A large part of the population does not even experience introspection or safe confinement, blatantly exposing the lie that minimizes the sanitary, economic and humanitarian crisis. In this context, Father Júlio Lancellotti, coordinator of the Pastoral Povo de Rua of the Archdiocese of São Paulo, equipped with a sledgehammer, breaks blocks of cobblestones installed under an elevation in the East Zone of the city, as a sign of protest against an initiative that sought to prevent homeless people from settling there. The action of the 'hammering’ becomes a testimony in the face of excess and allows thinking, in Freudian terms, of the place of memory and transmission, which refers to an ethical experience and supposes implication. In articulating the strange/uncanny to that which is at the same time familiar, we have – on the one hand, the repetition that reminds us that there is no knowledge that exempts the subject from being included in the experience and in the social bond; on the other, segregation, as a way of organizing the city and the undesirable. We seek to argue how Father Júlio's action calls for the dimension of the common and of humanity, a presence that affirms the difference and recovers the human face of the city.