The current global threat to democracy is intimately tied to the rejection of a knowledge-based shared public sphere, which has often been associated with the onset of a ‘post-truth era’. My research grapples with this problem by focusing on one of its most drastic and revealing cases, namely the undoing of Brazilian democracy under Bolsonaro (2019-2022), to develop a critical and theoretical analysis vis-à-vis the relation of politics to knowledge. Many analyses on the topic insist on a hierarchical connection between the two poles, resorting to categories such as anti-intellectualism, populism, illusion, and ignorance, reinstating thereby different versions of the ‘principle of the ignorance of the people’. Instead of falling prey to facile solutions with ineffective results, such as postulating the ‘wisdom of the people’, this project starts from the assumption that this intellectualist approach is based on the premise of a neutrality (and objectivation) of knowledge, thus overlooking that the latter has been functional to power – and even more so than it has been acknowledged by a tradition tracing back to Rousseau. Accordingly, the very concept of a public sphere, as proposed by Habermas, seems inadequate to sanction the relationship between the two poles in contemporary societies, since, stemming from an objectified conception of knowledge and a reductionist conception of agency, it fails to account for the epistemic exclusions at its foundation. Against this background, this project aims at: (i) a reconceptualization of the relationship between knowledge and politics in political and social philosophies, by means of (ii) a study of alternative approaches to agency and action, informed by different perspectives, from postcolonial theory to feminist epistemology, from science and technology studies to Amerindian ethnography.

Partant d'une analyse interdisciplinaire de la crise actuelle de la démocratie brésilienne, le partenariat entre le Centre Marc Bloch et l'Université de São Paulo se penche sur les "paradoxes de l'émancipation". A travers cette étude de cas, il apparaît que la relation complexe entre la démocratie et le savoir ne reflète pas la relation beaucoup plus claire entre l'autoritarisme et les fake news. Alors que le discours de la droite radicale repose sur le rejet délibéré d'une sphère publique partagée basée sur la connaissance, la défense des structures démocratiques ne peut pas se fonder sur une simple affirmation de la distinction entre savoir et ignorance. Car c'est cette distinction même qui se trouve à la base des exclusions et des hiérarchies constitutive des discours post-factuels.