The despolitizing rhetoric of corruption and the dialectics of the great and small politics: a narrative on the neoliberal spectacle

Abstract

The aim of this article is to discuss the depoliticizing character of the rhetoric of corruption and how this is a true phenomenon of the hegemonic substantialization of small politics in Brazilian neoliberal reality. Without losing sight of the determinant category of material conditions and the dialectical conception of history, the hypothesis that conjugates this study is that, in neoliberalism, the Capital sums up efforts to establish a distance between the subjects and the themes of the great politics and, for that, it spectacularises the terrain of small politics. The present article is thus guided by important Gramscian keys - such as hegemony, the search for consensus and the idea of an intellectual - in dealing with neoliberal reality, spectacle and corruption as rhetoric. In addition, we analyze how the logic of the Spectacle, coined by Debord, hinders political action in the neoliberal context, and corroborates the acceptance of rhetoric such as corruption itself.