Interview with José Ricardo Ayres

Abstract

In this interview to the magazine Health and Society, José Ricardo Ayres explains how he approached the concept of vulnerability and of the advantages and dangers present in its application, situating it amidst the public health and in the academic, sanitary and political contexts. Taking the studies on the AIDS epidemic into consideration, he highlights differences in the emphasis given to the concept in Brazil and in the United States of America (USA). While in the U.S. the emphasis fell on the axis of ethics and law, fostering legal actions before the State, Brazil emphasized on a critical perspective of the technocratic aspect of public policies and on the authoritarianism of knowledge possessed in public health, seeking more dialogical relations with social movements in a context of struggles for the (re)construction of a democratic constitutional State, while occurred a process of reopening politics in Brazil. The relationship between vulnerability and specific contributions of recognition theory, according to Ayres, strengthens analysis of relations between intersubjectivities and social contexts, dialogue and conflict, actions and social structures. For him, we must consider the dialectic of representations, of interactions and of work as a way of construction of the world of relationships where we found ourselves, thus rupturing from the idea that the individual is a “Monad” that acts upon the world as something merely external or that acts according to social imperatives without possibility of transformation of reality. In this way, we avoid the naturalization of vulnerability when considering it as an intrinsic characteristic of the subjects, which would neutralize the analytical and political interest of this concept.