Abstract
The first objective of this essay is to delineate hallucinatory phenomena, essentially indistinguishable from reality, presenting the way in which the definition of what I call the world-in-itself, external to the individual and oblivious to the symbolizations that can be attributed to it, is constituted as a dispute for the very substance of reality. Mental health discourses become privileged for the definition of which worlds exist or not, and the immanence of reality is a constant object of dispute. The second objective is to demonstrate the argument through the analysis of the specific phenomenon of the state management of the Covid-19 pandemic in Brazil, describing how the pro-science discourse, initially used to legitimize restrictive quarantines, gradually started to justify the reopening and flexibilization in supposed stability scenarios of the number of deaths and new cases. This movement put dissonant voices to a condition analogous to the hallucinatory experimentation of reality.
Keywords:
hallucination; reality; world-in-itself; COVID-19