Vulnerabilidade, luto e interdependência: reflexões críticas ao individualismo neoliberal a partir de Judith Butler

Abstract

The present dissertation proposes to investigate the critique of the neoliberal morality of self-responsibilization formulated by the American philosopher Judith Butler based on the concept of primordial vulnerability — a dimension of our existence transpassed by ambivalences with strong exploratory potential, which nevertheless substantiate the conditions of possibility for our physical, psychic and social survival. To achieve this objective, our footsteps are articulated around two main discussions, namely: 1) the relationship between the neoliberal ideal of self-sufficiency with the political inducement of precariousness and unequal distribution of public mourning and 2) the ethical-political potential of public mourning to protect the links of interdependence, weakened by the neoliberal morality. At the first moment, we exhibit how neoliberalism is a rationality that shapes the State, society, and our own subjectivity per the market imperative, emptying the state of social welfare and the feeling of collective solidarity, deepening even the vulnerability of historically subaltern subjects through precarization policies that attribute a differentiated valuation to life resulting in a selective commotion in the face of death. At this point, we elucidate how mourning operates as a descriptor of the intelligibility of life, subverting the commonly held understanding that the value of life perdures since birth. At the second moment, we exhibit how the experience of loss awakens us to the opacity and dispossession, inherent to our constitutive relationality, disrupting the fantasy of the autonomous subject that holds full control over himself. In the face of the recrudescence of neoliberal agendas experienced in Western democracies, we aim to reflect on the limits and possibilities of Butler's proposition for an ethics of vulnerability intended to protect the links of interdependence. Hopefully, this research can collaborate with the construction of narratives that broaden our imaginative capacity in contrast to neoliberal nihilism.