Political registers of suffering: identity, trauma, and transformation

Abstract

In this paper, we will present some social occurrences of psychological suffering, their political implications, means of resistance, and transformative potentials. Different expressions and social productions of suffering in the contemporary Brazilian context related to gender, sexuality, race, and violence are mobilized for an analysis based on Lacanian registers of the Real, the Symbolic, and the Imaginary. We will discuss the identitarization of suffering as a denunciation strategy that has traumatic fixations as its limit; the banalization of contingency in the silencing of violence as effects of the colonization between the imaginary and the real axes; and finally, a presentation of the symptomatic structure of suffering will allow the use of the symbolic register as the matrix for a horizon of social transformation that articulates history and desire.