Neopentecostalism as a Neoliberal Grammar of Suffering

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University of Canterbury
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2021
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Gonsalves, Rodrigo
Dunker, Christian Ingo Lenz
Estevão, Ivan
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This article proposes an understanding of Brazilian Neopentecostalism, emerging in the 2000-2019 decades, considering processes related to mass psychology, identifications and ideological fantasies described by psychoanalysis. Such processes engender what we call policies of suffering, mobilizing discourses, signifiers, and enunciations, whereby certain symptoms become more or less tolerable collectively and individually. Suffering becomes a political factor because it engenders modes of recognition within theories of transformation. For example, if the cause of suffering is supposed to be natural or divine, economic or cultural, this sets conditions for different subjective engagements that are fixed in different ideological fantasies that in turn dispute different grammars of suffering. There is an interweaving of dimensions to this phenomenon which crosses several matrices, such as theological, sociological, economic, psychoanalytic, among others. Therefore, we do not propose a strictly theological, sociological or psychoanalytic investigation of the Brazilian Neopentecostal phenomenon, although we use elements from the three fields in their discussions.

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This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.