O mal-estar moderno: ensaio da cultura jurídica

Abstract

The monograph, an essayistic exercise in Brazilian philosophy of law, offers a reading of the anguish that arises from choices in favor of a civilization or a legal culture. It unfolds in three discussions, all articulated in order to serve the problem: “what is the function of law in the face of modern malaise?”. To this end, in a first instant, we approach the terrain in which this conflict unfolds: modernity, a properly temporal form of maintenance, apprehension, and reproduction of the world; then, the moderns, that is, from the point of view of their insular subject-protagonist; finally, the theological-political locus of absence (divine) and, at the same time, of emergence (of the Rule of Law and, above all, of the democratic “agonies”). Identified in these three keys, the affection that urges on the modern plane - the malaise, suggested by Freud in his original formulation of unbehagen - is reinterpreted jusphilosophically to confront the ideological-hegemonic bases of neoliberal globalization. Against the individualistic hijacking of the political and feeling challenged by the insistent “return of the repressed” of the mythical dimension of living - in its various manifestations: in the present time, in the individual, in legal dogmatics... -, we intend to bring together modernity, uneasiness and law under the viewpoint of macrophilosophy (Gonçal Mayos) in the endless search for a destiny for the juridical that allows and encourages the future as a time of emancipation; in realization of the original project of the research group POLEMOS: Politics, Imagination and Future. We conclude that, if uneasiness is an affection provoked by/in front of emptiness, to assume in relation to it the position of the possible is to admit the indeterminate as the very possibility of change and, therefore, effectiveness of the desire for freedom; this is a theory for social criticism/transformation capable of philosophically realizing the philosophy of law.