A WORK FOR LIFE: SI NARRATIVE AGAINST THE COISIFICATION OF BODIES

Abstract

This article is a theoretical effort constructed from displacements provoked by narratives produced during research in the context of the Subjectivities and (auto)biographies Research Group that reveal situations of vulnerability and precariousness of life. It is about thinking of narratives as one of the forms of expression of power in work by life. Understanding that life's work consists of fighting complete coisity. The constructed argument has its foundation in Mbembe (2018a; 2018b; 2018c), to think about the conditions by which lives are submitted in neoliberal logic. But not only, in epistemological terms, the readings of Mbembe (2018a) trigger reflections of psychoanalysis and corroborate to evidence the engendering of the places of power of narratives in the formative processes. Above all, this bet is also political since it problematizes a system that produces the coisification of life and transforms humans into "living crypts of capital", as Mbembe names. The argument is a compliment

to narratives as an amalgam of ghostly imaginaries – which consists of the subject who narrates – and the symbolic as a "nocturnal power" – that makes it exist. That is, the organization of language and memory as the body's performative capacity in metamorphosis to (ex)istir, or exist in one outside. Thus, the narratives in giving to see the subject who narrates, reveal a central place of the vital power, which coincides with the formation of ones, that is, one between "the nocturnal power" and the "ghost world" in The words of Mbembe.