Affects and the struggle for recognition: The nacional street population movement in Brazil

Will the composition originated between the life experience and the struggle for recognition be motivated by survival interests or will there be another dimension, present in the struggle for recognition that escapes most of the empiric researches in the social sciences?

The aim of this article is to try to understand how the disrespect experience, anchored in the affective life experience has subsidized the impulse for the social resistance, more precisely, for a struggle for ethic, juridical and identity recognition.

Emblematic case, the “Praça da Sé Massacre”, occurred in the city of San Paulo/Brazil, in August 2004 and where 15 people were brutally attacked, demonstrates harshly how the disrespect experience made plausible the identification and union between similars living in the streets, through the living of pain. Simultaneously, it functioned as a promoting fact of an effective struggle for recognition and political claims which culminated with the constitution of the National Street Population Movement in Brazil.

This articulation between the population living in the streets and social organizations has been trying, through the denunciation of the complete absence of public policies, to make evident how the entanglement of several exclusions has been central to the creation of a controlled population which is only a contingency to the neoliberalism: either necessary, as precarious labour, either completely disposable.     

Thus, re-subjectivized from a critical perspective, and with a rebellious repertoire consubstantiated in the claim of a positively replaced identity, the new people in the streets organized in a collective movement, find in the struggle for recognition a singular form of reinterpretation for the affective, juridical and solidary dimensions in the long path for the social emancipation.