The Concrete Experiences of the Subject of Social Injustice: Engendering Knowledge, Empowerment, and Collective Resistance

The main question of this paper is how the production of knowledge of the subjects of social injustice impact a certain philosophical grammar implicated in dealing with justice. It is my claim that throughout the concrete experiences of social injustice, the protagonists of struggles against precarity and vulnerability inevitably produce knowledge, political empowerment, and collective rexistence and co(re)existence along their militant form of life. Such rexisting stances have a significant impact on a certain western political-philosophical grammar, according to which vulnerable bodies have none or minor political agency, that they produce nothing but precarity and need, that “proper politics” is a matter left to those secured from the necessities of bare survival. These protagonists reveal through their (r)existing, co(re)existence strategies and actions the very need to radicalize a conservative political-philosophical grammar. To “radicalize” means here literally to unravel the very root of the issue, to destabilize certain presuppositions, instating a new set of elements that directly rearrange the whole frame of thought conceived to keep things according to a certain status quo. I will highlight a few dimensions of this framework by considering four social movements of mothers from favelas and peripheries of Rio de Janeiro who had their sons and daughters killed by state violence. According to preliminary research, the subjects of those social movement who become protagonists in the struggle against the very injustice which has befallen them develop strategies and actions that implicate (a) different dimensions of social existence and (b) different levels and contexts of
social organization.