Corpos hipotecados: o dispositivo da dívida em sua articulação com microcrédito produtivo e financiamento estudantil

Abstract

Based on the gradual growth of debt and indebtedness relationships, this research intends to analyze the power relations and the struggles that involves debt. Beyond purely economic relationships debt concept allows us to identify the intricate dispute, oppositions and subjectivities that organize the debt system. As a dispositif it does not appear as an abstract concept, but as particular empirical realities. Debt is understood as a dispositif deeply linked to labor relations, as it is a promise of future work that may or may not be done. Hence the student debt is analyzed in its articulation with knowledge and practices of anatomo-political and biopolitical technologies of power. Student debt makes the indebted person to promise future work as a manner to repay creditor. Debt acts over bodies, conforming their future to present and reducing future possibilities to present determinations. As productive microcredit debt provides real possibilities for efectuate informal labour based on indebtedness. Microcredit debt allows informal workers to become “microentrepreneurs”, which will be monitored by the financial market and must meet the income expectations that creditors aim to extract. Conducting informal workers as the entrepreneurial man of neoliberal governmentality (entrepreneur of the self) to the rhythms of production and productivity required by the financial market. It also analyzes how debt promotes the mixing of relationships, causing a juxtaposition of previously separated spheres of life. By reducing family and community relationships to debt based relationship and expanding competition between subjects, debt produces a sociability of individual blame and punishment for those in debt.