ABSTRACT
This chapter advances the idea that recent political events in Brazil – and possibly elsewhere – can be seen to express a crisis not only of the social order institutionalized in the past decades but also of its corresponding form of subjectivity: namely, that of an “entrepreneur of the self” whose experiences of psychological malaise came to be predominantly conceived of in terms of depression. It is in this sense that one may speak of a “post-depressive constellation”: a situation in which the social psychological tensions of the depressive order have reached a peak, leading to a variety of reactions and struggles but not yet to the establishment of a new consensus and stable institutional framework. Two kinds of political process, in particular, can be understood as moments of such a constellation: “post-depressive effervescence” (as it has emerged in key moments of the “Journeys of June”) and “post-depressive authoritarianism” (which progressively gained traction from the 2013 demonstrations to the 2018 election of Jair Bolsonaro).
