The Colonization of Adolescence and its Subversion by Psychoanalysis

Abstract

This article aims, from a theoretical investigation of social and psychoanalytical texts, to analyze how adolescence appears, in modernity, as a privileged political product of colonization. We associate biopolitics and necropolitics to the emergence of that age of life, the first being a concept by Michel Foucault and the second by Achille Mbembe. Likewise, we analyze how the signifier "adolescence" is intercepted by different violent signifieds, which move inversely and down the chain of signifiers, and which imprison adolescents in colonizing senses, imposing a process of subjective destitution on them. We resorted to the contributions of Glória Anzaldúa and the psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, to indicate another possible adolescent identity which excels in proposing new signifieds and in the metonymic displacement of the signifier, opposing the identities forged by colonization. Thus, we indicate how Psychoanalysis can be a viable option for the subversion of the colonization of adolescence, privileging the subject and desire.