The dignity of failure

a place for the subject in the neoliberal society

Abstract

This article starts from the suposed that the fields of psychoanalysis and education, taking into account their specificities, would respond as discourses and practices of resistance to the strategies of neoliberal capitalist society of reducing everything to commodity value and making subjects mere entrepreneurs of themselves, productive and efficient in maintaining a logic that them makes responsible for their countless failures. Based on authors from the philosophical and psychoanalytic field, these writings propose a reflection that follows exactly the opposite path, namely, that the dignity of the subject is found in his condition of being precarious and divided, therefore, in his unavoidable right to failure. To this end, it carries out three movements entitled: 1) neoliberalism and its traps; 2) a new ethos, a new subject?; 3) the dignity of failure: education, psychoanalysis and resistance.