Title:

Notes on capitalist religion and the contemporary superego

Author:
Matheus Henrique Kunst
Master student in the program of Post-Graduation in Psychoanalytic Theory at the
Federal University of Rio de Janeiro - Brazil
This paper provides an overview of authors like Walter Benjamin, Giorgio Agamben, DaniRobert Dufour and Vladimir Safatle in their comments about the strictly religious aspects of
capitalism, in order to rethink the social, historical and economical conditions that provided
mutations of the social figures of the superego. In the manuscript Capitalism as religion,
Benjamin extends the weberian perspective about the religious ethics that underlying the
capitalist society in the 19th century. The philosopher proposes the thesis that, more than
conditioned by religion, capitalism is strictly a religious phenomena. its non-dogmatic and
expressively cultic. Agamben updates such thesis localizing the beginning of the capitalist cult
in the desmaterialization process of the currency, concomitant with the transformation of the
money into credit and with the growth of economy grounded in the credit and financial
speculation. In addition to the understanding that there was a passage from the society based on
production for the current consumption-based, and that patriarchal conceptions have become
obsolete to new forms of social organization of labor and the libidinal economy of individuals,
causing a reversal of social figures of the superego, it seems that the growing recurrence of the
subjects in contemporary times to the capitalist cult through the provision of credit by banks the true churches today, according to Agamben - deserves deeper understanding, both by the
critical theory and by the psychoanalytic clinic. Referencing in national psychoanalysis authors,
such perspective is analyzed in the article.