In this text I present two modalities of suffering experienced by adolescents responsible for committing offenses while in detention, especially when caught in a kind of intermediary zone between life and death. In the first modality, suffering turns into a political act of self-rebellion, a suffering-resistance in which the subject passes from victim to witness. In the second modality, the pathologization of the adolescents turns their experience of suffering and rebelling bodies into increasingly isolated, individual and disempowered acts. Subsequently I focus on the ethical-political dimension of two experiences of suffering, highlighting the presence in contemporary Brazil of an extreme overlap between mechanisms of sovereignty (authoritarian society) and biopower: making some live (the citizens) and others die (the enemies), one in the name of the other. Finally I suggest the need to (re)politicize the violence committed and suffered by young people as a form of denaturalizing youth violence.
Adolescent offenders; Suffering; Pathologization