ABSTRACT
The Child and Adolescent Statute (ECA, in Portuguese) represents a major breakthrough when it comes to providing minors (who were once subject to State intervention on behalf of some notion of ‘well-being’ provided by the Code of Minors) with the condition of a subject of rights and duties. In regard to the adolescent who is the ‘author’ of an unlawful act, however, we identify that the acknowledgement of the authorship could give rise to risks and misinterpretations that may arise when the notion of ‘author’ is attached to the concept of ‘crime’, allowing, thus, for the creation of the idea of a ‘criminal subject’, as proposed by Michel Misse. If on the one hand the term ‘author’ localizes the adolescent as a subject, on the other hand, it could imprison him in a discursivity that is limited and circumscribed to the unlawful act that he committed. We therefore intend, in the present article, to localize the question of ‘authorship’ in ECA, to discuss the construction of the idea of ‘author’ in relation to the reader’s apprehension, considering Foucault’s theorization in articulation with Freudian-Lacanian psychoanalysis, and finally, to reflect upon devices that may offer new modes of inscription for this author, which often escape the imprisoned and imprisoning knots of the chains of discursive association.
Keywords:
Authorship; stigma; discursivity