THE JURIDICAL-DISCURSIVE FABRICATION OF THE INDEBTED SUBJECT: THE MORALIZATION OF CREDIT CARD DEBT AS A TECHNOLOGY OF GOVERNMENTALITY IN BRAZIL

Abstract

This article investigates how the causal-individualizing rationality of legal discourse and institutional texts on financial education transforms indebtedness through revolving credit and compulsory installments into a matter of personal conduct, obscuring structural determinations of capitalist financialization. Drawing on a Foucauldian-Gramscian framework articulated with the Marxist critique of law, particularly Pachukanis's theory of the legal form, it analyzes a documentary corpus comprising decisions from state courts and the Superior Court of Justice (STJ), as well as institutional texts from regulatory bodies and financial entities. The research identifies recurrent patterns of individual imputation, in which legal grammar privileges the question "who did it?" over "how is this structured?", converting systemic antagonisms into the consumer's moral failings. It is argued that the individualization of debt functions as a microtechnology of governmentality, producing subjects responsive to market discipline and stabilizing bourgeois hegemony. Financial fetishism naturalizes interest rates and contractual practices as inevitable, while financial education pedagogy consolidates the common sense of individual responsibility. The article concludes that a consequent legal critique must go beyond procedural corrections and confront the social form of credit as a mechanism of governance and capital reproduction.