Victimism, a new way of life. An attempt at characterization

Abstract

This article aims to characterize victimhood as a new form of cultural identity of our time. From this perspective it is an attempt to understand it as a perverse and terminal figure of modern subjectivity in its current critical phase, marked, among other factors, by emotional capitalism, consumerist hedonism and the anti-essentialist thought of postmodernity. Victimhood thus appears as a phenomenon replete with paradoxes that dissolve the enlightened rational project of emancipation and autonomy of the human being in favour of a sentimental culture that values misfortune and impotence as a new way of life, ignoring the disturbing dangers it entails: dehumanization and totalitarianism.