Privazione simbolica e devianza minorile. Per una teoria critica della criminalità giovanile a Napoli

Abstract

This paper advances a theory of juvenile deviance as the outcome of an alternative symbolic subjectivation process, drawing on the findings of the research project La devianza e la criminalità minorile nella Città Metropolitana di Napoli [Letizia 2025], conducted at the Department of Social Sciences of the University of Naples Federico II in collaboration with the Osservatorio Giovani of the same Department and the Juvenile Justice Centre of Naples. Against readings of marginality as absence – of resources, opportunities, or culture – the paper argues that the symbolic space left vacant by legitimate cultural institutions does not remain inert, but is occupied by an endomimetic symbolic field endowed with its own internal coherence, its own logic of transmission and its own capacity to dispositionalize subjects who are culturally saturated with an order alternative to the institutionally legitimated one. Drawing on Pierre Bourdieu's sociology of reproduction, Gramsci's concept of cultural hegemony and Foucault's theory of subjectivation, the paper elaborates the concept of incorporated symbolic deprivation and introduces the Autopoietic Metasystem of Deviance as an interpretive model, articulated around four matrices: family, neighbourhood, peer group and camorra. The paper concludes with a theoretical reflection on the conditions of a cultural and creative intervention conceived not as a tool of rehabilitation, but as a practice of counter-literacy capable of restoring the subject's capacity to desire what it has never been able to imagine wanting.