CRITICAL MEDIATION OF AFFECTS

A PRAXIOLOGY OF CRITICAL BIBLIOTHERAPY

Abstract

What mediation sustains bibliotherapeutic care, and what does it silence? This article examines the limits of a therapeutic rationality oriented toward well-being and emotional regulation in Bibliotherapy and interrogates its still insufficient attention to the social and historical conditions of the social production of affects. It aims to reconstruct mediation as the praxiological core of Critical Bibliotherapy. This is a qualitative, bibliographic, and theoretical-conceptual, critical-reconstructive study. The analytical trajectory examines the therapeutic rationality articulated by Caldin, mobilizes the social critique of the social production of affects, revisits bibliopsychology as a psychosociological foreshadowing of emancipatory mediation, and reconstructs bibliotherapeutic mediation on the basis of critical information studies. The analysis reveals a grammar of appeasement that individualizes suffering and reduces reading to subjective recomposition. A praxiological formulation of critical mediation of affects is proposed, articulating the fundamental axes of Critical Bibliotherapy—an emancipatory horizon, historicization of affects, non-reification of care, sustaining of negativity, and critical elaboration of experience—with the dialogical, aesthetic, formative, ethical, and political dimensions of conscious mediation. It is concluded that this reconstruction shifts care from adaptation toward emancipation.