A genealogy of homo-economicus: Neoliberalism and the production of subjectivity

Foucault Studies

Volumn , Issue 6, 2009, Pages 25-36

  Read, Jason ^a  

^a UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN MAINE   (United States)

Author keywords

Foucault; Governmentality; Neoliberalism; Real subsumption; Subjectivity

Indexed keywords

EID: 70350428184     PISSN: None     EISSN: 18325203     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.22439/fs.v0i0.2465     Document Type: Article

References (20)

1. David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.
2. Fredric Jameson, Postmodernism; Or, the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1991), 263.
3. Michel Foucault, "The Subject and Power," Afterward to Michel Foucault: Beyond Structu- ralism and Hermeneutics, ed. Hubert L. Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow (Chicago, IL: Universi-ty of Chicago Press, 1982), 208.
4. As Foucault writes on this point: "The combination of the savage and exchange is, I think, basic to juridical thought, and not only to eighteenth century theories of right - we constantly find the savage exchange couple from the eighteenth century theory of right to the anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. In both the juridical thought of the eighteenth century and the anthropology of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the savage is essentially a man who exchanges."(Michel Foucault, Society Must Be De-fended: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975-1976, trans. David Macey (New York: Picador, 2003), 194)
5. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978-1979, trans. Graham Burchell (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008), 12.
6. Jeffrey Nealon has developed the logic of intensification in Foucault, arguing that this can be seen in the transition from disciplinary power to biopower; the former operates through specific sites and identities, while the latter operates on sexuality, which is dif-fuse throughout society, coextensive with subjectivity (Jeffrey T. Nealon, Foucault Beyond Foucault: Power and its Intensification Since 1984 (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press), 2008, 46). A similar point could be raised with respect to neoliberalism.
7. Thomas Lemke, "Foucault, Governmentality, and Critique." Rethinking Marxis, 14, 3 (2002), 60.
8. Eric Alliez and Michel Feher, The Luster of Capital, trans. Alyson Waters, Zone, 1, 2, (1987), 349.
9. Michel Foucault, The Birth of Biopolitics, 221.
10. In The Birth of Biopolitics Foucault argues that Marx filled this void with an "anthropolo- gy" of labor. This is similar to the critique that Foucault develops in "Truth and Juridical Forms," in which he argues that Marx posited labor as the "concrete essence of man." As Foucault writes: "So I don't think we can simply accept the traditional Marxist analysis, which assumes that, labor being man's concrete essence, the capitalist system is what transforms labor into profit, into hyperprofit or surplus value. The fact is capitalism pe-netrates much more deeply into our existence. That system, as it was established in the nineteenth century, was obliged to elaborate a set of political techniques, techniques of power, by which man was tied to something like labor - a set of techniques by which people's bodies and time would become labor power and labor time so as to be effective-ly used and thereby transformed into hyper profit" (Michel Foucault, "Truth and Juridical Forms," in Power: Essential Works of Michel Foucault, 1954-1984: Volume Three, trans. Robert Hurley et al. Ed. James D. Faubion (New York: New Press, 2000), 86).
11. This idea, of "capillary power relations" that turn man into a subject of labor, is an idea which Foucault sometimes develops as a critique and at other times attributes to Marx, see for ex-ample "Les Mailles du pouvoir", in Dits et Écrits Tome IV: 1980-198, ed. D. Defert and F. Ewald (Paris: Éditions Gallimard, 1994) and less explicitly Discipline and Punish.
12. Etienne Balibar, Masses, Classes, Ideas: Studies on Politics and Philosophy Before and After Marx, trans. James Swenson (New York: Routledge, 1994), 53.
13. Christian Laval, L'homme économique: Essai sur les racines du néolibéralisme (Paris: Galli- mard, 2007), 17.
14. Karl Marx, Grundrisse: Foundations of the Critique of Political Economy, trans. Martin Nicolaus (New York: Penguin, 1973), 712.
15. Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, The Labor of Dionysus: A Critique of the State Form (Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota, 1994), 226.
16. Antonio Negri, The Politics of Subversion: A Manifesto for the Twenty-First Century, trans. James Newell (Oxford: Polity Press, 1989), 99.
17. Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality: Volume 1: An Introduction, trans. Robert Hurley (New York: Vintage, 1978), 101.
18. Wendy Brown, "American Nightmare: Neoliberalism, Neoconservatism, and Democrati- zation," Political Theory, 34, 6 (2006), 704.
19. Wendy Brown, "Neoliberalism and the End of Liberal Democracy," in Edgework: Critical Essays on Knowledge and Politics (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University, 2005), 43.
20. Maurizio Lazzarato, Les révolutions du capitalisme (Paris: Le Seuil, 2004), 19.