The neoliberal regime reappropriated Foucault’s ethics of the self into a self-exploitation device
Evidence
In fact, the blind spot in Foucault’s analysis is the technology of power under the neoliberal regime. Foucault did not see that the neoliberal regime utterly claims the technology of the self for its own purposes: perpetual self-optimization – as the exemplary neoliberal technology of the self – represents nothing so much as a highly efficient mode of domination and exploitation. As an ‘entrepreneur of himself’, the neoliberal achievement-subject engages in auto-exploitation willingly – and even passionately. The self-as-a-work-of-art amounts to a beautiful but deceptive illusion that the neoliberal regime maintains in order to exhaust its resources entirely. — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics, 68
Categorization
- XREF: connects to: Self-optimization serves systemic market function, not personal flourishing; Self-exploiting subject makes Hegel’s slave-master dialectic collapse — Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New…, 14; Foucault’s biopolitics resembles but misleads analysis of everyday neoliberalism — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 262 (+8 more)
Related
- The neoliberal self-optimization ethic functions as a disguised form of self-exploitation (similarity 0.92)
- Neoliberalism governs people by getting them to self-regulate toward economic ideals. (similarity 0.83)
- Foucault’s biopolitics resembles but misleads analysis of everyday neoliberalism (similarity 0.83)
- Foucault pioneered the critique of human capital theory as self-disintegration (similarity 0.82)
- Neoliberal governability extends beyond what Foucault imagined through maximum freedom (similarity 0.82)
- Foucault’s prescience about everyday neoliberalism came from adopting neoliberal doctrine (similarity 0.82)
- Neoliberal domination works by making subjects act on themselves and call it freedom (similarity 0.81)
- Foucault frames neoliberalism as a remaking of liberal governmentality rather than an economic break (similarity 0.81)
- Foucault’s governmentality concept may itself be a cog in the neoliberal regime of truth (similarity 0.81)
- Neoliberalism replaces labor with human capital and dissolves the stable self (similarity 0.80)
- Neoliberalism framed itself as a defence of individual freedom against all collectivist systems. (similarity 0.80)
- Foucault’s account of neoliberalism missed its transnational and postnational dimensions (similarity 0.80)
- Neoliberalism was only emergent in Foucault’s time, not yet hegemonic (similarity 0.80)
- Foucault’s lectures were not a neo-Marxist critique of neoliberalism (similarity 0.80)
- Neoliberalism transforms the self so that crises stop being read as system failures (similarity 0.80)
Broader Connections
- Foucault’s prescience about everyday neoliberalism came from adopting neoliberal doctrine
#corroborates(0.90) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 278 - Foucault’s governmentality concept may itself be a cog in the neoliberal regime of truth
#corroborates(0.85) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 1951 - Foucault’s biopolitics resembles but misleads analysis of everyday neoliberalism
#corroborates(0.80) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 262 - Neoliberalism replaces labor with human capital and dissolves the stable self
#expands(0.75) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 162 - Neoliberalism transformed even the criteria for individual self-evaluation
#expands(0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 747 - Neoliberalism was only emergent in Foucault’s time, not yet hegemonic
#qualifies(0.75) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 90 - Foucault frames neoliberalism as a remaking of liberal governmentality rather than an economic break
#contradicts(0.72) — Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos, 87 - Neoliberalism replaces class analysis with a cynical catechism of limitless self-transformation
#expands(0.70) — Philip Mirowski, Never Let a Serious Crisis Go to Waste, 332