Jason Read 2009 ISSN: 1832-5203 Foucault Studies, No 6, pp. 25-36, February 2009
ARTICLE
A Genealogy of Homo-Economicus: Neoliberalism and the Production of Subjectivity Jason Read, The University of Southern Maine ABSTRACT: This article examines Michel Foucault’s critical investigation of neoliberalism in the course published as Naissance de la biopolitique: Cours au Collège de France, 1978-1979. Foucault’s lectures are interrogated along two axes. First, examining the way in which neoliberalism can be viewed as a particular production of subjectivity, as a way in which individuals are constituted as subjects of “human capital.” Secondly, Foucault’s analyses is augmented and critically examined in light of other critical work on neoliberalism by Wendy Brown, David Harvey, Christian Laval, Maurizo Lazzarato, and Antonio Negri. Of these various debates and discussions, the paper argues that the discussion of real subsumption in Marx and Negri is most important for understanding the specific politics of neoliberalism. Finally, the paper argues that neoliberalism entails a fundamental reexamination of the tools of critical thought, an examination of how freedom can constitute a form of subjection. Keywords: Foucault, Neoliberalism, Governmentality, real subsumption, subjectivity. In the opening pages of David Harvey’s A Brief History of Neoliberalism we find the following statement “Neoliberalism... has pervasive effects on ways of thought to the point where it has become incorporated into the common-sense way many of us interpret, live in, and understand the world.” 1 While Harvey’s book presents a great deal of research on neoliberalism, presenting its origins in such academic institutions as the “Chicago School,” its spread in the initial experiments in Chile, and its return to the countries of its origin through the regimes of Reagan and Thatcher, as well as its effects on China and the rest of the world, the actual process by which it became hegemonic, to the point of becoming common sense, is not examined. While it might be wrong to look for philosophy in a work which is primarily a work of history, a “brief” history at that, aimed at shedding light on the current conjuncture, it is worth 1
David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 3.
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