The Making of Neoliberal Subjectivity: From the Entrepreneur of the Self to the Indebted Man

Abstract

This paper proposes a critical reflection on neoliberal subjectivity as an effect of a specific mode of governmentality, retrieving and expanding Michel Foucault’s diagnosis. In this context, it considers the presuppositions on which neoliberal rationality lies as a form of governing society and producing subjectivities through dispositifs such as generalized competition, the paradigmatic figure of which would be human capital, an entrepreneur of himself that – after four decades of hegemony of financial capitalism – became an indebted man. In this sense, this paper not only analyzes apparatuses of control that shape neoliberal subjectivities, but also takes into account the crucial role played by financial capital and the massive production of debt as dispositive of control of subjectivities as well as of capture of potentialities. Following the studies of Maurizio Lazzarato, this paper maintains that debt intervenes on individuals and populations – and also on dividuals, produced by the informational apparatuses of modulation and control at distance.