New Political Science | 2019
In Pursuit of the Neoliberal Subject
Abstract
The possibility that a critical approach is grounded in what it critically approaches is indeed a paradox only a few would acknowledge, and certainly not as loudly as Derrida once did: “we can pronounce not a single destructive proposition which has not already had to slip into the form, the logic, and the postulations of precisely what it seeks to contest.” Likewise, The Neoliberal Subject: Resilience, Adaptation and Vulnerability, by David Chandler and Julian Reid, embodies a far less loud but nevertheless remarkable way of coming to terms with its own groundedness in what, otherwise, could be deemed a comfortably out-there object of criticism. This is not the whole story, though. Foregrounding the biopolitical problematic of security, Chandler and Reid brave yet another difficulty of the canonical critique of neoliberalism, namely, the invisibility of the “neoliberal subject.” This invisibility, the authors argue, denotes a subjectivity that is simultaneously problematized and problematizing. As such, the neoliberal conception of agency entails more than a matter of conceptual ambivalence; arguably, it relies on our turning a blind eye to its inherent ambivalent conceptualization. This is all the more the case with the “resilient subject” which postulates an understanding of life “as a permanent process of continual adaptation to threats and dangers.” At hand is an everfailing security program which is nevertheless sustained, the authors explain, by blaming “societal” insecurity on the agent’s failure to adapt. The neoliberal subject, in other words, is a secure subject, but as deferred indefinitely to the future; rather than being secured, s/he embodies a neoliberal conception of “security” as programmatic understanding of life. How then to explain the ongoing success of this conceptually ambivalent “agency”? Remarkably, the book’s response is not so much an explanation as it is an exemplification: that agency is normally “crucial to the formation of human subjectivity,” points to a strategic openendedness one can trace back to the normativity of the biopolitical vision of life. It is an ambivalent “life” that permanently escapes the political present, for it “cannot be secured without destroying it”; like the neoliberal “subject,” the objectification of life remains conveniently invisible to the security program that effectively deploys it. Where neoliberalism hides its vital ambivalence behind the veil of strategic open-endedness, The Neoliberal Subject reciprocates with a dialogic counter-strategy. Thus, it avoids “replay[ing] neoliberalism’s own understandings of the limits of human subjectivity.” The canonical critique of neoliberalism is able to assert critical authority by uncritically assuming the presence of a deferred “neoliberal subject.” Here, by contrast, the counter-strategy is to refer it back to its very present insecurity, that is, to its open-endedly “invisible” status.