Filozofska istraživanja, Vol. 38 No. 3, 2018.
Original scientific paper
https://doi.org/10.21464/fi38314
Against the Individual: Deindividualized Political Subject
Adriana Zaharijević
orcid.org/0000-0003-4884-7158
; Institut za filozofiju i društvenu teoriju, Kraljice Natalije 45, RS-11000 Beograd
Abstract
The text is based on two premises. The first is that we live in the times of neoliberalism, and the second is that the political subject of neoliberalism is the individual, the "one" qualified as indivisible, independent, sole owner of one's self. To define what an individual is, I will revisit several 19th-century claims which at the same time posit individual as an empty universal – anyone qualifies for entitlement of an individual – and reveal it as profoundly exclusionary – as the holder of entitlements. I will claim that the indivisibility of an individual is also the basis for its understanding as sovereign and self-actualized. Liberal politicization of a sovereign possessor of interests introduces not only homo oeconomicus, but it also integrates economic mode of governmentality into the sphere of the political, it becoming a space of incessant play of exclusions and inclusions. If another kind of political imaginary is to be developed, I argue we need to distance ourselves from the figure of the individual, bearing in mind that homo oeconomicus triumphs today as the exhaustive figure of the human, amidst the patently unequal distribution not only of precarity but also of vulnerability. Critical engagement with neoliberalism assumes engaging with the political centrality of a figure of an agentic individual.
Keywords
individual; homo oeconomicus; homo politicus; dependence; sovereignty; proprietor; Michel Foucault; John Locke; Judith Butler; Wendy Brown
Hrčak ID:
215039
URI
Publication date:
13.11.2018.
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