Note: This is a summary of my presentation in a panel entitled “The Disappearance of the
Autonomous Subject and of Self-Reflection: The Conditions for the Emergence of the
Neoliberal Subject and of Political and Ideological Fanaticism,” at the Congress of the Latin
American Psychoanalytic Federation (FEPAL), held in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, October
15–19, 2024. The other presentations were given by M. Taffarel (SBPSP) and M. do Amaral
(SBPSP).
At first glance, the diagnosis seems simple: we look at the United States and the return of
Trump, we observe what happened in Brazil with Bolsonaro, and in Argentina, the actions of
Milei. Nancy Fraser (2019) speaks of a global political crisis, whose common feature would
be the drastic weakening of the authority of the established political classes and parties. But if
one wishes to specify what remains constant behind that crisis, one finds that regimes of
government may vary in their politics of the recognition of rights—more or less progressive,
more or less reactionary—while the distributive-economic component persists: it is always
neoliberal. Hence the current interest in work on the production of a neoliberal subject.
Foucault (2007) showed that neoliberalism represents a mutation with respect to classical
liberalism: it is no longer a matter of the exchange of goods, but of competition as the
principle of the market. And what proves central for us is that these forms of the government
of others foster forms of the government of oneself that take on the same principles. The
neoliberal subject is the one who replicates those practices upon himself: he conducts himself
as an “entrepreneur of the self,” organizing his existence according to an entrepreneurial,
competitive and managerial model (Alemán, 2016), while enveloped in an imaginary of
freedom. The resulting forms of malaise are well known: depression, addictions, burnout, the
permanent feeling of being at fault, the assumption as a personal problem of what is a
structural problem of capitalism.
But a further step must be noted. Authors such as Agamben (2017) and Byung-Chul Han
(2021) suggest that power today operates upon new fields: no longer upon the body, but upon
the psyche, upon subjectivity itself. It is the turn that Margaret Thatcher announced in 1981:
the economy as the method, the soul as the objective. Hence the central relevance of this
moment for psychoanalysts.
When one inquires into the dominant affect of this subjectivity, there is considerable
agreement: rage, resentment and hatred lead the way, and their manipulation for political gain
is ever greater. Hatred is always directed at the different other, at a different form of
jouissance. Freud (1930) had already pointed out that attacking neighboring groups offers a
relatively comfortable satisfaction of aggressive tendencies, while at the same time
facilitating the internal cohesion of the group.
The Argentine case allows us to observe a specific operation: the direct attack on the cultural
devices that produce subjectivity. The questioning of non-binary identities, the dispute over
the memory of military terror, the calling into question of the Nunca Más (“Never Again”) as
the ground for the refounding of a civilized community (Hilb, 2018). A government may
have its own agenda regarding rights. But this does not seem to be a matter of proposing new
devices that would coexist in tension with existing ones, but rather of dismantling them
through direct attack. And those devices fulfill a function: to provide anchoring points for
subjectivity. We are witnessing, perhaps, the point of greatest fragility of the social body:
subjects deprived of the symbolic devices with which to identify, left with alternatives that
are — whether untimely, archaic, or something harder to name — uncomfortable even for
conservatism itself, and it is this loss of anchoring points, more than anything else, that leaves
them increasingly seized by their passions, more prone than ever to political manipulation.
References
- Agamben, G. (2017). Homo sacer. El poder soberano y la vida desnuda. Adriana Hidalgo editora, Buenos Aires.
- Alemán, J. (2016). Horizontes neoliberales en la subjetividad. Grama Ediciones, Buenos Aires.
- Chul Han, B. (2021). Psicopolítica. Herder, Barcelona.
- Foucault, M. (2007). Nacimiento de la Biopolítica. Curso en el Collège de France (1978–1979). Fondo de Cultura Económica, Buenos Aires.
- Freud, S. (1930). El malestar en la cultura. Amorrortu editores, Tomo XXI, Buenos Aires.
- Hilb, C. (2018). ¿Por qué no pasan los 70? No hay verdades sencillas para pasados complejos. Siglo XXI editores, Buenos Aires.