Power and subjectivity in the element of danger: for a critique of the strategic matrices of authoritarian liberalism through Foucault and Neumann

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to decentralize the debate on liberal and neoliberal authoritarianism through the reflections of Michel Foucault and Franz Neumann. While the former has been accused of failing to grasp the specificity of neoliberal political authoritarianism, the latter, although he has made important reflections on the point, has little presence in the debate. Carrying out an analysis of institutions from the relations of power and the technologies that make them function, both allow us to analyze the normative and subjective effects produced by the technologies of power based on the notion of danger and their authoritarian recodification, beyond therefore legal interventionism. Through a comparison of their reflections, the essay aims to show that: 1) Foucault’s and Neumann’s frameworks allow for two different ways of critiquing the strategic matrix of authoritarian liberalism and neoliberalism; 2) liberal authoritarianism, by aiming to hinder the democratization of the economy, was a pathway to fascism; 3) the specificity of neoliberal governing rationality, even in the variety of its more or less authoritarian manifestations, remains the extension of economic logic to institutions and individuals; 4) the governing of political anxiety, in both a Foucauldian and a Neumannian sense, continues to play a decisive role in neoliberal civil war strategies.