Between Self-Dominion and Self-Domination: Psychic Subjection in Neoliberalism

Abstract

This study is aimed to discuss the subjective implications of neoliberalism, whose ethics, based on the logic of competition and on the norm of the company, demand continuous work from the subject on themselves. Based on some assumptions of neoliberal rationality, such as the idea that the individual is the self-interested self in search of the best opportunities in the market, we propose a discussion around the modes of subjection from which and by which we are called to constitute ourselves as subjects, which, in neoliberalism, is transmuted from self-dominion, as an ethical operation that implies the relationship of oneself with oneself to self-domination, that is, self-instrumentalization. If the autocratic-self fostered by this rationality was able to turn desire into the will to power, the question that seems to be necessary to articulate, as a contribution of psychoanalysis to the field of politics, concerns the point of contact between this self-interested self of current societies and the subject of desire, and, from this unravelling, offer forms of resistance to the monopoly of subjectivities in neoliberalism.