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The Ordinary Superstition of Subjectivity

Liberalism and Technostructural Violence

Free University of Berlin, papado{at}zedat.fu-berlin.de

This paper attempts to provide evidence for the thesis that the concept of subjectivity is linked to contemporary liberal geoculture, especially new regulation practices and new forms of violence that started to become visible during the 1980s and 1990s. Two conceptualizations of subjectivity will be examined: traditional Marxist accounts, which focus on the notion of interest, and post-structuralist accounts, which emphasize the self-referential character of subjectivity. I will argue that, despite the critical impetus of both traditions, their historical genesis can be traced to the hegemony of North Atlantic liberal ideology. Furthermore, their broad application in the social sciences and in psychology corresponds to the present-day neo-liberal reorganization of societal conditions and the trans-formation of liberalism to geoculture.

So that in the first place, I put for a general inclination of all mankind, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death. And the cause of this is not always that a man hopes for a more intensive delight than he has already attained to, or that he cannot be content with a moderate power, but because he cannot assure the power and means to live well, which he hath present, without the acquisition of more. (Hobbes, 1994, p. 58)

Key Words: neo-liberalism • post-structuralism • subjectivity • traditional • Marxism • violence

Theory & Psychology, Vol. 13, No. 1, 73-93 (2003)
DOI: 10.1177/0959354303013001763


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