Political Agency: The Subject and the Citizen in the Time of Neoliberal Global Capitalism

Authors

  • Marina Gržinić

DOI:

https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i14.205

Keywords:

citizen, subject, biopolitics, necropolitics, biopower, necropower, sovereignty and governmentality

Abstract

Today the notion of the ‘subject’ in the first capitalist world is reserved only for the citizens (fully acknowledged) as such of the first capitalist neoliberal world. Therefore the ‘old’ political ‘subjects’ are seen as a form of an archaic subjectivity and delegated to the so-called third worlds’ capitalisms. The consequences are terminal regarding political agency. Or to reformulate this going back to the most significant shift in the historicization of capitalism, the shift from biocapitalism to necrocapitalism (the shift, break and simultaneity of biopolitics and necropolitics and as well biopower and necropower), we see a twofold mechanism at work. First, if necropolitics presents a new mode of governmentality for neoliberal global capitalism that is a decision over the administration of death (as being opposed to biopolitics as a control over life) then we must ask in which concrete, political, economic and social ideological situation the sovereign decision over death without impunity is normalized and accepted. Second, who are those that are ‘selected’ and targeted as the goal of this necro ‘sovereign’ decision? The answers will pull a paradoxical difference inside the notion of the subject and as well respond to why any demand regarding political subjectivities in the time of a neoliberal global capitalism seems a bad joke and something obsolete.

Author Biography

Marina Gržinić

Institute of Philosophy ZRC SAZU Ljubljana
Slovenia

Marina Gržinić is a philosopher, theoretician and artist that lives in Ljubljana (Slovenia) and works in Ljubljana and Vienna. She works as research advisor at the Institute of Philosophy at SRC SASA (Ljubljana, Slovenia). Since 2003 she is a Full Professor at the Academy of Fine Arts Vienna, in charge of the study program Post-Conceptual Art Practices. She has been involved in video art since 1982. In collaboration with Aina Šmid (Ljubljana) she has produced more than 30 video art projects, a short film, numerous video and media installations, Internet websites and an interactive CD-ROM. She publishes extensively and lectures worldwide.

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Published

15.10.2017

How to Cite

Gržinić, M. (2017). Political Agency: The Subject and the Citizen in the Time of Neoliberal Global Capitalism. AM Journal of Art and Media Studies, (14), 1–11. https://doi.org/10.25038/am.v0i14.205