Description
Wendy Brown’s Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015) has proven a key resource for scholars seeking to understand the transformations in political economy that have come to dominate over the last fifty years. In that text, Brown builds on Foucault’s account of neoliberalism as an ‘order of reason’ emerging from classical liberalism and its self-interested subject (homo oeconomicus). However, she parts ways with Foucault in suggesting that, rather than being the consistent centre of liberal political subjectivity across recent centuries, homo oeconomicus has instead existed in parallel with a different, and more progressive, form of subjectivity, homo politicus, characterised by “moral reflection and association making” (2015, 88). Brown’s turn to homo politicus has been critiqued by Sam Chambers (2018), who argues that postulating alternative forms of subjectivity is not sufficient for challenging neoliberalism, which instead requires “alternative theories and practices that themselves produce and sustain new forms of subjectivity” (273).Informed by Chambers’ articulation, and turning to yet another neo-Latin term, borrowed from Joan Tronto (2017), this paper argues that the form of subjectivity most appropriate to challenging neoliberalism is homines curans, a vision of subjectivity in which care and dependence are central. Mindful of Chambers’ warning against simply positing alternative versions of subjectivity, the paper engages work by Bonnie Honig (2017) and David McIvor (2017) that responds to Brown, identifying sites of potential resistance in ideas of care and concern. Drawing on theories of the caring subject (Winnicott 1965) that have a long association with the ongoing project of social justice (Kellond 2019, 2022), these scholars distinguish practices that might produce and sustain new forms of subjectivity in which care is central. In this way, I suggest, they contribute to imagining homines curans as a necessary antidote to homo oeconomicus.
| Period | 31 Mar 2025 |
|---|---|
| Event title | Thinking with Wendy Brown: Democracy in Nihilistic Times |
| Event type | Conference |
| Location | Brighton , United KingdomShow on map |
| Degree of Recognition | International |