Brown

I’ve lately been rereading his lectures on neoliberalism and one thing I’m very struck by is that there is an absent figure in Foucault’s own formulation of modernity, when he offers us the picture of homo economicus and homo juridicus as the two sides of governance and the human being in modernity. Foucault just says you’ve got on the one hand the subject of interest, homo economicus and on the other hand homo juridicus, the derivative from sovereignty, the creature who’s limiting sovereignty. But for Foucault there’s no homo politicus, there’s no subject of the demos, there’s no democrat, there’s only a creature of rights and a creature of interest. It’s an extremely individually oriented formulation of what the modern order is. There’s the state, there’s the economy and then there’s the subject oriented to the economy by interests and toward the state by rights. But isn’t it striking for a French thinker that there’s no democratic subject, no subject oriented, as part of the demos, toward the question of sovereignty by or for the people?

Wendy Brown