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Owning the Bullet: Responsibilization, Biopolitics, and the Neoliberal Ethics of Self-Blame

Abstract

This essay examines the logic of neoliberal responsibilization through an illustrative metaphor: “If someone shoots you in the head, then the bullet in your brain is you—you must own the bullet.” This hyperbolic statement condenses a broader moral economy in which subjects are compelled to interpret structural harm as personal failure and to convert suffering into evidence of autonomy. Drawing on Michel Foucault’s analysis of biopolitics, Wendy Brown’s critique of neoliberal rationality, and Giorgio Agamben’s theorization of bare life, the essay argues that neoliberalism transforms exposure to violence into a test of self-management. The result is a profound moral displacement: power conceals itself behind the idiom of choice, and responsibility becomes indistinguishable from complicity. Against this, the essay proposes an ethics of disowning—a refusal to interpret wounds as self-authored or self-deserved.

1. Introduction

“If someone shoots you in the head, then the bullet in your brain is you—you must own the bullet.” On its surface, this statement is absurd. A bullet is an instrument of violence, not a sign of agency. Yet the phrase captures with uncanny precision the moral logic of neoliberal responsibilization, in which all outcomes—whether success or catastrophe—are reframed as the consequences of individual choice. The imperative to “own” one’s condition extends beyond the economic sphere into domains of health, psychology, and morality. In this totalizing ethos of self-management, even injury must be understood as failure to anticipate risk.

The claim that one “chose to be shot” dramatizes the neoliberal conflation of autonomy and accountability. It expresses, in grotesque miniature, how neoliberal governance operates through the internalization of blame. The subject is not coerced but persuaded to read their own suffering as evidence of poor investment, weak resilience, or insufficient adaptability. This essay interprets that paradox through three overlapping theoretical frameworks: Foucault’s concept of biopolitics, Brown’s account of neoliberal subject formation, and Agamben’s notion of bare life. Together, these perspectives reveal how contemporary power transforms structural vulnerability into moral responsibility—and why reclaiming the ability not to “own the bullet” may constitute an ethical act.

2. From Liberal Autonomy to Neoliberal Self-Management

The moral genealogy of responsibilization begins with classical liberalism’s principle of self-ownership. For thinkers such as Locke, self-ownership was a defense against external domination: one’s body, labor, and conscience were inalienable. However, under neoliberalism, this principle mutates. The self no longer merely possesses itself; it must continuously produce, optimize, and invest in itself as human capital (Brown, 2015). The liberal subject’s freedom from interference becomes the neoliberal subject’s freedom to compete.

Whereas classical liberalism presupposed an autonomous rational individual, neoliberalism presupposes an entrepreneurial self—an entity defined not by its rights but by its capacity to manage risk and generate value. As Brown (2015) observes, neoliberal rationality “economizes the political,” transforming citizens into firms of the self. Every social domain is recoded in market terms: health becomes “self-care,” education becomes “skill acquisition,” and political participation becomes “brand differentiation.”

Within this framework, vulnerability appears as mismanagement. To be exploited, impoverished, or harmed is to have failed in one’s fiduciary duties to oneself. The liberal ideal of self-mastery thus reappears as a demand for self-surveillance. The individual is enjoined to internalize structural precarity as a moral flaw, a failure to plan adequately for foreseeable contingencies. The metaphor of “owning the bullet” captures this inversion: the victim of violence becomes its moral author.

3. Foucault and the Biopolitical Turn

Foucault’s account of the transition from sovereign to biopolitical power helps clarify how this moral displacement occurs. In disciplinary societies, power operates through surveillance, regulation, and normalization; it seeks to produce compliant bodies (Foucault, 1977). In biopolitical societies, power no longer simply represses or punishes—it manages the conditions of life itself (Foucault, 2003). The modern state concerns itself with population health, productivity, and longevity. Death, in this schema, is not abolished but recontextualized: it appears as the failure of management.

Neoliberalism extends this managerial logic by relocating biopolitical responsibility from the state to the individual. The subject becomes both the site and the agent of governance. Instead of being disciplined by institutions, one disciplines oneself through metrics of performance and self-improvement. Foucault’s lectures on governmentality describe precisely this form of indirect control, in which freedom becomes the medium of power rather than its antithesis (Foucault, 2008).

When filtered through neoliberal rationality, biopolitics transforms into auto-biopolitics. The management of life becomes an individual enterprise. Health, wealth, and emotional stability are recast as personal investments, while illness, debt, and depression are construed as strategic errors. The social and economic structures that shape vulnerability disappear behind the veil of personal responsibility. The “bullet” that penetrates the self—whether literal violence or systemic harm—is interpreted as the outcome of inadequate self-governance.

4. Wendy Brown and the Economization of the Political

Wendy Brown’s analysis of neoliberalism as a political rationality, rather than a merely economic policy regime, provides the critical hinge for understanding this transformation. In Undoing the Demos, Brown (2015) argues that neoliberal reason remakes the subject as “human capital” and the state as an enterprise dedicated to fostering competitiveness. Political freedom is hollowed out and replaced by market rationality; democratic deliberation gives way to cost-benefit calculation.

This economization of life produces a paradoxical form of moralization. While neoliberal ideology celebrates freedom, it simultaneously imposes an ethic of relentless accountability. To be free is to be responsible, and to be responsible is to bear the full moral weight of one’s condition. Structural inequality and social violence are reinterpreted as data points in a personal ledger of risk and reward.

Brown identifies in this shift a profound reconfiguration of citizenship. The neoliberal citizen no longer participates in collective deliberation but manages their own exposure to insecurity. Social problems are redescribed as private failures; systemic crises as individual lapses of foresight. The insistence on “owning the bullet” epitomizes this logic: it collapses the political distinction between victim and agent, making the experience of harm itself evidence of moral deficiency.

This framework also explains why neoliberal societies exhibit a peculiar tolerance for violence and precarity. If suffering is always self-inflicted, then compassion becomes irrational, and solidarity becomes inefficient. The wounded are not to be helped but instructed—to take responsibility, to learn resilience, to “grow” from the wound. Violence is thereby moralized as pedagogy.

5. Agamben and the Ethics of Exposure

While Brown and Foucault elucidate the rationalities of neoliberal power, Giorgio Agamben offers a complementary account of its existential consequences. His notion of bare life—life that can be killed but not sacrificed—captures the condition of subjects stripped of political significance but preserved as biological matter (Agamben, 1998). The modern state, for Agamben, operates through the production of zones where law and life blur, rendering certain lives expendable.

Neoliberalism extends this logic into everyday existence. The distinction between the politically qualified life (bios) and mere biological life (zoē) collapses not at the margins but at the center. The worker, the consumer, the debtor, and the patient all inhabit forms of exposed life—lives maintained for productivity yet perpetually disposable.

However, in the neoliberal variant, exposure masquerades as empowerment. The subject is taught to interpret precarity as freedom, vulnerability as flexibility, and exploitation as opportunity. Agamben’s figure of the homo sacer—the one who can be killed with impunity—finds its contemporary echo in the self-entrepreneur who must consent to their own exhaustion.

The command to “own the bullet” thus names a new mode of sovereign violence: the demand that the subject take responsibility for their own subjection. The state and market no longer need to coerce consent; they require only that individuals frame their suffering as self-authored. In this way, neoliberalism transforms exposure itself into a moral virtue.

6. The Bullet as Moral Metaphor

Revisited through these theoretical lenses, the “bullet” functions as a metaphor for the internalization of structural violence. It condenses three operations: the privatization of harm, the moralization of failure, and the erasure of causality.

First, the privatization of harm: the bullet signifies the displacement of systemic violence onto the individual psyche. Social inequalities, economic dispossession, and political abandonment are reframed as personal misfortunes. The site of intervention shifts from the collective to the psychological.

Second, the moralization of failure: neoliberalism reconfigures injury as a test of character. The victim must display resilience, interpret suffering as opportunity, and narrate survival as self-improvement. Pain becomes a metric of worth, transforming wounds into evidence of moral fitness.

Third, the erasure of causality: the line between action and reaction, perpetrator and victim, dissolves. The bullet, once an emblem of external violence, becomes an index of internal responsibility. In this sense, the metaphor dramatizes what Brown (2015) describes as the “undoing of the demos”—the collapse of the political field into the moral psychology of the individual.

The resulting subject is a paradox: endlessly responsible yet powerless to alter the conditions of responsibility. They are sovereign only in the management of their own damage.

7. Toward an Ethics of Disowning

If neoliberal power operates through the injunction to own one’s suffering, then resistance may begin with disowning. To “disown the bullet” is not to deny injury but to refuse its moral translation into personal failure. It is to reintroduce mediation—to insist that harm arises within systems, relations, and histories that exceed individual choice.

Such an ethics of disowning would involve reclaiming the collective dimension of vulnerability. Rather than interpreting pain as a sign of mismanagement, it would treat it as evidence of shared exposure. In doing so, it would restore the political meaning that neoliberalism has evacuated from suffering.

This gesture resonates with Agamben’s call for inoperativity—the suspension of the function assigned by power (Agamben, 2019). To become inoperative in this sense is to interrupt the cycle of moral self-accounting that neoliberalism enforces. Similarly, Brown’s appeal to re-politicize the self requires confronting the ways in which economic rationality has colonized ethical life.

Disowning the bullet, then, is not passivity but counter-conduct: an act of refusing to interpret violence through the idiom of personal responsibility. It creates space for solidarity, critique, and mourning—forms of relation that neoliberal reason deems inefficient.

8. Conclusion

The metaphor of “owning the bullet” encapsulates the moral absurdity of neoliberal subject formation. It reveals a world in which even destruction must be self-authored, where freedom consists in consenting to one’s own harm. Through the convergence of Foucault’s biopolitical analysis, Brown’s critique of economized reason, and Agamben’s account of exposure, this essay has traced how responsibility becomes indistinguishable from complicity under neoliberalism.

In this moral economy, the subject’s task is to interpret every wound as evidence of autonomy—to see being shot as a failure of strategy rather than an act of violence. The political consequence is paralysis: if all harm is self-inflicted, then no collective redress is possible.

An ethics of disowning seeks to reopen that political horizon. It insists that the bullet is not the self, that vulnerability is not failure, and that responsibility does not cancel the reality of harm. To “own the bullet” is to complete the circuit of neoliberal power; to refuse ownership is to begin imagining another form of life.

References

Agamben, G. (1998). Homo sacer: Sovereign power and bare life (D. Heller-Roazen, Trans.). Stanford University Press.

Agamben, G. (2019). The use of bodies (A. Kotsko, Trans.). Stanford University Press.

Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books.

Dardot, P., & Laval, C. (2013). The new way of the world: On neoliberal society (G. Elliott, Trans.). Verso.

Foucault, M. (1977). Discipline and punish: The birth of the prison (A. Sheridan, Trans.). Pantheon Books.

Foucault, M. (2003). “Society must be defended”: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1975–1976 (D. Macey, Trans.). Picador.

Foucault, M. (2008). The birth of biopolitics: Lectures at the Collège de France, 1978–1979 (G. Burchell, Trans.). Palgrave Macmillan.

Rose, N. (1999). Powers of freedom: Reframing political thought. Cambridge University Press.

LLM