Sovereign Displacement

Wendy Brown’s work—especially in Undoing the Demos and In the Ruins of Neoliberalism—offers a powerful lens for understanding how responsibilization operates as a form of sovereign displacement. Brown warns that this enforced self-governance, absent institutional or communal scaffolding, breeds burnout, guilt, and despair. Structural failures are refigured as moral ones; social breakdown is privatized as personal inadequacy. Responsibilization thus functions not as empowerment but as a technology of abandonment—a way of governing through freedom, as Foucault might say, and of producing subjects who internalize both command and blame.

The cruelty lies in the architecture of choice itself. The neoliberal subject must continually decide between options that are not truly choices—between competing necessities, each bearing a cost that cannot be absorbed. Health or work, care or survival, time or subsistence. The act of choosing becomes compulsory, yet hollow: every decision confirms the subject’s responsibility while exposing their powerlessness.

Neoliberal life thus unfolds as a series of coerced decisions under manufactured scarcity, where the moral weight of freedom is imposed precisely where freedom is least possible. One is commanded to act as sovereign in situations structured by deprivation. The paradox is total: decision without agency, responsibility without support.

Everyday existence becomes a field of micro-sovereign crises. You must decide, and you must bear the consequences, even when the horizon of possible action has been foreclosed. Brown helps us see that this is not the expansion of freedom but its simulation—abandonment disguised as agency. The sovereign decision has not disappeared; it has been internalized, fragmented, and weaponized against those least equipped to bear its weight.

LLM