Sovereignty Without Power: The Paradox of Neoliberal Agency

Brown’s insight is that neoliberalism doesn’t eliminate sovereignty—it dislocates it. The sovereign decision, once the prerogative of the state or collective institutions, is dispersed across atomized individuals, who are compelled to act as if they possess full agency while being structurally deprived of the conditions that make agency meaningful.

• This is sovereignty as simulation: a hollowed-out form of decision-making that mimics autonomy but enacts abandonment.

• The subject becomes both ruler and ruled, enacting decisions that are structurally coerced yet morally owned.

The Bullet as Metaphor: Internalized Violence and the Collapse of Causality

Your metaphor—“the bullet in your brain is you”—is a chilling condensation of neoliberal logic:

• Violence is privatized: The system’s harm is reframed as personal failure.

• Causality is erased: The distinction between perpetrator and victim dissolves.

• Consent is coerced: The subject must own the conditions of their own destruction.

This echoes Brown’s warning that neoliberalism moralizes structural breakdown, turning systemic deprivation into personal inadequacy. It also resonates with Foucault’s notion of governing through freedom—where power operates not by command but by shaping the conditions of choice.

Sophie’s Choice and the Sovereign Exception

The invocation of Sophie’s Choice is devastatingly apt. Sophie is forced to enact a sovereign decision in a context where sovereignty properly belongs to the totalitarian structure. This dramatizes:

• The perversion of sovereignty: Decision-making imposed under duress, where choice is a form of violence.

• The collapse of the political into the personal: The subject bears the weight of decisions that should never have been theirs to make.

This parallels the neoliberal subject’s condition: micro-sovereign crises enacted daily under the guise of freedom, but structured by deprivation.