“L’entreprise de soi, un nouvel âge,” interview with Bob Aubrey, Autrement 192 (2000): 101.
Richard Cantillon, An Essay on Economic Theory, trans. Mark Thornton and Chantal Saucier (Ludwig von Mises Institute, Alabama, 2010), 76.
Le Figaro, August 30, 2005.
On this precise point, Ulrich Beck is wrong to straightforwardly contrast classical liberalism’s ontology of interests with the ontology of risk of contemporary capitalism, bourgeois society governed by self-interest with modern society governed by risk (The Risk Society, trans. Mark Ritter [London: Sage, 1992
“Entretien avec François Ewald,” Nouveaux regards 21 (Spring 2003).
Cf. Alain Ehrenberg, Le Culte de la performance (Paris: Hachette, 1999).
Ibid., 14. Ehrenberg rightly notes that Max Weber had anticipated this trend: “In the United States, on the very site of its paroxysm, the pursuit of wealth, stripped of its ethico-religious meaning, is today tending to become combined with purely agonistic passions—something that invariably endows it with the character of a sport” (quoted on 176).
Cf. Roland Gori and Pierre Le Coz, L’Empire des coachs. Une nouvelle forme de contrôle social (Paris: Albin Michel, 2006), 7ff.
Daniel Bell, The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism (New York: Basic Books, 1976).
This intensification and acceleration gave Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari the initial idea for a different political economy—one not separate from libidinal economy—set out in Anti-Oedipus and A Thousand Plateaus. For them, capitalism can only function by liberating desiring flows that exceed the social and political frameworks organized for the reproduction of the system of production. This is the sense in which the process of subjectivation peculiar to capitalism is characterized as “schizophrenic.” However, if capitalism can only function by liberating ever stronger doses of libidinal energy that “decode” and “deterritorialize,” it constantly seeks to reincorporate them into the productive machine: “The more the capitalist machine deterritorializes, decoding and axiomatizing flows in order to extract surplus value from them, the more its ancillary apparatuses, such as government bureaucracies and the forces of law and order, do their utmost to reterritorialize them, absorbing in the process a larger and larger share of surplus value” (Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, Anti-Oedipus: Capitalism and Schizophrenia, trans. Robert Hurley, Mark Seem, and Helen R. Lane [New York: Viking Press, 1977], 34–5). While in the 1970s Deleuze stressed the “paranoiac” repressive machines that vainly attempt to master desire’s lines of flight, he later came to emphasize the relationship between this liberation of flows of desire and apparatuses for directing flows in the “society of control,” between the mode of subjectivation by stimulation of “desire” and the generalized evaluation of performance. Cf. Gilles Deleuze, “Control and Becoming” and “Postscript on Control Societies,” in Negotiations 1972–1990, trans. Martin Joughin (New York: Columbia University Press, 1997).
The terms “trans-subjectivation” and “self-subjectivation” are proposed by Foucault to account for the difference between third- and fourth-century Christian asceticism and the Hellenistic era’s “culture of self.” Cf. Foucault, Hermeneutics of the Subject, 214.
In the sense that the Latin ultra means "beyond.” Ultra-subjectivation is therefore not an exaggerated or excessive subjectivation, but one that always aims at a beyond-the-self in the self.
Nikolas Rose, Governing the Soul: The Shaping of the Private Self, 2nd ed. (London: Free Association Books, 1999), vii. However, Rose makes an error in his dating. The “psy” turn does not date from the late nineteenth century, but began earlier. Even if it was not detached from physiology at the time, the beginning of “psy” discourse was contemporaneous with the birth of political economy and liberal governmentality. To govern conduct, it was necessary to know how to influence the formation of motives—that is, play on the “psychological dynamic,” in the phrase coined by Bentham.
Ibid., 88.
Let us recall that for Freud adaptation to reality, far from signifying renunciation of any pleasure, itself generates a certain form of pleasure.
See Rose, Inventing Ourselves: Psychology, Power and Personhood (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996).
Cf. on this point Charles Melman’s reflections in L’Homme sans gravité. Jouir à tout prix, interview with Jean-Pierre Lebrun (Paris: Denoël, 2002).
In Lacan, castration is understood as separation from enjoyment of the mother by dint of entry into the symbolic order. Quoted in Dufour, L’Art de réduire les têtes. Sur la nouvelle servitude de l’homme libéré à l’ère du capitalisme total (Paris: Denoël, 2003), 122–3 (“Ou pire” seminar, session of February 3, 1972; seminar at Saint-Anne, “Le savoir du psychanalyse,” session of January 6, 1972).
Some managerial apologias for the creation of paranoid behavior are not without interest. In Only the Paranoid Survive (New York: Doubleday, 1996), Andrew Grove, the president of Intel Corporation, advocates a method of leadership directly linking the norm of competition to a “psychotizing” management of the workforce: “Fear of competition, fear of bankruptcy, fear of being wrong and fear of losing can all be powerful motivators. How do we cultivate fear of losing in our employees? We can only do that if we feel it ourselves” (117).
Olivier Rey, Une folle solitude. Le fantasme de l’homme autoconstruit (Paris: Seuil, 2006).
See Alain Ehrenberg, L’Individu incertain (Paris: Hachette, 1996). Ehrenberg rightly notes that the triumphant individual and the suffering individual are the “two facets of self-government” (18).
