Neoliberalism as a booster of precarity

Abstract

From the understandings of Michel Foucault and the development made by Wendy Brown that neoliberal governmentality is capable of producing new subjects, this paper aims to understand how neoliberalism can be used as a machine that produces precarity, in terms driven by Judith Butler. Therefore, the goal is to investigate if the neoliberal governmentality supports the maintenance of certain populations in precarious situations. We argue that the neoliberal subject is disengaged from the ethical dimension, dealing with the “other” without a common good perception. The comprehension about inequalities and about differences trends to be displaced from the public sphere to the private sphere, in the core of a conception of meritocracy that seeks to charge the excluded people for their misery and their failures. Thence, through a differential distribution of the grief, we will see different necropolitical mechanisms, of segregation and exclusion of undesirable groups.