Human Capital and Self-Entrepreneurship. The Concept of Robbed Time.

Abstract

The notions of ″human capital″ and ″self-entrepreneurship″ are by now widespread. The present work takes a critical look at their pervasive acceptance and stresses the self-exploitation to which they give rise. The concept of self-entrepreneurship needs to take into account, in fact, the nature of a revolution in temporal phenomenology. This revolution not only blurs the distinction between time dedicated to life and time dedicated to one's profession. It means that time spent on whatever is traditionally irrelevant to work is potentially time robbed from successful self-entrepreneurship. An analysis is made, lastly, of the relationship between body and ″bio-labor″, recognizable in the emergence of new forms of manual labor. Emblematic, in this sense, is gestational surrogacy. This provides an opportunity to rediscover the pregnancy of M. Foucault's biopolitical interpretation of neoliberalism as opposed to the more recent category of ″psychopolitics″ defined by B.C. Han. In the current scenario, indeed, the body maintains a role that remains as central as it is paradoxical, on account of its configuration as an ″entrepreneurial resource″.