Abstract
This paper presents a framework for understanding the psychic life of governmentality. It builds upon analyses of power developed by Slavoj Žižek and Judith Butler to suggest the psychic dimensions of sovereignty and discipline, respectively, and uses Freud’s notion of the uncanny to develop an understanding of the psychic aspect of government. In so doing, it suggests that subjects’ complicity in their subjectivation cannot be understood as being purely the effect of their positioning within discourse. Rather, their complicity has an affective dimension. Where a regime of power is able to incite that dimension, it has an increased capacity to become totalising in its effects. The example of the psychology‐derived self‐help movement – as a mode of liberal governance – is used to demonstrate this point.
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