Abstract
The paper is constructed around the issues involved for the critical interrogation of the instrumental rationality generating political thoughtlessness in the following claim: “Humanity is in crisis—and there is no exit from that crisis other than solidarity of humans”. [Zygmunt Bauman] To even interrogate this as a crisis requires a depth-analysis of the hegemony of subject-formation, and this occurs in two markedly different ways. The first takes shape around a critical investigation of the neoliberalisation of subjectivity through Francis Fukuyama’s important text, The End of History and the Last Man. The second subjects the neoliberal post-political global subject to a competing antagonistic political construal in Samuel Huntington’s influential The Clash of Civilizations. The implication is of their importance to a genealogy of the range of contemporary political possibilities. The suggested repair takes the form of a particular gesture: a gesture towards subjecting the globally fractured subject takes shape within a theological configuration in terms of a Christic politics of neighbourliness.
Highlights
The paper is constructed around the issues involved for the critical interrogation of the instrumental rationality generating political thoughtlessness in the following claim: “Humanity is in crisis—and there is no exit from that crisis other than solidarity of humans”. [Zygmunt Bauman]
Fukuyama’s vision of civilly-conducted forms of free political and rational economic competition and peaceable “letting prices be determined by market mechanisms” is distinctly unconvincing when reflected in his exceedingly glib claims about both the nature of neoliberal capital and its capacity to refigure all lives for flourishing
He is unaware of the fact that neoliberalism is a performative rationality, “a governing rationality generating distinctive kinds of subjects, forms of conduct, and orders of social meaning and value”
Summary
With the tearing down of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the impending collapse of Soviet Communism, Francis Fukyama confidently, and in “triumphalistic notes”, declares “the end of history”.30 The phrase is not original to him, . Fukuyama’s vision of civilly-conducted forms of free political and rational economic competition and peaceable “letting prices be determined by market mechanisms” is distinctly unconvincing when reflected in his exceedingly glib claims about both the nature of neoliberal capital and its capacity to refigure all lives for flourishing.45 He is unaware of the fact that neoliberalism is a performative rationality, “a governing rationality generating distinctive kinds of subjects, forms of conduct, and orders of social meaning and value”.46. Within the neoliberalised education system, “Schools are corporate-sponsored training camps for producers and consumers”,88 and with finances dictating the quality of access to the centres of corporate training excellence, and the very nature and experience of time, it is only a bizarrely bourgeois and inattentive naïveté that can even begin to claim with a straight face that “The universalism and formality that characterizes the rule of law in liberal democracies does provide a level playing field on which people can compete, form coalitions, and make compromises”.89 The citizen subject has been steadily replaced by the consumptive and entrepreneurial subject of “globalising neoliberalism”.87 within the neoliberalised education system, “Schools are corporate-sponsored training camps for producers and consumers”,88 and with finances dictating the quality of access to the centres of corporate training excellence, and the very nature and experience of time, it is only a bizarrely bourgeois and inattentive naïveté that can even begin to claim with a straight face that “The universalism and formality that characterizes the rule of law in liberal democracies does provide a level playing field on which people can compete, form coalitions, and make compromises”.89
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