The Art of Shrinking Heads: The New Servitude of the Liberated in the Era of Total CapitalismISBN: 978-0-7456-3690-0
Paperback
200 pages
February 2008, Polity
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For two centuries, Kant’s critical subject and
Freud’s neurotic subject provided us with philosophical
templates for modernity, but today modern capitalism is
systematically destroying these two subjects and replacing them
with something new. The two subjects of modernity both presupposed
some reference to a higher value or power (like Reason) which
provided a symbolic guarantor, but neoliberalism, by emphasizing
the exchange of commodities in the marketplace, destroys all
transcendental references of this kind. Now human beings no longer
look beyond themselves and no longer have to agree about symbolic
values: they only have to get on with the circulation and
consumption of goods. Deprived of his faculty of judgement and
urged to enjoy himself without restraint, the ‘new man’
of neoliberalism takes centre stage in the era of global
capitalism.
In this biting critique of our contemporary condition Dufour shows that the radical transformation of the subject brought about by neoliberalism – what he calls ‘the art of shrinking heads’ – contains a new kind of violence which has far-reaching consequences for our ways of living together.