Independent and Invulnerable: Politics of an Individual

Abstract

When from the early 1980s onwards a reconfiguration of the politics of dependence began to take place, followed by a thorough dismantling of welfarism and real-socialism, individuals were called upon to use their freedom to self-actualize –to depend only on their own wits and capacities to deal with globalized insecurities. Government could no longer be interested in taking care of the governed. The governed needed to become more dependent on themselves, and less dependent on the state in particular. The governed, in other words, needed to be less vulnerable. It was repeated time and again that the welfare of individuals is best secured and promoted when they are prompted to be independent, to use all their might and imagination to be the only carers for themselves. To not be cared for by others implies a certain level of imagined invulnerability. Each and every one of us –simply by being individuals– has the capacity to demonstrate one’s sovereignty over oneself through one’s independence. Such reprogrammed neo-Victorian language urges us to meticulously revisit its source. The link between early liberalism and neoliberalism, at least in their shared tendency to produce strong aversion to dependence and vulnerability, to correlate it with utter abjection, is by no means accidental. I will claim that the notion of independence is inextricable from an incessant circuit of exclusions, systemic blockades, restrictions or obstructions of opportunities, rights and resources. It is, however also closely related to a specific epistemic and normative configuration of the creature who is the bearer of independence, i.e. a sovereign individual who governs himself.