Book review: The Government of Desire
Miguel de Beistegui’s new book is one of the most important contributions to the study of desire since the publication of René Girard’s Things Hidden Since the Foundation of the World (1987). The central argument of the work is that the creation – through specific rationalities of knowledge and technologies of power – of a type of subjectivity (homo desiderans) is the mechanism that allowed modern capitalism to transform into neoliberalism and power to translate into its biopolitical double. For, if neoliberalism is essentially characterised by a form of governance that privileges the management of productive subjects over their repressive control (the carrot instead of the stick), then it is crucial to understand the mechanisms that push individuals to move relentlessly according to the models and the new economic geography created by neoliberal capitalism.
Miguel de Beistegui, The Government of Desire: A Genealogy of the Liberal Subject (2018)
Reviewed by Antonio Cerella
Desire is precisely one of these mechanisms in that it is constituted as a structural negativity (i.e., as an infinity of always different carrots, or, to speak more directly, as an ‘ontological lack’ construed by the various epistemai of power) – which generates hyper-positivity at the subjective level through the incessant individual search for pleasures and products that the ‘free market’ constantly manufactures.
Drawing on the late Foucault’s work on sexuality, de Beistegui traces a convincing genealogy of this transcendental-historical dispositif by examining three fundamental assemblages or regimes of desire: the economic, the sexual and the symbolic. As he demonstrates, these three regimes are interdependent and self-reinforcing because they are born out of the same paradigm, i.e. the disciplinary rationality that characterises modern bio-power. Thus, for example, starting from the eighteenth century, the emergence of liberal political economy (i.e. Physiocracy) established a new discourse on negative freedom that, on the one hand, seemed to free individuals from the control of the state, but, on the other, subjected them to the new rules set by the market. Self-interest and utility thus become the watchwords of a libidinal economic system based on the ‘free maximisation’ of desires, which can now be purchased for money. In this way, desire ‘is naturalised, and seen as a form of positive energy, that is, as a spontaneous mechanism generating its own norms’.…
https://www.radicalphilosophy.com/reviews/individual-reviews/homo-desiderans
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