Lubica Ucnik

In this paper, I will discuss the neoliberal construction of the subject as an entrepreneurial self, based on the economic notion of ‘human capital’. I will argue that this framing of the self is a fiction that has become accepted as everyday reality: this reduces the political space to that of the marketplace, the state to a corporation, and education to a vocational training ground, producing compliant subjects for a risk-driven present defined by corporate logic. I will revisit Jan Patočka’s paper on ‘Super-civilisation’ to offer a possible understanding of this new configuration of society. Patočka’s consideration of the changes to modern society is an extension of his concern with the ‘responsibility of the subject.’ I will sketch his argument in opposition to the notion of ‘responsibilisation’ of the neoliberal subject, which is the outcome of the changes I have outlined above. The neoliberal subject is configured on the entrepreneurial model, whereby the social and political become reduced to the personal risk of the ‘responsibilised’ neoliberal subject.

In this paper, I will start with the elimination of acting human beings from the space of the political, now reconfigured on the abstract model of market relations, to look at the crisis in and of the world. What we have recognised previously as social problems that we need to address on the level of society are now reconfigured as ‘psychological traits’ in each of us, supposedly responding to a self-running and self-knowing market. Individuals are stripped of every other human characteristic. We are self-sufficient, self-driven, self-interested ‘rational’ atoms driven by the entrepreneurial spirit. Informed by Patočka’s understanding of modern society as technological civilization, I will argue that to limit ourselves to the ‘current crisis of Europe’ is to miss a world crisis, defined by neoliberal economic domination of the world. The present-day crisis is not only European; it is not only a crisis of rational and spiritual European culture: it is a crisis that affects us all. Modern society is in crisis, and this crisis is not only political, economic or environmental but is also, fundamentally, a crisis of meaning.

In this paper, I will briefty sketch Arendt's phenomenological analysis of the human condition defined by her early stress on the vita activa, as well as her later, vita contemplativa, in order to suggest that her project is problematic. At the heart of Arendt's project is the problem of time: the time in her analysis of thinking as nunc stans of the vita contemplativa as well as the historical time in her analysis of the vita activa. I will argue that the problematic nature of her analyses follows from her appropriation of Heidegger's phenomenological project without also accepting Husserl's analyses of inner time consciousness that Heidegger presupposes. To conclude, I will briefty point towards Patocka's project to show a different way to address human existence.