Description
The notion of a global ‘new turn’ towards authoritarian neoliberalism is built on two central assumptions: 1) that neoliberalism, in its advent and inception, had been a democratic project, or at least a neutral set of ideas and practices of government, and 2) that neoliberalism emanated from the ‘democratic’ global North and spread to the ‘authoritarian’ global South. This paper challenges this view and agrees with recent scholarship that neoliberalism is composed of plural rationalities and affects that are mobilised to create the appropriate conditions of choice conducive for a free market. This paper argues that these conditions of choice are inherently authoritarian and are a result of a global, rather than a North-centric project. While choice implies freedom, constructions of freedom under neoliberalism are intrinsically connected to disciplinary, coercive, and governmental instruments that pre-empt resistance to growing inequality, and provide the conditions for the proliferation of market technologies through which populations are governed. This account of neoliberalism is based on a theoretical and empirical engagement with forms of affective citizenship that inform contemporary technologies of subjectification in Egypt, which operate through displacing structural inequalities onto discourses of affect that limit the imagination and production of emancipatory futures.
