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The ungovernable, which is the beginning and, at the same time, the vanishing point of every politics. (Agamben, in Prozorov 2014, p.24)
Beyond the apparatuses and the forms of subjectivity that they produce there is an excess of living being that can never be subsumed under them. While the excess does not in itself constitute a political subject, it testifies to the fact that the apparatuses are never all there is. (Prozorov 2014, p.24)
Thomas Hobbes feared humanity's state of nature, arguing that if there was to be security and peace in society, people would need to be governed by a leviathan (Ryan, 2012, pp. 432-435). Fast forward a few centuries and the leviathan has morphed into biopolitics, which is the management not just of the political, but of life itself. Worse, the leviathan is not readily identifiable, because the state is imbricated with other nodes of power, resulting in inverted totalitarianism—a leviathan hidden under the façade of democracy (Wolin, 2008). Add to this bleak picture the prevalence of neoliberal capitalism in organizing society and producing subjects (homo economicus) for the market society—“being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of his earnings” (Foucault in Chari, 2015, p.64). The market society produces entrepreneurial subjects who follow the flow of capital (Eagleton, 2011, p.118), while being forced “to become…responsible” self-investors and self-providers (Brown, 2015, p.84). As Herbert Marcuse (1964) notes, “the individual by himself reproduces and perpetuates the external controls exercised by his society” (p. 10). What we observe is that the most effective forms of oppression are those where people possess the illusion of freedom, while being held in bondage by a mystifying leviathan.
It seems to me that since its inception, psychoanalysis has been, in part, concerned with emancipation, breaking the chains that restrict individuals' knowledge and freedom. One could arg