Against Individualism: Rethinking Disposession

Dr Adriana Zaharijević | Assistant Professor, Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, University of Belgrade 

Friday 5th October | 11.00am - 4.00pm (with lunch) | Grand Parade (Room TBC) 

Thinking against neoliberalism demands that we abandon the individual and seek an imaginary which opens itself towards political tropes of non-sovereign dispossession. When homo oeconomicus triumphs as the exhaustive figure of the human amidst the patently unequal distribution of precarity and vulnerability the individual cannot be at the centre stage of politics. Brown understands neoliberalism as a governing rationality through which everything becomes economized. In thinking opposition to neoliberal politicization I reject the appeal to this self-same individual. The individual is an impotent political figure. It makes space only for managerial forms which deal with ‘the phenomena of politics’, or for the populist invocations of the ‘people’, a sort of counter-illusionary figure offering another kind of mastery and sovereignty. A truly different homo politicus would neither arise out of some organic bond uniting individuals into a populus nor from more sovereignty and more self-rule. Critical engagement imagines political bonds beyond self-possession. A different – unknown, unseen – political body would be de-individualized such that none qualifies as one.

Adriana Zaharijević graduated in philosophy at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Belgrade. She obtained her PhD at the Faculty of Political Sciences, University of Belgrade, combining political philosophy, feminist theory and social history of the 19th century. In 2013 Zaharijević became a researcher at the Institute for Philosophy and Social Theory, and in 2016 assistant professor at the University of Novi Sad. She is the author of more than sixty articles and two books – Postajanje ženom (Becoming Woman 2010) and Ko je pojedinac? (Who is an Individual? Genealogical Inquiry into the Idea of a Citizen, 2014). Her present theoretical interests lie in the field of critical engagement.