Crisis as Art of Government

Abstract

The concepts of crisis and conflict are inextricably linked to notions of modernity and draw on such heterogenous disciplines as political sciences, philosophy, economics and psychoanalysis. This paper aims to identify and analyze the so called ‘apparatus of crisis’ starting from the ancient Greece conception of krisis in medical and political fields. On the strength of the bio-political genealogy of crisis, I argue that the diffusion and the pervasiveness of the term ‘crisis’ are not at all signs of semantic ‘vagueness’, as Reihart Koselleck affirms, but rather denote the ‘highest effectiveness of its apparatus’ ­the highest effectiveness that is apparent nowadays, when the crisis has become the ‘art of government’ par excellence. The nature of each crisis has set a specific concept and practice of conflict and, therefore, a specific process of political subjectification. Unlike the past, today the predominant apparatus of crisis has a manifest biopolitical nature and so it implies the neoliberalism’s axiom that “there is no alternative”, and therefore tends to neutralize the conflict and to marginalize in the precarity the forms of life that could be constituent expressions of it. Is it therefore possible to think of the conflict and its processes of subjectification as pulled out from the apparatus of the neo-liberal crisis?

Keywords

• biopolitics
• conflict
• crisis
• neoliberalism
• precariat