This article argues that a significant dimension in Foucault’s rethinking of resistance remains underexplored, namely how he navigated the relationship between desubjectivation and subjectivation. These two processes point to fundamentally different subjective experiences of resistance and different extents of becoming-indifferent to power, understood not as an escape from power relations but as deliberate detachment from specific modes of subjectification undertaken from within them. It contends that desubjectivation, described informally by Foucault as a limit-experience, operates across a spectrum from the extreme to the more measured detachment. This measured detachment, which the article terms ‘critical indifference’, is inseparable from subjectivation, the active process through which the subject constitutes itself otherwise. Together, they form what the article terms (de)subjectivation, a single dynamic whose two dimensions Foucault explored without ever fully resolving them. Ultimately, his caution about desubjectivation reflects a sensitivity to how far becoming-indifferent to power any genuine practice of resistance can sustain.
Taking Quinn Slobodian’s Hayek’s Bastards: The Neoliberal Roots of the Populist Right as its point of departure, this article traces how neoliberalism’s Hayekian strand mutated after 1991 into the biologized, racialized market hierarchy of the contemporary far right. Organized around Slobodian’s concept of encasement, it argues that the far right is neoliberalism’s reactionary heir, retaining its economic programme while replacing cosmopolitan-universalist recognition with ethno-nationalism. Through Nancy Fraser and Abrahamsen et al., the article qualifies this claim by distinguishing the far right’s neoliberal inheritance from its distinct ideological architecture. It develops materialized science fiction to explain the speculative infrastructure through which encasement is planned and legitimized, from Rothbard’s anarcho-capitalism and Thiel’s neo-feudal enclaves to Muskism’s state-capture ambitions in contemporary governance. If the nationalist right is a mutation from within neoliberalism rather than a revolt against it, then the nationalist tech oligarchy is also one of neoliberalism’s bastard heirs, not its antagonist.
This article closely examines Giorgio Agamben’s philosophical and methodological framework, especially the notions of oscillation and threshold, and their limits. On the one hand, Agamben insightfully exposes the paradoxes of modern biopolitical structures and, in turn, seeks to dissolve the binary between zoē and bios by addressing form-of-life as a liberating unity. This article argues that, on the other hand, Agamben’s oscillatory approach contributes to a dialectic of potentiality and political passivity. By dissecting the threshold as a liminal interface – neither advancing nor retreating – Agamben’s political ontology remains ambiguous about messianic time. Despite articulating the ‘coming community’ through the reconciliation of life and form while deactivating sovereign power, Agamben’s methodological limit leaves bare life – precarious and excluded subjects – vulnerable to populist sentiments and manipulation, an unintended potentiality linked to the resemblance between Agamben’s thought and classical political romanticism.
This article explores the economy of contribution as an alternative to consumerist capitalism, rooted in free software practices and digital commons. Drawing on Bernard Stiegler’s critical theory, particularly his reflections on proletarianization, care, and technological pharmacology, this model reconfigures traditional producer-consumer roles toward collaborative value creation and long-term social, ecological, and cognitive investment. The argument is grounded in the Plaine Commune project in France, which experiments with contributive income, collaborative urban planning, and co-constructed therapeutic practices, demonstrating how contributory models can foster knowledge, autonomy, and collective responsibility. Beyond explanation, the article critically extends Stiegler’s framework through engagement with digital labor studies, platform capitalism, and STS, while addressing unresolved tensions, including the Neganthropocene, the structural limits of contributory models, and challenges posed by global inequality and infrastructural scarcity, ultimately proposing a viable path toward economic and technological agency in the Anthropocene.
This article examines the concept of ‘queer commons’ through the history and archival practices of Atlantide, an autonomous queer and feminist collective space in Bologna, Italy, active from 1998 to 2015. Atlantide serves as a case for exploring queer commons as a relational practice that defies conventional social structures and challenges archival institutions. Turning to the archive, the article proposes an alternative framework for understanding and sustaining queer commons, using memory work to reclaim erased or marginalized narratives and to cultivate shared belonging. This involves rethinking archival practices as a form of composting – transforming remnants into a living repository that generates non-linear narratives and enables the apprehension of a collective body. The notion of queer commons draws on queer theorists José Esteban Muñoz and Lauren Berlant, while its methodology treats the archive as a repertoire and contact zone with ephemera, informed by Diane Taylor and Avery Gordon.
