Fight for your alienation: The fantasy of employability and the ironic struggle for self-exploitation

This paper draws on Lacanian psychoanalysis, to introduce employability as a cultural fantasy that organizes identity around the desire to shape, exploit and ultimately profit from an employable self. Specifically, the paper shows how individuals seek to overcome their subjective and material alienation by maximizing their self-exploitation through constantly enhancing their employability. This linking of empowerment to selfexploitation has expanded into a broader organizational and political demand calling on individuals to fight for their alienation by having managers and governments help them better exploit themselves through enhancing their employability. Paradoxically, the more contemporary subjects aim to overcome their subjective and material alienation through fantasies of employability the more alienated they become

Capitalism’s Cynical Leviathan: Cynicism, Totalitarianism, and Hobbes in Modern Capitalist Regulation

In this paper I have tried to show the symbiotic relationship between discursive systems of totalitarianism and cynicism. Whether speaking of a social Leviathan a la Hobbes or localized capitalist regulation each relies upon the symbiotic combination of total governance with the positive allowance for internal individual dis-identification. The inherent failures of totalitarian discourses to fully interpellate a subject requires a subjective freedom of thought expressed via an ineffectual cynicism, a point borne witness to in the theoretical work of Zizek. Individuals are thus, either implicitly or explicitly, encouraged to manifest their discontent through a non-active liberty in thought or an “ideology of cynicism” (Zizek: 1989). By providing the space to think resistance these systems are able to legitimately demand and make easier obedience in action. Thus the liberating effect of cynical rebellion is the foundation for an acting compliance

Recital 2: Program

The 2022 CP Program contains an overview of all sessions, including physical locations for in-person sessions, as well as overviews of the space, expectations, and philosophy of the event. It also includes thanks to our sponsors and hosts. This year\u27s program was designed by PS Berge