Browsing by Author "Naidoo, Kiasha"

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    Being and neoliberalism: A conceptual history of the subject
    (University of the Western Cape, 2022) Naidoo, Kiasha; van Bever Donker, Maurits
    The idea of neoliberalism, as both a guiding principle for economic policy decisions and a governing rationality, is a pertinent issue of our time. The concept itself is often used to describe the contemporary mode of political economy but when we look closer, it is notoriously elusive. Scholars such as Michel Foucault and Wendy Brown seek to conceptualize neoliberalism as a governing rationality. What these scholars share is a reading of neoliberal governmentality in terms of the subject. In social and political philosophical critiques of neoliberalism which inherit from this Foucauldian line of thought, the subject is a central figure. However, thinking on the subject did not begin with a consideration of neoliberalism, it has a long philosophical history. I discuss this through a conceptual history of the subject and in doing so, understand the neoliberal subject as another iteration of subjectivity.
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    Between racial madness and neoliberal reason: Metonymic contagion in apartheid biopower
    (Taylor and Francis Group, 2023) Naidoo, Kiasha
    I will seek to consider the simultaneous workings of race and capital in apartheid biopower. J.M. Coetzee offers a reading of apartheid racism as racial madness which is imbricated with economic reason. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, we have witnessed instances of the biopolitical making live and letting die. The Strandfontein homeless camp set up just outside Cape Town in 2020 is an instantiation of a particular normative order, wherein contagion was used to justify the movement of black, homeless people outside of the city�s cordon sanitaire. This is resonant of apartheid racial segregation in which the fear of race mixing is sometimes described in terms of contagion where whiteness repre-sents that which is pure while blackness that which is dirty and infectious.