Affecting the becoming of bodies: micro-policies of neo-liberal insecurity

Abstract

Based on the progressive articulation of the notions of margins, pathos and bodies, we describe through the technique of the essay how micro-policies of insecurity produce specific and functional subjectivities in the context of a capitalism in transformation. Foucault and Deleuze’s descriptions of disciplinary and control societies are reinterpreted in the light of their premises about the body and from the key to reading the neoliberal transformations operated globally through security and foresight mechanisms in the 1970s and 1980s, and later in Latin American countries. Such a re-reading is in benefit of an advance provided by contemporary Italian thinkers such as Lazzarato, Virilio and Berardi, who point out that the unequal distribution of neoliberal insecurity and management through fear, sources of a global micro-policy, constitute factors that, affecting bodies, impose the margins that control and govern their future.