Banca de DEFESA: LEONARDO RODRIGUES ALMEIDA

Uma banca de DEFESA de MESTRADO foi cadastrada pelo programa.
STUDENT : LEONARDO RODRIGUES ALMEIDA
DATE: 18/05/2026
TIME: 14:00
LOCAL: Link da videochamada: https://meet.google.com/cga-frji-odp
TITLE:

GOVERNING FOR FREEDOM: THE MARKET, SECURITY, AND THE PRODUCTION OF SUBJECTS IN (NEO)LIBERAL GOVERNANCE

KEY WORDS:

Governmentality; Liberalism; Biopolitics; Subjectivity; Foucault.

PAGES: 100
BIG AREA: Ciências Humanas
AREA: Filosofia
SUBÁREA: Ética
SUMMARY:

This dissertation investigates how the transformations of liberal governmentality into neoliberalism reconfigure the relationship between subjectivity and economic power, producing specific forms of naturalization and depoliticization of social life. Drawing on the Foucauldian analytics of power, the study shifts the question of freedom from a juridical-normative right to an examination of the technologies of government that historically fabricate economic subjects, regimes of truth, and fields of experience organized around political economy.

Chapter 1 reconstructs the conceptual framework of liberal governmentality by articulating the Foucauldian concepts of sovereignty, discipline, biopolitics, and state racism. It demonstrates how modern raison d’État is constituted through dispositifs such as statistics and administrative policing, and how political economy emerges as a principle of governmental self-limitation. The chapter shows that the market becomes an instance of veridiction — a privileged site for the production of truth concerning the rationality of public policies — thereby displacing political legitimacy from the juridical sphere to the domain of measurable economic efficiency. By bringing Foucault into dialogue with critical readings by Macpherson, Marx, Polanyi, Mbembe, and Denise Ferreira da Silva, the dissertation makes explicit how this rationality operates through constitutive exclusions of race, class, and coloniality, producing hierarchies between lives that must be fostered and lives exposed to death.

Chapter 2 shifts the focus to the production of subjectivities within this governmental rationality. Freedom is analyzed as a technology of government that liberalism must produce, organize, and consume, rather than as a natural attribute preceding the state. Security dispositifs are examined as a specific liberal technology operating through the differential management of risks and statistical modulation, governing through circulation and risk. The dissertation reconstructs the figure of the liberal homo economicus as a subject of interest and, subsequently, as human capital under neoliberalism, demonstrating how the enterprise form and generalized competition produce subjectivities permanently exposed to dispositifs of evaluation and responsibilization.

Based on this trajectory, the dissertation argues that liberal-neoliberal governmentality fabricates an economic subject who recognizes in the “laws” of the market not merely an external limit to political power, but the very grammar of social reality itself. This configuration contributes to the naturalization of relations of domination and hinders the formulation of criteria of critique capable of escaping economic veridiction. The genealogical analysis reveals the historical contingency of arrangements that present themselves as necessary, thereby opening space for the critical denaturalization of contemporary forms of economic subjectivation.

COMMITTEE MEMBERS:
Presidente - 1856247 - JULIANA ORTEGOSA AGGIO
Externo à Instituição - ALAN DA SILVA SAMPAIO - UNEB
Externo à Instituição - ANDRE CONSTANTINO YAZBEK