The dignity of belonging and the limits of neoliberalism: disasters, capitalism, State and victims

Abstract

This article discusses how catastrophes reveal the logics underlying capitalism’s operation and how, at the limit, States are the last guarantor for support and reestablishment of social bonds and of communities, following a disaster. It is argued that the State is the mediator and the last resort, which legitimizes the integration of societies in global capitalism, and that the abyssal line, which defines who is included and who is disposable, runs through both South and the small colonies of the North, through both the logics of regulation/emancipation and of appropriation/violence that exist in the Global North as in the Global South. The article is structured in three sections. First, it discusses the new forms taken by advanced capitalism and neoliberalism. The second part discusses critically the concept of risk and how catastrophes can reveal capitalism logic and the limits of neoliberalism. The third section focuses on the role of victims and the affected people and on the way they demand an analysis based on performativity, and beyond Michel Foucault’s biopolitics and Giorgio Agamben’s exception regimes.

Keywords: Catastrophe; State; Capitalism and neoliberalism; Victims; Performativity