Technologies of the Self after Foucault: Care, Desire, and Mute Compulsion in Neoliberal Subjectivation

This article reconstructs Foucault’s late account of technologies of the self as a historically situated problematic of subjectivation, and not a toolkit for self-help. It confronts this problematic with Lacanian psychoanalysis – the split subject, desire, fantasy, jouissance, the object a, the Real – via Slavoj Žižek, and with Marxian theories of abstract domination, especially Søren Mau’s mute compulsion and Samo Tomšič’s Marx-Lacan homology. Rather than synthesis, it proposes articulation: historical practice, libidinal investment, and material compulsion remain analytically distinct yet empirically entangled. Drawing on research on therapy culture, workplace authenticity, education, and generative AI, it argues that critique of contemporary self-care must distinguish ethical practice from governmental capture, desire from preference, and formal freedom from its material conditions – reviving Foucault’s late turn toward parrēsia and care of the city.