The society of disciplined jouissance

blind transparency, anthropophagic superego and the fragilized enemy after Foucault

Abstract

This article proposes the concept of the society of disciplined jouissance to address a gap in debates on contemporary power: the tendency to oppose, in an excessively linear way, disciplinary society, performance, transparency and psychopolitics. Situated in contemporary political philosophy, in dialogue with critical theory, Foucauldian studies, critical criminology and literature, the study argues that discipline does not disappear in late neoliberalism, but is differentially redistributed. The method is essayistic and conceptual, guided by genealogy and operationalized through the reconstruction of matrices of power, the identification of historical displacements, the explicit treatment of tensions between Michel Foucault, Byung-Chul Han and Slavoj Žižek and the elaboration of interpretive categories. The argument formulates three connected concepts: society of disciplined jouissance, blind transparency and the fragilized enemy. The article concludes that Foucault’s relevance, after Foucault, lies not in repeating his description of disciplinary institutions, but in diagnosing hybrid forms through which freedom, visibility, subjectivation and selective punishment produce vulnerabilities socially converted into threat.