Postsecuritarian neoliberal governmentality and resilience: a new metaphysic of identity

Abstract

Different authors have shown that, since the attack on the Twin Towers in 2001, the category of resilience has pervaded risk management rationalities and neoliberal governmentality. Resilience is characterized by being a form of governing oneself and the others that seeks to create the conditions for individuals, communities or systems, to thrive in response to harmful events. Drawing on the modern origin of the category of resilience —in the ecology of the 1970s — and George Canghilhem`s concepts of life and health, our central thesis is that resilience creates an onto-political fiction: if the classic forms of risk management assumed that identity was something that should be preserved from risky contingencies, resilience proposes that identity is affirmed through the exposure to them.