Joronen 13 - Department of Geography and Geology at the University of Turku, Finland (Mikko, Conceptualising New Modes of State

Governmentality: Power, Violence and the Ontological Mono-politics of Neoliberalism, Geopolitics, 18:356-370)

MIKKO JORONEN
This paper explores the ontological constitution of the neoliberal state. By enriching Michel Foucaults
work on neoliberal governmentality with Heideggerian reading of the ontological conditions involved in
the process, the paper argues for an understanding of neoliberalism as a mono-political process of
enframing, through which things and human capabilities are revealed as an array of reserves set
available for the market rational utilisation.
It is argued that the neoliberal state is not based on the ideological or discursive turn in political
practices, but on the extending drive, through which the real itself, including the ethical constitution of
human conducts, natural entities, and life (with its possibilities), is ontologically positioned to serve the
interests of profit-making.
The paper concludes by showing how the neoliberal state and the economisation of everyday life are
fundamentally based on the ontological violence of concealing the openness of being, and thus, the
possibility for ontological politics.
INTRODUCTION
A growing visibility given to neoliberalism among geographers over the last fifteen years has led to a
wide-scale conceptual and empirical recognition of its variegations, from the institutional, city-regional
and state-based policies to the new modes of government conducted at the level of body and everyday
life.1 In spite of its tendency to infringe the territorially bound modes of national sovereignty,
neoliberalisation has not merely operated
Address correspondence to Mikko Joronen, Department of Geography and Geology, University of Turku,
FI-20014 Turku, Finland. E-mail: mikko.joronen@utu.fi
as an extra-territorial power capable of violating the state sovereignty, but has become an essential part
of the constitution of the new modes of state governance.2 In addition to the sovereign rule of the
state, state governance is being established more and more through the production of de-politicised
subjectivities, constituting citizenship as a reserve for the state to use in the global competition.3 Such
neoliberal governmentality of the self and the conducts of individuals has become a new mode of state
power with new spatial formations prominently justified with regard to the survival struggle of the state
in the whirlpool of global capital.
This paper aims to scrutinise two central processes constitutive for the emergence of the neoliberal
state: the neoliberal production of the self (self-controlling subjects) and the rise of the new ontology
of nature and social existence (ontological mono-politics), upon which the former process is
fundamentally based. As the paper argues below, this transformation of the state is based on the
ontological enframing of entities and individual conducts. It shows how neoliberalisation is a process of
ontological violence, which does not merely govern the conduct of individuals by encouraging a
particular form of subjectivity, but also enframes all entities for the use of market forces. Instead of
ideological or discursive turn grounded on new types of political practices, the rise of the neoliberal
state is seen as an extending drive of the ontological setting of what Martin Heidegger calls the
enframing (das Gestell). Such enframing works by de-politicising particular governmental rationalities,

such as the efficient managerialism of entities and calculative constitution of the self, but also by
globally unleashing its drive to enframe entities. Hence, state is an essential constituent of the
intersection between power, globalisation, and the production of subjectivities - of a process where
market rationalities do not just aim to extend their power over all aspects of social existence, but also
across the earth.
As Simon Springer4 shows, geographers and geographical theorisation on spatial displacements of
neoliberalism have been particularly sensitive to the hybrid forms and mutated outcomes of
neoliberalisation. Accordingly, this paper does not aim to deprecate the importance of the processbased analyses on how and in what ways neoliberalism actually emerges and becomes problematised.
After all, as Peck and Tickell write, One of the most striking features of the recent history of
neoliberalism is its quite remarkable transformative capacity.5 Instead, the paper concentrates on
explicating the flip side of neoliberalisation: the ontological logic through which multiplicity of ontic
events and transformations are enframed and revealed. The aim here is not to systematise empiric
facts, but to explore their ontological constitution. It is argued that the process of neoliberalisation is in
itself essentially characterised by an ontological drive to reveal things as reserves for the calculative use
based on market rationalities. Even though the focus on ontology has to meet certain risks involved in
the writing genre orientated to grand narratives, wider processes or paradigmatic conditions, the
discussion here does not hollow out the ontic heterogeneity and difference.6 At the ontic level,
neoliberalisation is evidently related to ambiguous nuances, multiple outcomes and unpredictable
events that are not identical to each other, but which arguably have ontological similarity and
parallelism. Neoliberalisation incorporates monophonic politics only at the level of ontology: as a drive
to reveal things in terms of calculable market value.
The paper starts by showing how Michel Foucaults work on the neoliberal subjectification, presented
in the recent publication of his Lectures at the College de France, The Birth of Biopolitics, can be
significantly enriched through Martin Heideggers writings on the historical emergence of the
ontological mode of revealing he conceptualises as enframing (Gestell) and machination
(Machenschaft) .7 Geographers have paid some attention to the close relation between Foucault and
Heidegger, yet the reception has either focused on the ontological issues8 or alternatively touched on
the relation between enframing and governmentality,9 without reading these all together, in particular,
with regard to the questions of neoliberalism and state government. Accordingly, the paper argues for
an interpretation of neoliberalisation and its logic of government as epiphenomenal to the ontological
enframing (Gestell) of things and human capabilities into a usable array of constantly available
standing-reserves (Bestand). All in all, the first part of the paper expands the discussion of state
government to the level of ontology, and hence, from the governmentality of subjects to ordering and
enframing of the real as such. The second part of the paper continues by showing how the ontological
violence of the neoliberal state and the economisation of everyday life are fundamentally based on the
ontological concealment of life and its possibilities, the openness of being. The second part concludes,
through the works of Agamben and Heidegger, by re-opening the ontological mono-politics of
neoliberalism for proper critique.
THE ONTOLOGY OF GOVERNANCE: ENFRAMING THE HOMO ECONOMICUS
Even though the reception of neoliberalism in geographical literature has grown enormously during the
last three decades,10 contradictions between mutable particularities and theoretical contributions still

seem overwhelming for a conceptual consensus. Most of this comes back to ontological resiliencies
between the approaches, in spite of the evident overlapping and possibilities for hybrid interpretations.
While more policy-based approaches seem to focus on state reforms and transformations,11 others are
more comfortable at framing neoliberalism as an ideological project entangled with the hegemony of
the elites protecting their comparative advantage in the neoliberal redistribution of the wealth.12
Studies focusing on neoliberal govern-mentality in turn tend to emphasise, mainly by following the
thoughts of Michel Foucault, the techniques and rationalities concerning the mentality of how our
conducts are governed and rationalised as a neoliberal common sense.13 While within governmentality
studies considerable focus has been directed to the art of governing the social body of the state - after
all, Foucaults original definition of governmentality referred to institutions, administrative practices and
knowledge that, instead of the rule over territory, were aimed to govern the conducts of entire
populations14 - recently more geographers have followed Foucaults own passage to explore the ways
through which individuals are governed, and further, how they govern themselves.15
As Foucault argues in the Birth of Biopolitics, neoliberal governmentality works by framing and
encouraging a specific modality of self-repressive subjectivity: the economically calculating, benefitmaximising and efficiently productive atom of self-interests, the homo economicus.16 While classic
liberalism made homo economicus a partner of exchange, such exchange defining the anthropology of
man and the societal space of the markets, in neoliberalism, Foucault writes, homo economicus
becomes defined solely in terms of competition. Unlike in liberalism, where the process of exchange was
defined as a natural action, in neoliberalism competition becomes an artificial space, which needs to be
defended against the monopolies and interventions of the state. The central problem in neoliberalism,
then, is how the existing political power can be organised on the basis of market principles: while the
classic liberalism aimed to free up the natural space of market exchange, for the latter the question is
more of a style, of how one acts, of how ones conducts must be governed with a proper manner.17
Although Foucaults discussion on the constitution of the self through the particular form of subjectivity
covers a great deal of the process of making the neoliberal state, governmentality approaches seem to
leave the question concerning the new ontology of human and non-human existence relatively
untouched. As Braun suggests,18 governmentality does not merely rely on a rationality of self-control,
but also denotes a material process of governing and measuring natural entities. Hence, it seems to
subject both human and non-human entities to the trade of calculative profit-making, not just by
reducing capabilities of citizens to the economically rational and productive conducts, but also by
enframing all things to the assemblage of standing- reserves set available for the market-efficient use.
As David Harvey reminds us,19 eventually neoliberalism can continue its process of accumulation only
by disposing the commons, such as clean water, through the commodification and privatisation. The
neoliberal governmentality, thus, does not lead into a mere encouragement of the economically rational
conducts, but encloses all beings in terms of a uniform plane of existence: as a part of enframing
(Gestell), through which things are revealed as a usable and available set of standing-reserve
(Bestand).20
According to Heidegger, the emergence of the apparatus of enframing (Gestell) is fundamentally
rooted in the historical process where the modern techniques originally developed for controlling the
nature became turned back to us.21 In the process, both the modern subject and the modern nature of
paralysed objects were sucked up into standing-reserves and thus revealed as an enframed array
available for the use of calculative machinations. Apparently such ontological shift has had massive

consequences: enframing can take place through an unlimited number of guises, practices and material
settings, since it works by creating certainty on the availability, usability and controllability of things and
subjects. Through the apparatus of enframing, defined by Heidegger as the gathering together of that
setting-upon which sets upon man, i.e., challenges him forth, to reveal the real, in the mode of ordering,
as a standing-reserve,22 subjects and objects are simply made available for the power to control,
calculate and order them with predictable certainty. As a number of studies have pointed out,
enframing is able to measure different sets of practices, discourses and material relations related, for
instance, to creative industries,23 carbon economy,24 colonialism,25 forest conservation,26
globalisation,27 and science,28 and should be understood above all as a broader political order based
on metaphysical positioning of entities.
As a modality of enframing, the process of neoliberalisation has evidently created an entire array of
governmental politics actualised through the different orders, possibilities, and positions of things. First
of all, as Foucault writes, neoliberalism denotes an ethical order defining the proper constitution of the
self. In neoliberalism, every action human subjects attempt to recognise as an end of their actions
becomes assimilated to the economy of market rationality, to the robust calculations of costs against
the benefits. Hence, human existence is solely caught up to serve the nihilist utility of maximum profit.
Under such ethos, or better, under such inversion of ethos, human existence is reduced to a nihilist
framework constituted by the arrangements efficiently implementing seemingly value neutral means.
Enframing thus represents everything that is nihilist in a contemporary world-economy: planetary
homelessness, calculative aimlessness, mischief of other forms of rationalities, and the constant
devaluation of nature and human existence as mere stocks of profits.29 As Zizek writes, global
capitalism is a truth-without-meaning, a worldless constellation capable of accommodating itself to
any cultural and material setting.30
In enframing, a calculative regulation of all domains of life becomes a fundamental goal of its own. As
Heidegger prudently wrote as early as 1939,31 the humanity seems to be producing itself in such a
manner that the absolute meaningless is valued as the one and only meaning. The preservation of
such nihilism appears not only as a human domination of the globe, but also as a mode of existence
sucked up to the process where the will to calculate fumbles its own strengthening. Hence, enframing
leads into a nihilist mode of subjectivity, where the human will is challenged to will more of the
optimal calculations. Heidegger makes a great effort, in the four-book series of Nietzsche lectures in
particular, in order to show how such production of the nihilist mode of revealing was inaugurated by
Nietzsches notion of will to power. Through the will to power, beings are revealed as makeable, as
something dragged under the strengthening power of human willing and machinations. Eventually, the
will wills nothing but its own empowerment, its will to will more of itself. In the neoliberal modality of
homo economicus this will to will turns into a will to profit evidently following the same ontological
logic of self-increasing calculations. As a consequence, human beings turn into technical subjects selfcontrolling their conducts through the value-neutral calculation of the means for the maximum profit.
In a neoliberal common sense, we are hence not only part of the value neutral and de-politicised
economic nihilism, but also enframed, positioned, and tranquilised by the self-optimising drive of
calculative arrangements.32
This leads us to the second point: even though human existence is enframed into usable reserve, our
position in enframing still differs from the position of non-human entities. Foucault evidently refers to
this when exploring the historical emergence of homo economicus, wherein the worker of liberalism

turns into a human capital of neoliberalism.33 In neoliberalism, Foucault argues, the wage earner of
liberalism, an individual who without the possession of capital is obligated to sell his/her labour power
as a commodity, turns into a human capital, into a usable reserve of the individuals acquired skills and
genetic qualities. Accordingly, such a change signifies an ontological process where the modern subject
becomes translated into a late-modern reserve: human beings are constantly optimised and ordered to
flexibly serve the instrumental interests of profit-making.34 In neoliberal enframing, human beings
eventually turn into what Foucault calls the entrepreneur of himself: an indivisible unit of calculating
self-interests who remains for himself his own capital, his own producer, and his own source of
earnings.35
In relation to human conducts, neoliberal enframing apparently consists of an ontological ambiguity.
On the one hand, human existence is reduced into a usable reserve of human capital. On the other
hand, human beings themselves are positioned not only as the ones ordering the process, but also as
the ones controlling their own conducts. What thereby separates the enframing of human reserves from
the non-human ones is our capability to be both the target of calculation as well as the ones capable of
calculating, and eventually out of this, as the last section will show, the ones capable of recognising the
ontological violence neoliberal enframing poses. In all cases, however, it is the specific modality of
existence - a peculiar ontological logic of revealing that mobilises beings through their inner logic of
calculation and profit - which fundamentally defines the process of subjectification.
The most peculiar thing characterising enframing is evidently not a mere human control of things.
Rather, as Heidegger concludes, Todays humans are themselves challenged forth by the demand to
challenge nature forth into arrangement. Humans themselves are set up (gestellt); they are thereby
demanded to correspond to the aforementioned demand.36 As neoliberal homo economicus - as
competing entrepreneurs of one-self - human beings are ontologically challenged to challenge
themselves, to self-control their actions, through the inexorable rationality of the limitless reign of
calculation. The neoliberal governmentality of the self, the framing of individual conducts in accordance
with the internalized rule of maximum economy, thereby unfolds human existence not only through
the social mechanism of subjectification, but by ontologically challenging us toward driving on to the
maximum yield at minimum expense.37 What Foucaults insightful focus on empiric realities of liberal
and neoliberal governmentalities - the techniques, rationalities, forms of visibility, and formation of
identities implemented in Germany between 1948 and 1962 as well as presented in the thoughts of the
Chicago School of Economics38 - fails to fully explicate is the operational logic constitutive not just for
the ontology of ourselves, but for the revealing of the real as such.

AT: State Reformism

THE STATE OF THE STATE: NEOLIBERAL GOVERNMENTALITY, POWER AND ONTOLOGICAL VIOLENCE
Heideggers notion of massive and gigantic spread of enframing as a particular ontological assembling of
things apparently extends the discussion of neoliberalisation from the production of subjectivity to the
question concerning the revealing of the real as such. Which role the state then has in proportion to the
implementation of the logic of revealing intrinsic to the neoliberal governmentality? Foucaults notion of
governmentality evidently brings together two aspects of government: the government of everyday
conducts of individuals and the government of the conducts of entire populations. Rather than a set of

single doctrines and rules, governmentality denotes an entire ethos of government. Neoliberal form of
governmentality, thus, does not indicate a government where some dominant force, such as the state,
has a direct control over the individual conducts, but those conditions out of which certain practices
become more rational to choose than others. Neoliberalisation favours rational choice and cost-benefit
calculations not by forcing individuals to act in certain ways, but by creating conditions that encourage,
reinforce and necessitate particular conducts as rational behaviour.39 Neoliberal governmentality has
hence created an entirely new form of power, which is not based on the states sovereign power to
control its population and territory, but on a use of more positive ways of regulating and rationalising
individual conducts.
Accordingly, the process of neoliberalisation has not lead to the degradation of state power, but has
taken place particularly through the reforms of state government. Although in a world of global flows
the state has become inextricably tied to the changes that cannot be replied through the traditional
forms of state sovereignty, it is precisely the state that has become a locus between the neoliberal
subjectification and the networks created by the global movements of capital. As Foucault claims,40
inasmuch as the neoliberal homo economicus refers to a mode of government that needs to be
maintained through the institutions, administrative practices and the internalisation of market
rationalities, also the (global) space of neoliberal markets, free of monopolies and interventions of the
state, can only exist through the active government and legal support of the state. Neither globalisation
of neoliberal markets nor the government of the everyday life of individuals erodes the state or turns it
into what Thrift calls the phantom state - a state based on communicative power of electronic
networks and few selected glocalities, such as the world cities, driven by the money power.41
Neoliberalisation is rather in need of the state, not so much of the sovereign power of the state, but of
the state institutions and practices de- politicising the population through the survival strategies, which
encourage conducts where people are treated as reserves of human capital essential for the survival
of the state in the turmoil of global competition.
The rationality of neoliberal governmentality consists of a new human anthropology and the support of
the space of the competition, which both need to be maintained and kept viable at all levels of society
through different techniques, practices, identities, and forms of visibility. The neoliberalisation of the
state thus consists of a change in the way states increasingly justify their existence: through the
protection of the space of the markets, by valuing the non-human entities as reserves of profits (either
as a natural resource or by framing the ecological through economical), and through the process of
subjectification grounded on the human anthropology of homo economicus. Neoliberalisation of the
state, then, denotes an increasing use of the strategies of government constituted through the
particular mode of power: the strategic programming of individual conducts on a basis of economic
rationality. This however, as Foucault warns us in Security, Territory, Population,42 does not mean that
the sovereign and disciplinary modes of power are now somehow eliminated from the world. We should
not think that the disciplinary society has replaced the society of sovereignty, or that the disciplinary
society is now being entirely eliminated by the rise of the society of governmental management, but
instead to explore the complex ways of their demonic combination.43
The violence intrinsic to the neoliberal state, to its ways of economising nature and the everyday life of
individuals, is fundamentally based on the ontological enframing of human and non-human life
through the actualisation of different (demonic) combinations of practices, materialities, rationalities,
power relations, and spatial formations. As Giorgio Agamben has argued, by being self-consciously

Heideggerian, Foucaults understanding of the historical regimes of power is grounded on a more

original relation between the constituted (or actualised) forms of power and the constituting power of
potentiality. While the constituting power works as a condition of possibility for the constituted modes
of power to emerge, all historical actualisations of power intrinsically depend on the suspension of the
potentialities of constituting power, on their concealment.44 In this sense, constituting power has a
similar ontological structure with Aristotles notion of potentiality: it maintains itself without ever fully
passing into actuality, without being exhausted into actualisations.45
It is not my intention here to go into details of Agambens complex and nuanced argument in Homo
Sacer, but instead to emphasise, as Agambens re-reading of the distinction between potentiality and
actuality indicates, how the coalescence of state power with neoliberal governmentality constitutes
politics at the domain of ontology. The constituting power does not merely refer to the ontological
possibility for the constituted modes of constituted power, but also to the fundamental possibility for
the political action as such. Accordingly, also the question of resistance needs to be explored and
confronted at this proper level of ontology: as a question of existential resistance.
In order to scrutinise the ontological implications Agambens distinction has for the question of
existential resistance, it is essential to pay attention to what Agamben calls in Homo Sacer the life of
possibility. It is life that opposes the operations of constituted power: it constitutes an inexhaustible
possibility, which can be never entirely corralled into constituted forms of political power. The power of
potentiality in life, thus, denotes a power to constitute, a possibility to ground new modes of life, to be
otherwise. Governmentalities of neoliberal enframing evidently close this possibility, or to use
Rancieres words in Disagreement,46 follow the logic of the police, the logic of designating ontological
positions and divisions of power rather than opening them up for the power of potential life. The
ontological resistance, hence, does not only liberate life from the grasp of ontological monopolisations,
such as neoliberal enframing, but from all coded and corralled forms of belonging, including the state.
Agambens thinking evidently resolves the question of politics by moving it from the sphere of actualised
forms of political power to the realm of ontology. Agambens ontological discussion concerning the
power of life can be thus subordinated to what Heidegger defines as the fundamental condition of
possibility for the constitution of all ontologies: the appropriation of revealing from the abyssal source
(Ab-Grund) of open being.47 Supported by the fact that Agamben was heavily influenced by Heideggers
seminars he participated in during the 1960s,48 the eclectic position of Agamben - with one foot in the
realm of biopolitics, the politics over life, and the other in the realm of ontology - can be re-thought
from an explicitly Heideggerian perspective.
Agamben, however, accuses Heidegger precisely of ignoring what he thinks is the fundamental origin of
all revealing: the pure fact of living things.49 Heidegger evidently goes through a great effort, at least in
his early major contribution Being and Time (1927), to separate his existential-ontological analysis of
Dasein from the analyses of life formulated, in particular, by the key representatives of the German lifephilosophy movement (Lebensphilosophie), Wilhelm Dilthey and Georg Simmel.50 For Heidegger, the
fundamental flaw of the Lebensphilosophie was that it never came to properly treat life in ontological
terms, that is, as a mode of being/revealing. Heideggers separation, however, remained quite
ambiguous: it is not clear whether Heidegger was able to truly recede his existential-ontological analysis
of being from the strains of life-philosophy, or whether Heideggers own thinking would have evolved
into its shape without the significant influence of life-philosophy in the early phase of his thinking.51

Moreover, the compulsive distancing of life from being may, in the end, afford nothing by a cul-de-sac.
First of all, by locating the potential, even necessary, linkages between questions of life and being, we
may find more proper ways to grasp some of the crucial contemporary forms of power and government,
such as the biopolitical techniques, which have taken life itself as the target of ontological politics.
Second, in order to grasp the ontological politics behind neoliberalism, and further, to enable
alternatives that have the potential to widen the scope of ontological imagination, we need to take into
account how constituted forms of life and power are framed through the different ontological
monopolisations of revealing.
As I have suggested,52 ontological monopolisations constitute violence through two reciprocally
conditioning mechanisms. First, through the oblivion of the mechanism of appropriation (Ereignis),
which works by intrinsically concealing the openness of being and its reservoir of ungrounded
possibilities; and second, through the violence intrinsic in particular historical modes of revealing, for
instance, the ontological ordering of entities in neoliberal enframing. The first mechanism of violence
apparently refers to the fundamental (im)possibility for the different forms of life to emerge. It is a
question concerning particular appropriations of being, which take place by monopolising their own
mode of revealing, thus refusing their intrinsic condition of possibility, the abyssal richness of open
being. The second mechanism of violence, in turn, is related to the designated positions, such as the
neoliberal enframing, which violently enframe human existence and the revealing of the real to
particular modalities of ontology.
At the level of the first mechanism, neoliberal fabrication of particular mode of existence takes
advantage of what I have discussed, by following Heidegger, the ontological ambiguity of being, its
happening as a concealing- revealing.53 Accordingly, while disclosing a peculiar mode of existence, the
appropriation of being always conceals the open possibility for the other modes of revealing to come
about. Such concealment is an intrinsic necessity for all revealing to take place: all modes of revealing
conceal their originary source, the inexhaustible plenitude of open being. Neoliberal governmentality,
however, follows the logic of violent mono-politics and complete grounding of the revealing of things to
the point of abandoning the possibility for ontological change. It remains solely withdrawn to the
optimised arrangement of ontic realities: it concentrates on the calculative ordering of things (beings),
and as a result, hides the ontological question concerning its own mode of revealing (being).
Neoliberalisation thus covers not only the ontological mechanism of concealing-revealing, but its own
ontological finitude. By monopolising its own modality of revealing, neoliberal enframing veils its own
finitude, its nature as a finite Event of appropriation (das Ereignis), thus passing the originary openness
of being into oblivion.
The latter mechanism of ontological violence, in turn, refers to the inner logic of neoliberal enframing.
Neoliberalisation operates, first, by reducing political capabilities of individuals to the internalised rule of
the maximum economy, but also by moulding all things into reserves of profits. First of all,
neoliberalisation violently enframes human existence into bare reserves of human capital, which are
increasingly used by states in their tactics to succeed in global competition. The neoliberal state,
governing its population by the means of encouraging economically calculating subjectivity, is not
established out of the violent act of territorial inclusion and order, but above all, out of the violent fact
of reducing human existence into usable capital. Second, as a drive to reveal things as profitable
reserves, neoliberalisation violently divests natural entities from their abrupt happening and
phenomenological richness of revealing. Altogether, such reductions constitute the post-political

situation of neoliberal governmentality: they create a world of technical solutions and politics-free zones
abrogating the politics of ontological revealing. The depoliticising conduct of the neoliberal state is an
ultimate political act, which paradoxically establishes an antipolitical abrogation of all political acts
through the concealment of the politics of ontological possibility. Such ontological mono-politics thus
intertwines with the first mechanism of ontological violence: by fabricating the real, including human
existence, for the use of economic calculations and profits, neoliberal governmentality monopolises a
particular mode of revealing, and thus, fades the ontological openness of being and its finite Event
(Ereignis) to the background.
What remains excluded in the process of neoliberal enframing, what remains outside of its
framework, is evidently no-thing ontic, but the ontological openness of being. As the critical explorations
of neoliberalism in recent geographical literature have emphasised, mainly by leaning on Marx, Harvey
and a set of interpretations of Foucault, neoliberalism should be conceptualised as an open and
unpredictable process of enclosure, as a complex set of logics of inclusion and exclusion operating
through a variety of spatial territories and networks.54 Instead of a fixed set of doctrines and practices,
neoliberalisation is conceptualised as a contingent process that works by enclosing a variety of subjects,
practices, technologies and materialities through different, even conflicting, rationalities and spatialities.
Nevertheless, even as delegate contributions as these seem to fall short on scrutinising the ontological
characteristics involved in the process of neoliberalisation, not to mention the evident absence of
Heideggers work, which also Foucault, though with cryptic and non-explicated manner, admitted as
being a central influence on his own thinking.55 Although neoliberalism is conceptualised as a flexible
and contingent process emerging through the unlimited number of unpredictable enclosures, from the
Heideggerian perspective, neoliberalism is not so much a dialectical process of inclusion and
exclusion,56 but a process of ontological mono-politics enframing the real as such in terms of available,
usable, orderable, and make- able reserve. Instead of exclusion, neoliberal enframing works through
total inclusion, where every-thing is revealed as having the potential to become utilised. Things escaping
the measures of neoliberal enframing are revealed, not as excluded, but as not-yet-enframed-andutilised reserves. Neoliberal enframing is hence a process of ontological inclusion - an ontological drive
towards the complete economic usability of things, where this drive in itself is never under suspect.
CONCLUDING REMARKS

Start
It is important to notice that the aim of the Heideggerian reading here is not merely to offer a new
ontological approach grounded on the Event of revealing/appropriation (Ereignis), but above all to
describe the ontological mechanism through which the process of neoliberalisation operates: through
the oblivion of its finite mode of revealing, and thus, the openness of being. By monopolising a
domain of revealing, neoliberal enframing fades the originary concealment of open being to the
background: it turns a particular concealment (of being and its possibilities) into total oblivion (of being
and its possibilities). As the paper has shown, Heideggers notion about the ambiguity of the event of
being evidently clarifies the mechanism behind the ontological violence of neoliberal enframing: its
constant obliteration of open being and its event of concealing-revealing. The Heideggerian reading of
neoliberalisation thus helps to clarify where and how we should aim at our critiques. The resistance of
ontological violence needs to take its stance not from the dialectical process of negation, but from the
fundamental openness of being, allowing an open space for the transformation of revealing.

Yet, the critique of ontological violence immanent in neoliberalisation is not confined to a mere act of
ontological contemplation. Ontological monopolisations also impose ontic violence and social
relations of control, generating a ground for the multiplicity of oppressive institutions, state
governmentalities, popular culture artefacts, violent authoritarianism, biopolitical techniques, and
practises indifference to the degradation of nature.57 At the same time neoliberal business of
calculation, the will to profit, displaces the open abyss of being by substantially engaging with the
scaffolding, where every thing is alienated from itself and flattened to the same level of usable
reserve. Contrary to such worldless nihilism - to the un-world of neoliberal capitalism - the openness
of being works as a fundamental condition for a world-formation, as an abundant reservoir for the
forms of life to emerge through the different settings of revealing. Such creative praxis of worldformation, however, can take place only as a non-violent participation in the revealing of being. As
Heidegger pinpoints,58 the creative praxis does not take place in fully unbounded and wide-open
space, but through our dwelling in the midst of things, in the site (Statte) of the event of unfolding.
What creative participation changes is first and foremost our existential relation to things.

End