"If we do not understand precarization, then we understand neither the politics nor the economy of the present." After years of the welfare state, the rise of technology, combined with neoliberal governmental apparatuses have established a new society of the precarious. In this new way of the world, productivity is not just connected to labor in the traditional sense of work hours, but more totally, to the formation of the self: work becomes performative and affective, and personal identities seep more and more into working ones. This new mode of being has another side, however: it can lead to new forms of self-organisation, resistance, and exodus. In it we see the emergence of a new and disobedient self-government of the precarious.

Isabell Lorey, political scientist, teaches political theory and gender studies at the University of Vienna and at the University of Basel.