Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power. 2017 Verso
True happiness comes from what runs riot, lets go, is exuberant and loses meaning — the excessive and superfluous. That is, it comes from what luxuriates, what has taken leave of all necessity, work, performance and purpose.
page 52
The art of living is the art of killing psychology, of creating with oneself and with others unnamed individualities, being, relations, qualities. If one can’t manage to do that in one’s life, that life is not worth living
Michel Foucault cited in Byung-Chul Han
The art of living stands opposed to the ‘psychological terror’ through which subjugating subjectivation occurs.
Neoliberal psychopolitics is a technology of domination that stabilizes and perpetuates the prevailing system by means of psychological programming and steering. Accordingly, the art of living, as the praxis of freedom, must proceed by way of de-psychologization. This serves to disarm psychopolitics, which is a means of effecting submission. When the subject is de-psychologized — indeed, de-voided — it opens onto a mode of existence that still has no names: an unwritten future. 79