Biopolitical Complicity

Biopolitical Complicity names the structural condition in which subjects who consciously critique neoliberalism and biopolitics nonetheless remain captured by the very system they denounce — not through ignorance or bad faith, but through the libidinal economy that system deploys. In Ruti's argument (mari-ruti-penis-envy-and-other-bad-feelings-the-emotional-costs-of-everyday-life, p. 208), consumer culture's "proliferation of pleasures" functions as a mechanism of capture: it offers a surplus of objects and satisfactions that "buy off" critical subjects, binding them affectively to the system at the level of desire and enjoyment rather than at the level of belief or explicit assent. The concept thus identifies complicity as neither a moral failing nor a simple ideological delusion, but as a structural effect of the way capitalist biopolitics colonizes desire by substituting an endless variety of partial satisfactions for a genuine confrontation with lack-in-being.

The concept's deeper theoretical wager is that the recognition of constitutive lack — the Lacanian insight that the subject is always already castrated, that no object can fill the void that structures desire — is itself a form of resistance. Accepting lack-in-being has, for Ruti, not only existential but political significance: it is precisely because subjects refuse or are unable to mourn this lack that they remain available for capture by consumer culture's logic of perpetual substitution. Biopolitical Complicity therefore describes the libidinal underside of ideology critique: even critics are not exempt from the superego's command to "Enjoy!", and their enjoyment of the variety of items on offer keeps them structurally tethered to what they nominally oppose.

Biopolitical Complicity sits at the intersection of several canonical concepts in the corpus. It is most immediately an extension of Ideology in its post-Lacanian, Žižekian register: just as ideology functions not through belief but through the libidinal bribe of surplus-enjoyment — the structural non-knowledge embedded in social participation — Biopolitical Complicity names the specific form this bribe takes under neoliberal consumer culture. The "variety of items" that buys off the critic is precisely the capitalist production of surplus-jouissance (plus-de-jouir), the remainder extracted from alienated desire and repackaged as consumer choice. In this sense the concept also extends Jouissance in its superego modality: the command "Enjoy!" is not suspended for those who know better; the critic is no less subject to it than the naive consumer. The concept therefore reinforces the Lacanian principle that cynical distance is itself ideology's most fundamental mode — seeing through the system and enjoying it anyway are not contradictory.

Equally, Biopolitical Complicity is grounded in the logic of Lack and Castration. Ruti's argument is that accepting lack-in-being — accepting castration as structural and irremediable — is what would break the loop of complicity, because consumer culture's power lies precisely in its promise to fill the lack with an ever-expanding proliferation of pleasures. This aligns with the Lacanian principle that the subject who misrecognizes its castration as a contingent deprivation remains endlessly available for the fantasy-supplement that ideology provides. In this sense the concept is a specification and politicization of Fantasy: the fantasmatic frame consumer culture offers is not the subject's own fundamental fantasy but a socially administered one, a collective fantasy of plenitude that keeps lack disavowed. The source, mari-ruti-penis-envy-and-other-bad-feelings-the-emotional-costs-of-everyday-life, thus positions psychoanalytic acceptance of constitutive lack as an unlikely but genuine critical resource against biopolitical capture.

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday LifeMari Ruti · 2018 (p.208)

all of us (critics of neoliberalism and biopolitics)—and not just this speaker—are complicit in the very system we denounce. It buys us off by offering us a variety of items

The phrase "buys us off by offering us a variety of items" is theoretically loaded because it translates the abstract Lacanian mechanism of surplus-jouissance into a concrete political diagnosis: the "variety of items" names the capitalist proliferation of partial objects that substitute for genuine confrontation with lack, while "buys us off" specifies complicity as a libidinal transaction rather than an epistemic failure, applying equally to "all of us" — including the critic — and thereby foreclosing any position of ideological exemption.