Neoliberalism

In Ruti's framework, neoliberalism names an ideological system organized around performance, productivity, self-improvement, and enforced cheerfulness that functions as a psychic management apparatus. The theoretical move is precise: neoliberal ideology does not simply distort consciousness in the classic Marxist sense but operates at the level of affective regulation. By keeping subjects perpetually busy, goal-oriented, and optimistic, neoliberalism suppresses the "bad feelings"—resentment, grief, anxiety, dissatisfaction—that are the inevitable psychic residue of ontological lack and castration. In Lacanian terms, the structural loss that constitutes the speaking subject generates an irreducible affective surplus; neoliberalism functions as a social-level defense against the eruption of that surplus into legible, articulable discontent.

This means neoliberalism operates as a form of ideology (in the Althusserian-Lacanian sense) that interpellates subjects not through explicit repression but through the colonization of desire and jouissance. By recruiting subjects into a ceaseless circuit of self-optimization, neoliberal discourse re-channels the drive's energy into productivity rather than allowing it to crystallize as critique. The "enforced cheerfulness" component is particularly theoretically significant: it names the demand placed on subjects to foreclose the anxiety and bad feelings that castration structurally produces, effectively recruiting fantasy—the frame that gives desire its coordinates—in the service of an ideological fiction of completeness and self-sufficiency. Ruti's wager is that naming this system is already a first step toward disidentifying from its affective imperatives.

This concept appears exclusively in mari-ruti-penis-envy-and-other-bad-feelings-the-emotional-costs-of-everyday-life, where it serves as the social-historical counterpart to the psychoanalytic argument about castration and bad feelings. It is not developed as a standalone political-economic analysis but as an explanatory hinge: the Lacanian account of ontological lack (castration, desire, anxiety) explains why subjects produce bad feelings, and neoliberalism explains why those feelings are systematically suppressed and cannot reach articulation or political form. The concept thus functions as an extension of the canonical concepts of Castration and Anxiety into the domain of ideology and interpellation: if castration installs an irremovable lack and anxiety is the affect that signals the Real pressing against symbolic containment, then neoliberalism is the ideological apparatus that colonizes both—keeping the circuit of desire (Desire) captured in productivity fantasies and the anxiety of the Real managed through enforced positivity.

The concept also bears directly on Fantasy and Jouissance, though these are cross-referenced rather than elaborated here. Neoliberalism recruits fantasy by offering subjects a coherent frame—self-improvement, achievement, happiness—that screens the constitutive impossibility of the social relation, and it reroutes jouissance into the compulsive repetition of performance metrics. In this respect, Ruti's neoliberalism functions as a specification of how Ideology and Interpellation operate at the level of affect and drive, rather than merely belief or cognition: subjects are hailed not only into social positions but into particular emotional stances toward their own structural lack.

Penis Envy and Other Bad Feelings: The Emotional Costs of Everyday LifeMari Ruti · 2018 (page unknown)

This system of performance, productivity, self-improvement, and enforced cheerfulness, which scholars in my field... call neoliberalism

The phrase "enforced cheerfulness" is theoretically loaded because it names an affective injunction—not merely an economic arrangement—making explicit that neoliberalism operates as a demand placed on the subject's emotional life; the four-term series "performance, productivity, self-improvement, and enforced cheerfulness" maps precisely onto the suppression of the bad feelings that castration and lack structurally generate, showing ideology operating at the level of jouissance and desire rather than at the level of belief alone.