This article brings new insights from critical neoliberalism studies into dialogue with recent critical human rights scholarship to develop a theoretically driven analysis of South Africa’s post-apartheid transition. With South Africa’s post-apartheid settlement becoming increasingly fragile, there is a growing need to revisit the purported miracle of transition. Recognizing this need, the article critically explores the relationships between the social transformations wrought by South Africa’s neoliberal transition and the parallel processes of the country’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission (TRC). Understanding neoliberalism as a modality of governing concerned with producing subjects as individualized enterprises, I analyse the TRC as a mechanism which supported this objective by ‘de-collectivising’ the social and making it more amenable to the demands of post-apartheid neoliberalism. To do so, I explore how the TRC’s use of public testimony and mass-media broadcasting displaced collective struggles against apartheid with a range of subjectivities organized around human rights victimhood. The overall effect of the TRC, I conclude, was to constitute post-apartheid society as a thin, individualized and ultimately fragile ‘community of emotion’ that comfortably sits within the limits of South African neoliberalism. I conclude by reflecting on the implications of this analysis for other transitional contexts.

First developed by human rights lawyers and activists, transitional justice emerged from the so-called third wave of democratisations in Latin America. Over the last 30 years, transitional justice has risen to become a 'global project' of global governance.Locating the emergence of transitional justice within the global rise of neoliberalism, this article shows that transitional justice serves an important function in regards to the particularly neoliberal contours of many transitions. Understanding this relation, the article argues, is best served with recourse to what Wendy Brown describes as neoliberalism's practice of omnus et singulatim, a double process through which 'communities' are gathered together as stakeholders to take part in economic activities whilst simultaneously being individualised as 'responsibilised' and self-sufficient entrepreneurial units. Taking this concept, I argue that transitional justice also undertakes a process of omnus et singulatim that usefully prefigures and supports processes of neoliberalisation during 'transition'.Transitional justice, it concludes, does the necessary work of bringing conflictual, traumatised, societies back together, whilst doing so on terms that do not threaten but instead prefigure the individualising demands made upon subjects at the sites of neoliberal transition.

Adding to contemporary debates about the relationship between financialization and neoliberalism, this article investigates their entanglement at the level of subjectivity. Primarily, the article argues that financialization and neoliberalism are converging to produce a new form of subjectivity, post-profit homo œconomicus, an always indebted but credit-seeking enterprise. The value of this approach, the article demonstrates, is that it provides theoretical tools capable of grasping the differential production of subjectivity across the uneven and unequal striations of contemporary neoliberal society, from precarious workers of the gig economy to financial sector elites. The article examines two figures who have become central to public and academic debates about neoliberalism and financialization – the low-waged, precarious worker and the indebted student – to consider how neoliberal subjectivity is produced and distributed unevenly. It concludes that within these fragmentary socioeconomic positions are different instantiations of always indebted but credit-seeking human capital.

No abstract

This chapter seeks to understand the social and political significance of the Greek Truth Committee on the Public Debt (TCPD), a process set up by SYRIZA in June 2015 to contest the dominant ‘common sense’ of Greece’s sovereign debt. Affirming its value, this chapter analyses the TCPD as an important, strategic response to post-crash neoliberalism. Lazzarato has argued that contemporary neoliberalism relies on a mnemotechnics of debt, a project of memory, which does the crucial work of legitimising and sustaining recourse to austerity policies by making citizens ‘guilty’ and thus deserving of them. Set against neoliberalism’s mnemotechnics, I examine the TCPD as a memory-making project, showing how it produced a counter-memory of the debt which demonstrated the innocence of Greek citizens and thus freed them from guilt. With its capacity to reverse the common sense of debt, I conclude that the TCPD’s memory-making strategy remains an important precedent for resisting post-crash neoliberalism.