Homo Clima – The Neoliberal Subject of Climate Change?

Abstract

Discourse on climate change has portrayed biospheric life as sensitive, vulnerable and adaptable, while fostering human life as changeable and contingent. This paper traces how the politicization of ‘life itself’ extends organizing processes with the atmosphere as a new terrain for government. The analysis illustrates how green governmentality, which claims to take the life of the entire planet into consideration, with climate change reconfigures human species-being into ‘moral life’. This is testament of a shift in biopolitical imaginaries, enforced by risk politics and ethopolitics, that problematizes the moral as a capacity to be assessed, calculated and evaluated. This results in an idea of a moral population, inserted in history through an atmosphere moral economy that modulates the neoliberal subject as an ethico-politically active self-researcher. This subject is able to speak the truth on a climate authorized aestheticized life and functions as a relay of ‘bioaesthetics’, which offers an ostensible confrontation of the entrepreneurial subject in advanced liberal society.