ABSTRACT
Neoliberalism means different things to different people. Reinhold Martin uses the term neoliberal "as defined along two intersecting axes. The first, political-economic dimension of neoliberalism has been associated with the widespread deregulation, privatization" based on Harvey's inclusion of all human actions into the market, the second a sociopolitical dimension has been defined by the philosopher Michel Foucault as the transformation of the modern subject, understood as homo economicus, into 'human capital', an 'entrepreneur of himself'. Neoliberal urbanism should be read in line to a Foucault-inspired critique that focuses on the recalibrated relationships of the citizen to the state and the corporate economy, or its 'governmentality'. Giorgio Agamben argues that the paradigm of providential oikonomia informs and determines the whole political economy of modernity and the administrative, "impolitical" notion of contemporary governmentality. The political house in flames of today's planetary state of exception is one in which Agamben believes its original structure can be glimpsed.
