ABSTRACT
The new science of the brain has become a key preoccupation in social regulation, public and cultural debates and aesthetic practice. Over the past five years, a notable development has been the emergence of terms such as neurocapitalism, neuropower and neuroliberalism to describe what are claimed to be radical shifts in the functioning of capitalism, power and liberalism, respectively. To help elucidate the complex nature of the emerging liberal regulatory frame, this chapter explores a genealogy of liberal rule, looking at the particular ways in which it has conceived and manipulated what will be called the natural frame. Biopolitics as the government of life, that takes as its basis scientific discourses of life, finds in liberalism its most paradigmatic expression. The liberal rule begins to abandon its katechontic logic of protecting the naturalness of the economic and the social in favour of an eschatological promise of ultimate perfection in the form of a nature saved, redeemed from regulatory constraints.
