ABSTRACT
This chapter briefly summarises the governmental rationality of neoliberalism in order to highlight the entrepreneurial conduct and mobilisation of affect from its key elements. With a genealogical approach, we describe recent neoliberal transformations of social fields in which new affective modes of governing and subjectivation are embedded. In a next step the chapter investigates the role of affect for the neoliberal state-economy relationship and for the dismantling and reconfiguration of the Fordist welfare state. The chapter proceeds by describing the rising importance of affect in (post-)democratic politics that paves the ground for right-wing populism. Finally, the examination of the neoliberal political economy shows that affects found their way into economic theory but even more so in the promotion of consumption in Western societies. Happiness is one of the strong promises in the realm of consumption that contributes to neoliberal affective governmentality. All social fields are scrutinised with a focus on the consequences for gender relations.
