Another form of this identity mania is our contemporary individualism.

Neo-individualism, bent on performance and entrepreneurial heroism, athletic individualism (Alain Ehrenberg) – possibly neo­ hedonistic, syncretic and tribal – bears no relation to the hero of bourgeois individualism. This latter, the hero of subjectivity, of breaking with the old, of free will and Stirner’s radical singular­ ity, is well and truly dead.  Even Riesman’s ‘self-directed’ individuality has disappeared from the horizon of the social as it has from the purview of the human sciences. The neo-individual is, by contrast, the purest product of ‘other-directedness’ : an interactive, communicational particle, plugged into the network, getting continuous feedback, · and with a clear vision of the podium in his mind’s eye. Everyone is ready to turn themselves, depending on their various advantages or handicaps, into an autonomous micro-particle. And why not? This is the age of the daily invention of new particles. Why should the innumerable particles of our society not each demand their own identity and personal ‘charm’ ? Obviously, this gives rise to chaotic sets and Brownian motion, in which freedom is merely the statistical end­ product of impacts between singularities and no longer, therefore, in any sense a philosophical problem.

This individual is not an individual at all. He is a pentito of subjectivity and alienation, of the heroic appropriation of himself. His only aim is the technical appropriation of the self. He is a convert to the sacrificial religion of performance, efficiency, stress and time-pressure – a much fiercer liturgy than that of production- total mortification and unremitting sacrifice to the divinities of data [/’information], total exploitation of oneself by oneself, the ultimate in alienation.

No religion has ever demanded as much of the individual as such, and it might be said that. radical individualism is the very form of religious integrism. * The modern religion of self­ abnegation, of all-out operationality – the worst one of all since it recoups all the energy of irreligion, all the energy released by the eclipsing of traditional religions. This is the greatest irreligious conversion in history. By comparison with this voluntary holo­ caust, this escalation of sacrifice, the so-called return of religion which we pretend to fear – these occasional upsurges of religiosity or traditional integrism – is negligible. It merely conceals the fundamental integrism of this consensual society, the terroristic fundamentalism of this new sacrificial religion of performance. It masks the fact that society as a whole is moving towards religious metastasis. Religious effects are taken too seriously in their religious dimension and not seriously enough as effects, that is, as masking the true process. This is a screen tumour, a fixation abscess which, by focusing it, allows the evil to be exorcized at little cost, sparing the need to analyse the whole society, to analyse ‘democratic’ society, which is virtually con­ verted to integrism and revisionism, to security and protectionism and, at the same time, to the techniques of crude promotion and intimidation.

This ‘post-modern’ individualism arises not out of a problematic of liberty and liberation, but out of a liberalization of slave networks and circuits, that is, an individual diffraction of the programmed ensembles, a metamorphosis of the macro-structures into innumerable particles which bear within them all the stigmata of the networks and circuits – each one forming its own micro-network and micro-circuit, each one reviving for itself, in its micro-universe, the now useless totalitarianism of the whole. In any case, in all registers – sex, culture, the economy, the media, politics – the concepts of liberty and liberation are diametrically opposed, unconditional liberation being the surest way of keeping liber-ty at bay. Liberty operates in a field that is limited and transcendent, in the symbolic space of the subject, where he is confronted with his own finality, his own destiny, whereas liberation operates in a potentially unlimited space. It is a quasi­ physical process (its prototype is the liberation or release of energy) which pushes every function, every force, every individual to the limit of its possibilities and even beyond, where it is no longer answerable for its own actions. That is why liberty is a critical form, whereas liberation is a potentially catastrophic its end. There is no resolving the dilemma posed by these two. But the present system has found the final solution to both – in liberalization. Not the free subject any longer, but the liberal individual. No longer the liberation, but the liberalization of exchanges. From liberty to liberation, from liberation to liberal­ ization. The extreme point of highest dilution, minimal intensity, where the problem of liberty cannot even be posed any longer.

And, in the process, the concept of alienation disappears. This new, cloned, metastatic, interactive individual is not alienated any longer, but self-identical. He no longer differs from himself and is, therefore, indifferent to himself. This indifference to oneself is at the heart of the more general problem of the indifference of institutions or of the political [le politique], etc., to themselves.

The indifference of time: the non-distance between points in time, the promiscuity of points in time, the instantaneousness of real time. Boredom.

The indifference of space: the televisual, remote-controlled contiguity and contamination of all points in space, which leaves you nowhere.

Political indifference: the superimposition, the proliferation of all opinions in a single media continuum.

Sexual indifference: indistinguishability and substitution of sexes as a necessary consequence of the modern theory of sex as difference.

The individual’s indifference to himself and to others is a mirror-image of all these other kinds of indifference: it results from the absence of division within the subject, the suppression of the pole of otherness, from the subject’s being inscribed in the order of identity, which is a product, paradoxically, of the demand that he be different from himself and from others.

For this identitary individual lives on the hymning and hallucinating of difference, employing to that end all the devices for simulating the other. He is the first victim of that psychologi­ cal and philosophical theory of difference which, in all spheres, ends in indifference to oneself and others. Difference is the infantile disorder of the subject (of our culture in general) and identity mania (the de-differentiation of self.

from: The Illlusion of the End