ABSTRACT: This article proposes a Foucauldian genealogy of uselessness and argues that uselessness can function not only as a mechanism of exclusion within neoliberal governmentality but also as a potential tool of resistance. Neoliberal rationality constructs uselessness as the negative counterpart of productivity, efficiency, and measurable performance, drawing on two liberal regimes of truth: the juridico-deductive logic, which frames the useless as a parasitic element of the social body, and the utilitarian logic, which disqualifies what produces no quantifiable effects. While neoliberalism intensifies these logics through governance by numbers and New Public Management, the article contends that uselessness occupies a paradoxical position at the margins of governmentality. Precisely because it lies outside dominant regimes of value, uselessness can be reinterpreted as an impolitical category that exposes the contingency and violence of neoliberal norms. When reappropriated under specific material and political conditions, uselessness becomes a critical lens and, potentially, a site of resistance against productivist and functionalist imperatives.
Léa Antonicelli (Sun,) studied this question.