Helmi Chikaoui

“The idiot is a modern-day heretic. Etymologically, heresy means ‘choice’. Thus, the heretic is one who commands free choice·, the courage to deviate from orthodoxy. As a heretic, the idiot represents a figure of resistance opposing the violence of consensus. The idiot preserves the magic of the outsider. Today, in fight of increasingly coercive conformism, it is more urgent than ever to heighten heretical consciousness.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

“The neoliberal imperative of self-optimization serves only to promote perfect functioning within the system. Inhibitions, points of weakness and mistakes are to be therapeutically eliminated in order to enhance efficiency and performance. In turn, everything is made comparable and measurable and subjected to the logic of the market. It is not concern for the good life that drives self-optimization. Rather, self-optimization follows from systemic constraints - from the logic of quantifying success on the market.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

“Countless self-management workshops, motivational retreats, and seminars on personality or mental training promise boundless self-optimization and heightened efficiency. They are steered by neoliberal techniques of domination, which aim to capitalize not just on working time but on the person themselves.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power

“To be sure, power can express itself as violence or repression. But it is not based on force. Power need not exclude, prohibit or censor. Not does it stand opposed to freedom. Indeed, power can even use freedom to its own ends. Only in its negative form does power manifest itself as a violence that says "no’ by shattering the will and annulling freedom. Today, power is assuming increasingly permissive forms. In its permissivity - indeed, in its friendliness - power is shedding its negativity and presenting itself as freedom.”
― Byung-Chul Han, Psychopolitics: Neoliberalism and New Technologies of Power