REPOLITICIZING LIFE: LAW AND EDUCATION AS (ANTI- OR COUNTER-) POLITICAL RESISTANCES TO NEOLIBERALISM

Abstract

The article proposes the repoliticization of life by understanding law and education as anti- or counter-political practices that resist neoliberal rationality. To this end, it draws on the distinction between politics and the political, as well as the notion of the distribution of the sensible, to show that both fields-legal and educational-are not neutral but hegemonic arenas of dispute, stabilization, or subversion of social antagonisms. The article argues that neoliberalism operates as a form of government that captures subjectivities and shifts politics toward individual management, converting law into an instrument of conformity and education into human capital. In light of this scenario, it proposes conceiving law and education as war machines for reactivating dissensus, reopening the public sphere, and fostering subjectivities capable of reaffirming modes of life that cannot be governed by the competitive-performative logic. Thus, law may function as a language of dissensus and a minimal protection of life, while education becomes a formative experience that produces subjects capable of contesting hegemonies. In this context, the repoliticization of life requires ethical-aesthetic-political practices that reorganize the sensible, reinvent the common, and affirm democracy as an ever-unfinished agonistic field. Law and education, understood as counterpolitics, thus become conditions of possibility for sustaining modes of existence resistant to neoliberalism.