What if the most joyful act was not to transgress a norm but to erect
it? What if creativity consisted in enunciating a law under the pretext
of violating it? And what if it turned out that you, who claim to prefer
exceptions, only talk about them because they allow you to imagine the
rules?
This book proposes a provocative interpretation of the dynamic
relationship between the normative and the transgressive. Combining
sociology, biopolitics and satire, it offers a surprising theory of
normative imagination as a cognitive mode characteristic of the era of
emotional capitalism. Gender, fashion, artistic creation and
surveillance are analyzed from the perspective of a regulatory drive, a
continuously renovated and imperative push for normalcy that no longer
comes from factual powers but from citizens themselves. These, united in
a spontaneous popular court, armed with smartphones and driven by
juridical compulsion, become the axis of societies of control. In this
way the affective ways of constructing subjectivity are replaced by the
distinctive pathology of our times, the name of the globalized game:
normopathy for all.