Excerpt from L. Poenaru, LOST IN SELF-CONSUMPTION. Blackout Selection and the Anti-Darwinian Regime of Extraction (in press, Cambridge Scholars) What kind of system selects individuals only to erode the very capacities it depends on? What form of selection no longer aims at preservation, stabilization, or reproduction, but instead organizes the progressive depletion of those it identifies as most functional? And what does it mean, biologically and structurally, to live with

SELF-WATCHDOG SELF-WATCHDOG The contemporary subject is increasingly constituted as a self-contained unit of responsibility, coherence, and performance. Psychological stability, success, emotional regulation, and social legitimacy are framed as outcomes that must be produced internally by the individual self. This configuration is not a neutral psychological evolution; it is historically and politically produced through neoliberal rationalities that relocate social, economic,