Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Audiard’s triumphant neoliberal subjects
- Chapter 2 Subjects in the chains of debt
- Chapter 3 The desperate search for the exit
- Chapter 4 The deconstructive materialism of Sciamma and Kechiche
- Chapter 5 The Dardennes’ unwitting gifts
- Chapter 6 Machinic enslavement and cinema’s machinic powers
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
Chapter 3 - The desperate search for the exit
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 06 June 2023
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of figures
- Acknowledgements
- Introduction
- Chapter 1 Audiard’s triumphant neoliberal subjects
- Chapter 2 Subjects in the chains of debt
- Chapter 3 The desperate search for the exit
- Chapter 4 The deconstructive materialism of Sciamma and Kechiche
- Chapter 5 The Dardennes’ unwitting gifts
- Chapter 6 Machinic enslavement and cinema’s machinic powers
- Conclusion
- Bibliography
- Filmography
- Index
Summary
Our first chapter gave us a positive account of the entrepreneurial neoliberal subject as enacted in the cinema of Audiard. The second showed cinematic subjects enchained by debt and no longer able to shape themselves or their future. Radicalising this sense of a coming-into-crisis of neoliberal subjectivity but also seeking to look beyond it, the current chapter focuses on an important cluster of films that have successful or abortive worker suicides at their core. The chapter has two main thrusts. Drawing on Slavoj Žižek’s tripartite typology of violences (Žižek 2008: 1–2), it gauges how productively the films connect the subjective violences (the suicides) to the systemic and symbolic violences that are built into the ‘normal’ functioning of the status quo. Supplementing Žižek, addressing workers’ on-screen suicides more specifically, teasing out differences between them, it also draws on another tripartite typology, this time the suicide-related one deployed by Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming in their Dead Man Working (2012). If that book’s title points towards the nightmare situation within which workers kill everything within themselves superfluous to the requirements of the neoliberal workplace, effectively becoming zombies, it also summons up the possibility that one might kill the worker in the self and open up an exit from capitalist labour. It is the films’ capacity to develop the latter, more politically promising scenario that I probe as I move towards the latter stages of the chapter. To help me here, I draw on Foucault’s discussion of parrhesia as a scandalous truth-telling that points the way towards another life within this life (Foucault 2011). I work through these questions in relation to some key worker-suicide films. I begin with the proletarian deaths of Stéphane Brizé’s films La Loi du marché (The Measure of a Man, 2015) and En guerre (At War, 2018) and move on to Christophe Barratier’s L’Outsider (Team Spirit, 2016) and Nicolas Silhol’s Corporate (2017), two films engaging with suicide in relation to the corporate and financial sectors where we might expect to find ideal neoliberal subjects. I will argue that, despite their differences, all these films bring us up against another impasse. They successfully force the violences of neoliberal employment and failure of neoliberal subjectivity into view but are trapped in a sterile left moralism or an individualist humanism that renders them incapable of looking beyond what they show. Their exits are blocked.
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- Information
- Looking beyond NeoliberalismFrench and Francophone Belgian Cinema and the Crisis, pp. 70 - 97Publisher: Edinburgh University PressPrint publication year: 2022