Putting the dead to work: making sense of worker suicide in contemporary French and Francophone Belgian film.

Contemporary French and Francophone Belgian cinema has produced a wave of worker suicides that outdoes even Jean Gabin's repeated cinematic deaths of the later 1930s. This article discusses its significance in the context of neo-liberalism and develops an analytical toolkit for making sense of it, t...

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Published in:Studies in French Cinema Vol. 19; no. 4; pp. 314 - 335
Main Author: O'Shaughnessy, Martin
Format: Article
Published: Taylor & Francis Ltd Nov2019
Subjects:
Online Access:View this record in EBSCOhost
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        atl: Putting the dead to work: making sense of worker suicide in contemporary French and Francophone Belgian film.
      aug:
        au: O'Shaughnessy, Martin
        affil: Department of English, Media and Creative Cultures, Nottingham Trent University, Clifton Lane, Nottingham, UK
      su:
        Suicide in motion pictures
        Violence in motion pictures
        French films
        Neoliberalism
        Žižek, Slavoj, 1949-
      sug:
        subj:
          Suicide in motion pictures
          Violence in motion pictures
          French films
          Neoliberalism
          Žižek, Slavoj, 1949-
      keyword:
        Žižek
        Foucault
        neo-liberalism
        parrhesia
        violence
        Worker suicide
      ab: Contemporary French and Francophone Belgian cinema has produced a wave of worker suicides that outdoes even Jean Gabin's repeated cinematic deaths of the later 1930s. This article discusses its significance in the context of neo-liberalism and develops an analytical toolkit for making sense of it, taking its main theoretical inspirations from Slavoj Žižek's theorisation of violence and Carl Cederström and Peter Fleming's analysis of worker suicide, but also drawing on Michel Foucault's account of parrhesia as the scandalous living of another life in this life. The article suggests that most of the films considered use the apparently subjective violence of worker suicide to force the unseen violences of neo-liberal labour into view, while only a few move beyond this denunciatory position to probe both what a parrhesiastic exit from neo-liberal labour, a killing of the worker-in-the-self, might look like and all that prevents it.
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    language: English
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      custom: Copyright of Studies in French Cinema is the property of Taylor & Francis Ltd and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites without the copyright holder's express written permission. Additionally, content may not be used with any artificial intelligence tools or machine learning technologies. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use.
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