La scrittura come pratica di resistenza: letteratura, azienda e politica nei romanzi di Thierry Beinstingel

Abstract

The aim of this article is to investigate the opportunity literature offers to oppose contemporary strategies of domination through language. Because work relationships are the main site of a subjection – meaning both the process of becoming a subject and subordination by power – whose rhetoric forms have long been extended to the political domain, studying how literary representations of symbolic domination in the workplace have emerged as a form of resistance can be particularly interesting. In order to do so, the article tackles the work of Thierry Beinstingel (1958) author of approximately ten novels most of which are inspired by their author’s own professional experience. In these texts, literature appropriates that same managerial newspeak which is used to produce and to profit from subjectivities in order to resignify it in a creative form of resistance. In his most recent novel, the writer re-elaborates in the same way some political and media discourses. From the case of France Telecom to the rise of electoral success of Front National, Beinstingel’s writings allow an exploration of the many ways linguistic manipulation is operated by neoliberal discourse as well as a reflection on the renewed critical and heuristic role literature can play to stand against them.