Looking Beyond Neoliberalism

Abstract

This book probes the response of French and Francophone Belgian cinema to neoliberal crisis, focusing first on neoliberal subjectivity, then exploring how cinema can track emergent possibilities and challenge us to imagine alternative futures. It begins by noting that crisis itself must be seen as a routine part of neoliberalism’s (mal)functioning, something instrumentalised by neoliberal governance, and a more systemic crisis of neoliberalism itself. Because of this complexity and resistance to neat chronological limits, the book examines works from before 2007-2008 as well as those produced after that time. It brings together careful close readings of selected films and relevant theory. It first shows how Audiard’s flexible heroes remake themselves as successful neoliberal subjects. Two chapters then explore films by Cantet, Hansen-Løve, the Dardenne brothers, Brizé, and others, looking first at neoliberal subjects in the grip of debt and, radicalising the sense of crisis, driven to suicide. Failed filmic suicides are used to explore what an exit from neoliberal labour might mean. The next two chapters continue this search for an exit, by discussing how the works of Sciamma and Kechiche develop a sense of radical contingency, and by uncovering a neglected gift economy which opens a sense of futurity and social connectivity in the Dardennes’ films. The final chapter explores how, with its machinic powers and semiotic richness, cinema can respond to our cog-like insertion into multiple machineries or to the semiotic richness of political demonstrations. Theorists turned to include Rancière, Foucault, Lazzarato, Žižek, Mauss, Althusser, Malabou and Derrida.