The Articulation of Violence in Fiction on Contemporary Capitalism

Abstract

What effects does economic violence have on individuals? Can one resist it by means that measure up to the oppression endured but that don’t disqualify action by making it participate in a spiral of violence? This article analyzes novels and films that represent industrial capitalism (Jia Zhangke’s A Touch of Sin, Arno Bertina’s Des châteaux qui brûlent), and finance capitalism (Don DeLillo’s Cosmopolis, J.C. Chandor’s Margin Call). In these works, it seems that the violence suffered by subjects is doomed to be exteriorized once again in destructive and self-destructive forms that lend themselves to aestheticization. The articulation of violence reproduces class inequality: whereas legalized and naturalized structural violence operates through intermediaries, the subjective violence used by the dominated is immediate, physical, and instantly reprehensible. In the works of Bertina and DeLillo, the performance and carnivalization of the world can be vectors, if only fleetingly, of protest. In the works of Chandor and Jia, individualist retreats and escapes forward prevail. Exploring a number of key moments in these fictions, this article seeks to determine the principles by which economic violence proliferates and metamorphoses.

Keywords:

• Capitalism
• violence
• Don DeLillo
• Jia Zhangke
• Arno Bertina
• J.C. Chandor

Notes

1 See pp. 16–26 of Hélder Câmara, Spirale de violence. Paris, Desclée de Brouwer, 1970.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Vincent Message

Vincent Message is Associate Professor of Comparative Literature and Creative Writing at the Université Paris 8 Saint-Denis. In Romanciers pluralistes (2013), a study devoted to Musil, Fuentes, Pynchon, Rushdie, and Glissant, he develops the concept of fictional pluralism in order to shed light on works that stage conflicts of values. He has published two novels, Les Veilleurs (2009) and Défaite des maîtres et possesseurs (2016).