ABSTRACT

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.

摘要

当代法国和讲法语的比利时电影产生了一波工人自杀浪潮，甚至超过了让·加宾 (Jean Gabin) 在 1930 年代后期多次因电影死亡的事件。本文讨论了它在新自由主义背景下的重要性，并开发了一个分析工具包来理解它，其主要理论灵感来自斯拉沃热齐泽克的暴力理论和卡尔塞德斯特伦和彼得弗莱明对工人自杀的分析，但也借鉴了米歇尔福柯将直言描述为今生另一种生活的可耻生活。这篇文章表明，大多数被考虑的电影都使用工人自杀的明显主观暴力来迫使人们看到新自由主义劳动者看不见的暴力行为，而只有少数电影超越了这种谴责的立场来探讨这两者是什么对新自由主义劳动的直言不讳的退出，对自我工作者的扼杀，可能看起来像所有阻止它的东西。