| Popis: |
This chapter highlights a shared ontological interest in the human and non-human encounter under finance capitalism between a realist strand of contemporary financial crisis fiction, particularly Alex Preston’s This Bleeding City, and the post-anthropocentric side to Maurizio Lazzarato and Franco Berardi’s theories on semio-capitalism. Through a dialogue between Preston, Lazzarato and Berardi, the chapter underlines a common understanding of how financial reality works and what it does: how a non-referential agency of finance money-signs is co-shaping financial subjectivity and how this affective interaction produces a ‘dry ontology’ of bodily and emotionally isolated and detached subjects. They all thereby highlight how the reality of financial capital violently reproduces an affective and experiential level of the ideological ideal of an atomized economic subject. In order to approach the novel in this way, the chapter likewise utilizes Fredric Jameson’s concept of literary realism and the contradiction between affect and narration. The chapter thereby wants to maintain that an affective approach to the realist financial novel must capture and foreground the aforementioned ontological reality of finance capitalism while at the same time avoid losing sight of the novel’s narrative ambition and the all too human desire of wanting to make sense of this reality and find a kind of closure. |
