The Deadly Time of Capitalism: Suicide and Plasticity in the French Workplace

Abstract

Abstract:Over the past twenty-five years, structural changes within French corporate life have given rise to an increase in workplace suicide. Waves of scholarly work, as well as novels and films, have emerged in response. Catherine Malabou, with her focus on work, time, and death, has so far been absent from these conversations. While exploring these problems in Malabou’s writing, this article considers their resonance in the worker-suicide film Corporate (2017). In doing so, it situates the crisis of workplace suicide, and its aestheticization in film, against emerging positions on the plasticity of the brain and the logic of human value.