Abstract
This text discusses the role played by fantasy and enjoyment in perpetuating the capitalist order and harnesses the historical and class charge of the term ‘bourgeois’ to its undertaking. More than 50 years ago, Roland Barthes was defining the bourgeoisie as ‘the social class that does not want to be named’ (Barthes 1972, 138). According to Barthes, bourgeois ideology functions by erasing the name ‘bourgeois’, thus transforming bourgeois reality into natural reality, into Nature (Barthes 1972, 141). But while critical theory, including the interwar modernist avant-garde, investigated the subjectivity they called ‘bourgeois’ with a sort of anatomopathological minutiae, looking for the key to understanding and affecting the modern regime, the term is not often used in contemporary anti-capitalist analyses. It has been replaced, mostly, by structural analyses that focus on the ‘middle class’ or on the ‘neoliberal’ subject. The term ‘middle class’ is inadequate for an analysis of capitalist ideology because it is one of this ideology’s active elements. In England, for example, the incognito of the bourgeois class was insured by its self-description as the ‘middle class’ (Moretti 2014). By spatialising its appellative, the bourgeoisie self-represents as an intermediate stratum, partly subaltern, and therefore is not responsible for the effects of capitalism. The suggestion of spatial contiguity created by the terms ‘low’, ‘middle’, and ‘high’ also promises a potential for class fluidity not allowed by the old terminologies such as peasantry, proletariat, bourgeoisie, and nobility (Moretti 2014, 12). ‘Middle class’, then, participates in forging the bourgeoisie’s mystique as a universal class that will eventually include everybody.
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Panu, M. (2016). The Bourgeois Returns. In: Enjoyment and Submission in Modern Fantasy. Studies in the Psychosocial. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51321-2_1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-51321-2_1
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