CampingConversation

Sandra Lucbert

Eat the rich,
une décomposition

© DR
© DR

15.06.22 — 19:00

CN D Pantin

“February 2022, a national scandal in France: an investigation reveals that the retirement homes of the private group Orpea are tormenting their residents. And their employees. Old people put to bed with full diapers. Left for hours on the floor with broken legs. Agonising in their own vomit. A business model that has been praised by the financial press for years: 15% annual return. Gombrowicz recounts a similar adventure in The Feast of Countess Fritouille. Whereas the narrator believes he is going to the Countess’s home for lean, vegetarian meals, full of benevolent restraint and humanistic concern. The menu suddenly changes. But not the words. They say they are serving cauliflower, but they have cooked human meat. The appetites at the table are not mistaken: and the diners metamorphose into cannibals – belching and jubilant about this sudden sense of authorisation. Such is the regime of impulsiveness that prevails in today’s financialised capitalism.” Sandra Lucbert

Sandra Lucbert is a writer of literature. Her last three books focus on financialised capitalism as an apparatus of discursive, normative and impulsive enrolment. La Toile uses the codes of the epistolary novel to reveal how mass digitalisation produces a political and economic organisation by directly plugging into bodies. Personne ne sort les fusils and Le Ministère des contes publics can be described as works of literary intervention: the former is based on the France Télécom trial, the latter on a media object, a special edition of a current events programme devoted to public debt. These hybrid forms propose, each in their own way, to dismantle the mechanisms of linguistic ratification by which the structures of deregulated finance destroy an entire social order.