Page - 22 - in JRFM - Journal Religion Film Media, Volume 02/02

22 | Isabella Guanzini www.jrfm.eu 2016, 2/2, 15–32 present world order and is organised around objects and no longer subjects, dissolving certainties and basic orientations and weakening the fundamental trust in the world. They suggest a profound connection between the general disorientation of their characters – who seem to act without being able to explain why – and the neglected fabric of late-capitalist working-class life. In their films, human be- ings seem to emerge from symbolic, ideological, political and physical ruins and to resiliently resist their own ultimate collapse. They describe the intolerable human condition of the post-movement and post-ideological globalised post- working class, which has metabolised its defeat and abandoned any utopian revolution.25 It is true that our characters belong to the working class or at least to what used to be the working class. You might say that Roger in La Promesse is déclassé, a man who no longer belongs to a class. He does not have a job, although we can guess that he once did have a job … The working class is no longer the working class. It is no longer structured as it was at the beginning of the last century. We are truly at the end of an age, of industry, of what we have known for a hundred years.26 The geo-aesthetic scenery informs and determines the development of the characters, who attempt to cope with this destructured social reality every day, trying to survive and to find a way out of the suffocating bubble of the global world. The Dardennes show that within capitalistic discourse, the subjects are reduced to instrumental bodies in the production circuit, which does not allow any exteriority, exception or ideals. Thus, the legitimacy and efficiency of any master figure is undermined, together with any other symbolic mandate neces- sary to determine the identity of the subjects. “In such times you see people who are a bit lost, who try to live by exploiting those worse off than they”.27 Consequently, the Dardennes suggest that capitalist discourse systematically dissolves otherness, inter-subjectivity and sociability, producing subjects who are no longer named by anyone but only by themselves. The Dardennes’ characters testify to the decline of the symbolic order of in- dustrial society and its enemies, together with the evaporation of the Name- of-the-Father as a sign of symbolic investiture,28 of a possible orientation, even a fragile filiation. In this way, they show the consequences of the dissolution of the paternal function, connecting it with the trick of capitalistic reason that L’envers de la psychanalyse. In a conference in Milan in 1972, he introduced the “Discourse of the capitalist” as the “cleverest discourse that we have made”, which corresponds to the main language of post-industrial society (Lacan 1978, 11). 25 Cf. Zonta 2005, 63–64. 26 West/West 2009, 132. 27 West/West 2009, 132. 28 Cf. Santner 2001.