The Figures of Crisis: The Reflections of the 2008 Financial Crisis as Ideological Discourse of Capitalism

In this dissertation, the reflections on the 2008 financial crisis by Henry Paulson, Timothy Geithner and Ben Bernanke are read as literary texts with formal features that perform an ideological function. Their memoirs of the financial crisis contain a set of figures and formal elements that create the narrative of crisis which acts as an apology for the current financial system and capitalist economy in general. The analysis shows how the crisis discourse deflects criticism directed at the three principal decision-makers by deploying the strategies of exceptional individualization of their characters, and by naturalization of historical processes and relations of capitalist production. In order to frame the reflections as ideological narratives, the analysis draws from Fredric Jameson’s understanding of literature and cultural texts as socially symbolic acts that can be deciphered in terms of their ideological position in the conflict between different class interests. The representations of crisis and the financial structure are read as an attempt to project a map of the unconscious of the capitalist system - of the unrepresentable global economy. That the totality of social relations cannot be individually experienced as an empirical object or process has been theorized as one of the conspicuous phenomena of modernity. The examination of crisis reflections locates and describes their formal moments that further obscure the global reality of financial relations and produce illusions of its natural permanence and regeneration. Figures like the firefighter, the lender of the last resort, the outsider, the expert, and others, form a discourse of crisis that evacuates genuine critical reflection on the system that constantly produces crises. To politicize and historicize this mythic discourse is to try to attend to its logic of representation and point out its aesthetic attraction and conceptual incoherence.

Name thesis:degree_name

Ph.D. Interdisciplinary Humanities

Level thesis:degree_level

Doctoral

Discipline thesis:degree_discipline

Faculty of Humanities

Department dc:contributor.department

Interdisciplinary Humanities Program

Grantor dc:publisher

Brock University

Year dc:date.issued

2025

Author dc:creator

• Zovko, Miroslav

Advisor dc:contributor.advisor

• Pendakis, Andrew

• HUMANITIES and RELIGION::Aesthetic subjects
• HUMANITIES and RELIGION::History and philosophy subjects

Language dc:language.iso

eng

Handle dc:identifier.uri

https://hdl.handle.net/10464/19746

OAI identifier oai:identifier

oai:brocku.scholaris.ca:10464/19746