Capitalist Realism and the Refrain: The Libidinal Economies of Degas

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Published: May 1, 2011
DOI: https://doi.org/10.12681/syn.16921
Keywords:
impressionism realism painting photography art degas
Dougal Philips
Abstract
This article looks to the work of Degas as an exemplar of a kind of Capitalist Realism, a kind of second generation realism following on from the earlier work of Courbet and Manet. It is posited here that Degas took up the mantle of a ‘corporeal’ realism distinguished from the Impressionists by its nuanced approach to the realism of the body, in particular to its place in the Parisian network of capital and desire. Degas’s paintings and his experiments with photography mapped two spaces: the space of the libidinal and capitalist exchange (theatre, café, stock-exchange) and the space of the production of painting. Further, Degas attempts to represent his own disappearance into both these spaces. Degas continued the politicised social project of realism but with a personalised, modernised vision that prefigures the realisms of the twentieth century.
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Author Biography
Dougal Philips
Philip Davis is Head of School of Arts at University of Liverpool and editor of The Reader. His publications include Memory and Writing: From Wordsworth to Lawrence (Liverpool University Press, 1983), The Experience of Reading (Routledge, 1992), The Victorians 1830-1880, new Oxford English Literature Series (Oxford University Press, 2002) and Why Victorian Literature Still Matters (Blackwell, 2008). He has edited Selected Writings of John Ruskin (Everyman, 1995), Real Voices on Reading (Macmillan, 1997) and an anthology of religious poems, All the Days of My Life (Dent, 1999). In addition he is the author of Sudden Shakespeare (Athlone and St Martin’s Press, 1996), Shakespeare Thinking (2006) and the internationally acclaimed biography Bernard Malamud: A Writer’s Life (Oxford University Press, 2007).
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