Capitalist Realism and the Refrain: The Libidinal Economies of Degas

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