A machine whose fuel is boredom and monotony

Abstract

In the following we propose a rereading of La condition ouvrie?re by Simone Weil, classic text of denunciation linked to Marxist, worker and union literature, but from the so- called affective turn in the social sciences. We propose an analysis that focuses on aspects few attended in the analysis of this work (Cabaud, 1957; Bea, 2010; Pe?trement, 1973; Andre?s Garci?a, 2016; Chenavier, 2016 y McLellan, 1989), we propose to stop at those affections, feelings and mood regimes that are measured in Weil’s experience of personification, during her work as a worker in the early 1930s in various French factories. In this sense, Weil’s affective register closely linked to the working-class world and Fordist industrial sensibility reads, by counterpoint, to the installation of a neoliberal psychic agenda linked to the normative regimes of optimism and enthusiasm, low modulation and boredom affective atmospheres, or the mental circulation of happiness and its promises of emotional attachment.