'Morbid Tiers Of Immortality': Don Delillo'S Players And The Financialisation Of The Usa

This article reads DeLillo's novel Players (1977) as an account of the transition from the 1970s' capitalist crisis in the USA to what Greta Krippner calls financialisation'. The process of financialisation' gave rise to a specific economic regime, social materiality, and a peculiar structure of feeling' grounded in finance capital. The protagonists of Players, Lyle and Pammy Wynant, participate in the fictitious vaporisation of social materiality that finance produces and structure their existences upon the workings of the medium of speculative capital in which they are immersed. I shall argue that the anxiety and dread pervading the Wynants can be interpreted as melancholia understood, following the theories of Abraham and Torok, as a refusal to mourn' and incorporation', and that such melancholia originates in the structural forgetting of the commodity form which is at the heart of the financial regime of accumulation. This essay aims to demonstrate that Players offers a powerful representation and critique of the workings of finance capital and of American hegemony pursued via the emergence, consolidation, and expansion of finance.