[[09-01|25-09-01]] This shift in registers, which relocates the speaker of the poem into a sus- Chapter One pended place, might be understood in a Habermasean way. In The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere Habermas talks about the public/private zoning of normative being in terms of a split within the man of modernity, who is a man of the house and a man of the market.23 Habermas suggests that the problem of living capitalist modernity is in managing the relations between these spheres as a bourgeois and a subject of emotions. A bourgeois is someone who instrumentalizes his social relations in terms of the rules of the market, and who is zoned by the people who assign value to property as having value in proximity to his property and his being self-possessed. For the bourgeois there is property, there is home, and the man is a little leader in the home, and everyone recognizes his authority wherever he carries his propriety onto property. At the same time the man cultivates an image of himself as fundamentally shaped in transactions of feeling, not capital. --- This structure is what Jürgen Habermas points to as well when he distinguishes the modern bourgeois as someone who shifts between his identity as a calculating man of the market and his identity as an homme who locates his true self in the performance of intimacy in the theater of domestic space.24 The displaced relation within the capitalist subject between his instrumental persona and his loving persona enables him to disidentify with what’s aggressive in his pursuit of desire and interest in all spaces, and to see himself as fundamentally ethical because he means to have solidarity with some humans he knows. This perspective would suggest that the children in the Dardennes’ films are caught in the contradictory knot of their parents’ economo-affective practices, which similarly cast intimate well-intentioned activity as importantly life-affirming and only situationally aggressive, coercive, or disappointing --- Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere