Runaway Capitalism: Sacrifice and the Lac-Mégantic Railway Disaster

Abstract

This dissertation critically interrogates the deployment of sacrificial discourses in response to corporate violence as an understudied dynamic of contemporary capitalism. Sacrificial rituals not only have a disciplining capacity on the human body in both a literal and symbolic sense, they are also instrumental in motivating behaviours that stabilize a society (Durkheim 1893) and can render violent social transactions to appear more palatable, even legitimate (Girard 2013; Wang 2020). Of particular concern are the representations of sacrifice mobilized in official state responses to a specific form of corporate violence: railway disasters. Through an examination of the unique socio-political-economic and historical context of Canadian railways and a distinct case study of one of the country's deadliest derailments, the Lac-Mégantic disaster, I examine the ways in which various narratives intersect to form an emergent discourse of sacrifice that linguistically conceals and sacralizes corporate violence. To this end, I aim to explore new ways of critically interrogating governing techniques in response to train derailments and the common (mis)understandings that inform such responses.