ABSTRACT
The 2008 stock market crash has already left abundant traces in mainstream Hollywood and televisual productions—to name but a few: Up in the Air, Capitalism: A Love Story, Too Big to Fail. There can be very little doubt about whether the epidemic stands for the stock market crash—notoriously triggering a chain reaction potentially dragging the whole world into a very deep economic crisis. The chapter closely analyzes Contagion as an allegory of the crisis of finance capital, and of the global consequences. The main topic of Contagion is very much a world reunited under the aegis of the same crisis burning everywhere, so it inevitably involves the representation of social totality. Blurring the private and the public comes dangerously close to what recent political theory has usually called the commons: sharing property, goods, services et cetera as the concrete basis for an alternative to present-day crisis.
