In the special issue ‘The Novel and Neoliberalism’ in Novel: A Forum on Fiction 

This essay examines Gillian Flynn's Gone Girl and the ticking-time-bomb terror scenario as exemplars the survival game, one of the key sub-genres of the aesthetic formation that I call the microeconomic mode. I argue that the survival game models a form of political interiority I call 'life-interest'. I read life-interest in relation to the history of interest as a political category and Deleuzian arguments regarding gamification and the control society. I posit that the agonised, embodied subject of life-interest emerges alongside and operates as a corollary to the more familiar, diffuse informatic subject of control.

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