Two nearly utopian moments mark the heart of the films La Promesse (1996) and Rosetta (1999), written and directed by Luc and Jean- Pierre Dardenne. In the first, we find Rosetta at the end of a very long day. She has a made a friend, Riquet, and through that friendship found an off-the-books job at a waffle maker, escaped her alcoholic and sexually profligate mother, and, with Riquet, spent the evening imitating what it might be like sometime to have fun with a friend or in a couple. She is awkward at this thing called relaxing, but she is game; she’ll take the risk of submitting to someone else’s pleasure economy in order to get that thing she wants, whose qualities she describes as she goes to sleep: “Your name is Rosetta. My name is Rosetta. You found a job. I found a job. You have a friend. I’ve got a friend. You have a normal life. I have a normal life. You won’t fall through the cracks. I won’t fall through the cracks. Good night. Good night.”

Many reviews of Rosetta call this catechistic quasi-prayer the film’s most heartbreaking moment: for Rosetta, all the world of possible desires has been paired down to a friend and a job, a state of attaining some bare minimum of social recognition. Moreover, this is an episode of intimacy, belonging, and sociability that, ultimately, Rosetta can have only with herself, in a private, hoarded space that’s usually occupied by the pain of her ulcer, a condition of attrition that the film suggests is a symbol and consequence of the intensity of aching life-making activity she otherwise goes through every day merely to survive. Even the measured tone of Rosetta’s repetitions expresses the wish to be able to use the French rester, which means not to rest, exactly, but to stay somewhere, over time, in a place to which one can return: I rest here.

When some Belgians saw Rosetta, they understood this scene to exemplify a national crisis, and the government promptly sponsored and passed a law called the “Rosetta Plan” that forced businesses to hire the young Belgians who, like Rosetta, were desperately struggling to gain a foothold of any sort in the increasingly global economy.1 Much contemporary theory defines citizenship as an amalgam of the legal and commercial activity of states and business and individual acts of participation and consumption, but Rosetta’s speech about falling though the cracks reminds that citizenship, in its formal and informal senses of social belonging, is also an affective state, where attachments take shape.

Here, the affects of belonging are all tied up with what happens at the point of production. When the Dardennes describe Rosetta as a “war film,” it is these aspects of the politics of everyday life and contemporary struggle to which they point.2 Indeed, the film opens amid the chaos that ensues when the diminutive girl is fired and physically fights two enormous men to keep from being ejected from another low-skill, low-paying, and repetitive job. She finally leaves that workplace to continue the circle she runs in every day, tracking a pattern from her home, to the town, to the bus, across a field, where she hides her precious “good shoes”—the ones that make her presentable to employers in the service economy — and into a trailer park where she lives, badly, with her mother.

Thus, by the time Rosetta makes this whispered affirmation, we know the emotional costs of her contentment: the impersonal pulses of capitalist exchange have had devastating personal, including physical, effects, and now, momentarily secure, she has optimism about the prospect of becoming what she pridefully calls “a good worker.” This matters so desperately that she rejects state welfare, because she wants to feel that she has earned her value the way “normal” people do, who produce something of value to others. Without membership in the army of laborers, she had no space for even a little cramped fantasy about spaces of the good life or good times ahead; now, with a job, Rosetta’s fantasy is not at a grandiose scale but evokes a scene of an entirely imaginable normalcy whose simplicity enables her to rest unanxiously and, for the first and only time in the film, to have a good night. It matters not that she is unofficial, off the books in all the bureaucratic senses; even in an extremely informal economy, the goodness of the good life feels possible to her and thus feels already like a confirming reality, calming her even before she lives it as an ongoing practice. The ongoing prospect of low-waged and uninteresting labor is for Rosetta nearly utopian, and it makes possible imagining living the proper life that capitalism offers as a route to the good life. That the route is a rut matters not to Rosetta; what operates here are the affects of aspirational normativity, understanding the persistence of which in the project of life-building on the bottom of contemporary class society is the descriptive project of this essay.