Financial Crisis and Experience Itself : The Beginning of a Redeeming Story in Iceland

Abstract: This thesis explores the experience – experience itself – of the economic crisis in Iceland 2008. This exploration takes its starting point in personal stories that together form a mythic narrative about the crisis in which the causes of the crisis are retroactively invented through the construction of a phantasmagoria. Since the reason for the stories peculiar form – their retroactive invention of the crisis’ causes – cannot be accounted for by the stories themselves, the stories are approached a symptoms of an experience that for some reason is articulated through a myth, rather than with the language of political economy, and this despite the fact that their narrators have experienced the consequences of a collapsed economic system. This thesis attempt to trace and formulate the experience that has given the personal stories illustrated in this thesis their mythic form.