Thinking the unconscious beyond the psychoanalytic subject: Simondon, Murakami, and the transductive forces of the transindividual

Abstract

ABSTRACT The last decade has seen growing interest across human geography in the concept of the unconscious as a key terrain for thinking social life. At the same time, an increasing number of geographers are exploring theorisations of the unconscious that push beyond the subject-predicate tendencies of much psychoanalytic thinking, addressing material and non-representational forces that exceed the confines of a human-centred understanding. This paper extends this work through an engagement with the philosophy of Gilbert Simondon, highlighting three key implications for geographical understandings of the unconscious. First, how it inverts the traditional emphasis on already-constituted psychic individuals to processes of psychic individuation that modulate the emergence and becoming of subjects. Second, how it shifts beyond the psychoanalytical fixation on negativity and repression through an understanding of the transductive potential of unconscious forces to create new forms of life. And third, how it opens a new way of articulating the relation of the psychic and collective as a relation of individuations that he terms the transindividual. Empirically, the paper turns to the subterranean landscape of dreams and desires in the novels of Haruki Murakami, exploring how literary encounters might open a space for thinking the transductive forces of the transindividual unconscious.