Writing subjectivity without subjecthood: the machinic unconscious of Nathalie Sarraute’s Tropisms

Abstract

ABSTRACT In the context of endeavors within social and cultural geography to conceive new models of subjectivity outside the classical model of the subject, this paper explores the possibility of a writing of subjectivity outside of the anthropocentric grammars that centralize the human subject as the locus of thought and action. To do so, we turn to the literary work Tropisms by French author Nathalie Sarraute for its expression of unconscious and impersonal ‘micromovements’ that evoke a mode of subjectivity that is no longer that of a given human individual. Sarraute’s work, with its attentiveness to and amplification of surreptitious yet forceful events that influence how we think and how we act, its rejection of individualized psychological ideas about human experience and its experimentation with what literature can do, creates singular portraits of socio-spatial life in its unfolding and thus evokes different kinds of subjectivities – what we term a ‘subjectivity without subjecthood’. To extrapolate from Sarraute’s writing, we turn to Félix Guattari’s theorization of subjectivity through a ‘machinic’ unconscious. In doing so, we draw out three dimensions of subjectivity as portrayed in Sarraute’s work: its collective, asignifying and non-linear character.