Encounters of human and non-human agencies in spontaneous recreations of memory are everpresent in our daily lives. Here, in a supposedly banal and quotidian instance, lies the questions that intrigue my curiosity as a literary researcher: how memory surpasses established oppositions between human subjects and non-human objects, and how solid and profound is the material aspect of human time.
These questions are strongly related to current trends within the humanities, namely the discourse of posthumanism. Abstractly speaking, posthumanistic thought takes on the vexing historical conditions of our time (for example, the advent of prosthetic digital technologies) to rethink the opposition between the human and the non-human, and at times to radically undermine it. If modern humanism has brought the world to an unprecedented climate crisis, post-humanism engages with non-anthropocentric methodologies in order to imagine a better future. Within this vast field of posthumanism, my research draws mostly from its appearances in French thought. Namely, the actor-network theory of Bruno Latour, Gilles Deleuze and his thought of becoming, and Bernard Stiegler’s thought of technics (following Jacques Derrida).
In this context, the discipline of literary studies seems invaluable. Writing, as Stiegler argues, is itself a kind of technic; it is what enables human inscription in time, and in practice allows human history to appear. The human is never autonomous or self-sufficient in time without a seemingly exterior technique that opens for him the realms of past and future. In that sense, literature always plays a double role: it is both an agency that enables human memory, and an artistic mechanism to question the essence of this memory and its reliability (let us mention again Proust in this context). While in a previous account of similar subjects I dealt with the paradox concerning technics and love in literary works, my current research concentrates on the act of reminiscence and the material groundings of any form of autobiography.
In recent French literature, these questions are astutely addressed by George Perec, Annie Ernaux, and François Bon. In their works, each one of the three presents compelling experiments of writing autobiography that is actively engaged with inorganic objects and the ghostly presences which they embody. The comparison between the three is of course not contingent at all, as the authors also represent three different generations within French literature. Here my research would relate directly to the historical conditions of our time, in asking how changes in forms of technics and technology, rapidly changing between each generation, affect human memory and human perception of time.
I develop this line of thought using the concepts of collecting and hoarding as two distinct mental and material configurations that undermine both the logic of the commodity – but also as practices that involve the externalization of human time and biography to non-human elements. Hoarding and collecting are highly relevant to New Materialisms because they are inherently assemblages, collective tendencies, under which we cannot bestow an ontological priority to humans or to any “atomic” or individual part whatsoever. Moreover, against representational readings in literature, I draw on theories of reading (namely surface reading in Best and Marcus’ terms) to discuss the expressive textuality of these assemblages. Exploring the expressive nature of material assemblages, my research revisits the dichotomy of matter and signs, of the material and the semiotic, exploring materiality as text and text as materiality.
