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Document Details : Title: Writing without a Subject Subtitle: Madame Guyon's and Surrealism's Subversion of the Modern Self Author(s): DE MAEYER, Lieven Journal: Studies in Spirituality Volume: 34 Date: 2025 Pages: 259-271 DOI: 10.2143/SIS.34.0.3294898 Abstract : This article compares the French mystic Madame Guyon’s divinely inspired writing with surrealist écriture automatique, and argues that both are informed by a typically modern ‘logic of exclusion’. This logic manifests itself in the need for the writer’s disengagement from the writing process, so that an other – divine inspiration, for Guyon, and the unconscious, for surrealism – can express itself freely. This article situates this logic of exclusion within Michel de Certeau’s theory of modernity, which argues that modern subjectivity arose from the loss of a cosmological order rooted in the divine Word, replacing a ‘vocational’ with a ‘scriptural’ relation to the world. Both Guyon and the surrealists resist this shift by attempting to recover a form of receptive subjectivity. By connecting the expression of the Divine Word and the unconscious to the absence of the subject’s conscious experience, their writing practices do not result in a more intimate relation between the subject and its ‘other’. This article concludes, therefore, that Guyon’s mysticism and surrealism are more appropriately characterized as a tragic subversion of, rather than a true alternative to modern subjectivity. |
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