Autofiction and the possibility of life in neoliberal ruins: reification, friction and the affective dominant in Weijers and Heti.

This essay analyses the intersection of the novel and neoliberalism as a relation of friction (Tsing). Whereas former studies of literature and neoliberalism imply models of resistance or complicity, the model of friction allows us to read novels as exploring possibilities of life and creativity within the worlds of neoliberal reification. We apply this model to contemporary autofiction: <italic>Kamers antikamers</italic> by Niña Weijers and <italic>How Should a Person Be?</italic> by Sheila Heti. Differing from idealist accounts of neoliberalism and a capitalist view of the subject as ‘entrepreneur of the self’, we engage a materialist approach that looks at the subject as a ‘gamer’ (Wark) whose affective and cognitive skills get reified into information. We conclude that both novels foreground the desire to find possibilities of life in affective attachments, which in their turn open up possibilities of difference and creativity in the context of neoliberal abstraction and alienation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]