Jamaican adventures: Simmel, subjectivity and extraterritoriality in the Caribbean [French summary]

As one of the key theorists of modernity, Simmel's writing remains strikingly underrepresented in recent anthropological theorizations of this subject. Drawing on Simmel's conception of adventure, this article considers the ways in which a sense of agency is created by working-class Jamaicans through their presentation of self in narrative. Adventure, as an aesthetic framing of individual experience, provides a temporal and spatial modality in which the individuated self can be reshaped into a protagonistic subjectivity for others. Ar the same time, the adventure presents a vehicle for an exploration of the meaning of freedom in a cosmopolitan field of social relations. The article examines the affinity that exists between the conditions for adventure, as Simmel outlines them, and the political-economic circumstances that govern Jamaican lives.