Experimenting with a Multiple Jobs Work System.

This article explores the links, for an individual, between the possibility of becoming a Subject and his or her tentative relationships to work and non-work activities. It relies on an extensive ethnographic and clinical study of a group of forty “intermittent workers” from the southwest coast of France who used to be executives in large companies and deliberately chose to quit a traditional way of working, under a permanent contract, in favor of a better quality of life, thus experimenting with a new way of working: having multiple jobs at the same time, alternating with periods of unemployment and willful precariousness. It aims at understanding to what extent the current climate of hyper-plural work and life stimulations prevents the individual from becoming a Subject and, conversely, it sheds some light on how individuals’ relationships to activity could be reconsidered to make it happen. From a theoretical perspective, the reflection builds on a peculiar approach of the subject and the process of subjectivizing, based on propositions from certain French psychosociologists and clinicians.