Reacting to the psychoanalytical discourses of Sigmund Freud and Jacques Lacan, which dominated psychoanalysis in the West for most of the twentieth century, schizoanalysts Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, in Anti- Oedipus and other texts, critique and push aside Freud's and Lacan's idea that subjectivity is a “person,” an “individual,” with a superego and a repressed unconscious, who is defined by the family. Deleuze and Guattari's conception of subjectivity is connected not just to the family but to all levels of existence. Guattari argues that “[s] ubjectivity establishes itself, at a minimum, in a complex relation to the other, mother, father, family, caste relations, class struggles, in short all levels of social interaction.” Rather than being a physical, unified person or individual, subjectivity, for Guattari, is “a crisscross, an intersection of psychological, biological, socioeconomic, etc. entities” or desires, or an assemblage of heterogeneous elements that are always under construction or is always becoming. Guattari's notion of subjectivity troubles modern, coherent, unified labels and categories, particularly sexual and gender categories. “We want to see ourselves,” he states, “as beings with varying identities, who can express their desires, their pleasures, their ecstasies, their tenderness without relying on or invoking any system of surplus value, or any system of power at all, but only in the spirit of play.” For Guattari, subjectivity is plural and polyphonic and multiple.

Djuna Barnes began writing Nightwood in the late 1920s and early 1930s, after her eight- year lesbian relationship with Thelma Wood ended. At the time, she was living in Paris among expatriates. She, along with Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Gertrude Stein, Robert McAlmon, Marsden Hartley, Berenice Abbott, and others, was a member of the bohemian/ American Lost Generation who had migrated to Paris in the 1920s because they felt either betrayed by the US role in World War I or crushed by Modernity and the American way of life, with its mechanical rationalism, its obsession for material objects and money, its cheap idealism, its vulgarity, its morally constraining Puritanism, and its modern conveniences and advertising. These were writers who came to believe that their inherent values were no longer relevant. Personally, Barnes liked Paris because it was “the only city in the world […] where a person can live when they have neither friends nor lovers.”