HOW MANY DEATHS? AUTO-BIO-GRAPHY AS DEATH-WRITING

• Authors: Kotásek Miroslav
• Languages of publication: EN

Abstracts

EN

This article concerns various aspects of autobiography as they have been introduced by Jacques Derrida, who himself used the term “autobiographical” to refer to his philosophical writing. Unlike most scholars who stress the link between autobiography and philosophy in Derrida’s writing the article attempts to link it primarily to the “literary”. In this endeavour, most attention is paid to the numerous metamorphoses in which “death” structures and haunts (auto)biographies and our thinking about the genre. Here, the greatest influence, apart from Derrida, was Maurice Blanchot. “Death” and negativity figure at many levels of autobiography, where, unlike in a fictional narrative, they cannot be suspended easily: they can be found in the question about the very usage of language and its relation to the autobiographer, in the construction of the “I”, and in the medial situation of the literary. The article concludes by suggesting a potential transformation of the autobiographical practice brought about by techno-cultural changes and developments regarding both the “archive” and “media”, which are transforming the status of memory, legacy, and the past.

Keywords

EN

AUTOBIOGRAPHY; DEATH; JACQUES DERRIDA; MEDIA

• Publisher: Institute of World Literature, Slovak Academy of Sciences
• Journal: World Literature Studies
• Year: 2024
• Volume: 16
• Issue: 1
• Pages: 109 – 119

Contributors

author

Kotásek Miroslav

• Faculty of Arts, Masaryk University, Brno, Czech Republic

• https://orcid.org/0000-0002-0784-3153

Identifiers

DOI

10.31577/WLS.2024.16.1.8