The Critique of Autobiography

Abstract

JSTOR is a not-for-profit service that helps scholars, researchers, and students discover, use, and build upon a wide range of content in a trusted digital archive. We use information technology and tools to increase productivity and facilitate new forms of scholarship. For more information about JSTOR, please contact support@jstor.org.. University of Oregon and Duke University Press are collaborating with JSTOR to digitize, preserve and extend access to Comparative Literature. TheCritique o f Autobiography QNE OF the lessons of structuralism is that the subject is not and can never be a part of the discourse he utters. It is no accident that this rule of Lacanian psychoanalysis, which formalizes and extends the Freudian discovery of the unconscious by making the unconscious a structure of language, actually verifies years of investigation in structural linguistics. Already in the 1950s structural linguists like Benveniste had demonstrated that in the pronoun system of the European languages, the first-person singular pronoun is the only one which cannot properly refer, because it transcends the structure of oppositions on which the system itself is based: the opposition of "I" to "you," of "we" and "you" to "they." Benveniste had ascribed this transcendence not to an individual "self," however, but to a more general, ill-defined entity: "Man" (L'Homme) as he appears in his role as producer and consumer of language (dans la langue) . But if "Man" is always present in language, his "self" is specifically the product of an individual locutor's speech (a parole). It is only when the locutor-subject seeks to ascertain the propriety and pertinence of reference in the message that he is led to inquire about the modes of expression used by a hypothetical "Man" to transmute a private speech into a common language (as in structuralism) or to foster and nurture the image in which he hopes to discover the truth, the essence of his own search (as in the hermeneutics of the Geneva School or the Heidelberg Circle). In both cases, the "self" appears to be a redundancy-Starobinski euphemistically calls it the "hermeneutic circle"-albeit the most puzzling redundancy in language, because it does not appear to be governed by the basic rule of all communication that a message can only be communicated on the condition 1 IRmile Benveniste, Problemns in General Linguistics, trans. Mary Elizabeth Meek (Coral Gables, Fla., 1971), Ch. v. 97 This content downloaded from 128.235.251.160 on Sat, 27 Dec 2014 18:16:25 PM All use subject to JSTOR Terms and Conditions COMPARATIVE LITERATUREthat its marks not be redundant.2 Whether the self is basically a portmanteau word which covers modes of distinction based on the lure (leurre) of an impossible identity of the speaking subject or whether it is a monadic reduction of the context in which the beginning and the end of first-person discourse coalesce to keep the subject from being alienated from a past for which he seeks to assume responsibility-in either case, the study of a literature of self m...

Treading the Borderline

“…21 With the help of these pre-existing 'patterns of experience' private memory merges with the larger cultural narratives and "automatically becomes part of a larger, impersonal whole". 22 However, the effect of dramatization produced by the use of these recognizable narrative models goes against the grain of Open Circle intentions. The performers are concerned with the possibilities of translating unmediated experiences in the theatre; however, once thrust into traditional narrative frames these personal experiences loose the effects of authenticity.…”