6 - Labyrinths

Summary

Having in the previous chapter made some general remarks about autobiography today, I would like now to look at Derrida's reading of two specific autobiographical texts, Nietzsche's Ecce homo and Michel Leiris's Biffures.

There exists a publication by Derrida entitled Otobiographies: l'enseignement de Nietzsche et la politique du nom propre. ‘Oto’, as in ‘otolith’, for example, comes from the Greek word meaning ‘ear’, so for ‘otobiographies’ one might read ‘earbiographies’. Otobiographies belongs with several other texts by Derrida concerning auscultation in general, and I shall make use of these too on entering the labyrinth whose architect Derrida is.

First turning

Jean-Luc Nancy's point about the subject becoming constituted through self-representation might profitably be recalled to introduce this thematic. It was said that both Nancy and Derrida echo Nietzsche's announcement, ‘and so I tell my life to myself’. In Derrida's words, the autobiographer ‘tells himself this life and he is the narration's first, if not its only, addressee and destination – within the text’ (L'O, 25/TEO, 13).

Though the idiom has been enriched, the notions of ‘addressee’ and ‘destination’ are still in dialogue with a broadly phenomenological heritage. In his early work on Husserl, Derrick had investigated ideas of self-representation and argued, following Husserl, that its ideal form was that of hearing oneself speak: ‘The operation of “hearing oneself speak” is an auto-affection of an absolutely unique kind’ (LVP, 88/SAP, 78, modified). The subject seals – or, in phenomenological terms, affects – itself in the completion of a circuit between voice and hearing, mouth and ear.