Document Type
Essay
Abstract
[First paragraph]
The border between fiction and truth in autobiography has been the subject of numerous investigations, yet the question of what we might call the "assignations to residence" of the author remains largely ignored. Critics have written abundantly about autobiography in its relation to the origin of the author as living personality with his own story, but never truly treated the idea of the spatial modalities, the layout, of the author's writing self. In his relatively unknown 1967 article "On Other Places," Michel Foucault, then on assignment in Tunis, saw in this thematic situation the stage of a major affront: "One could perhaps say that certain ideological conflicts animating polemics today uncoil between the pious descendants of time and the insistent residents of space" (752). If we acknowledge with Foucault that space itself has a history (753-754), must we not also deduce that the history of the "functions" of the autobiographical author, logically called upon to situate him- or herself in pragmatic fashion -- not just as a body interacting with other bodies, but also simply in the act of pronouncing "I" when faced with a "you" -- is manifested as multiple effects of these geographical schemas? My purpose in this paper is to explore such arrangements of the self, to examine how topological devices may have helped the self gain "access to the place of speech" (Ghitti 17), to define how, over the course of centuries of autobiography, writing has given place to subjects, how authors themselves have given themselves "place." My approach, to state it clearly from the outset, found itself knocked about by pragmatism, at least as represented by Jean-Jacques Lecercle (1999), and I have borrowed many terms from his theory; but, briefly, our approaches differ on two fundamental points: 1) where Lecercle sees, in the "placement" that produces a "subject," the effect of a purely linguistic interrogation (34), I refuse to exclude from my reflections a kind of placement inscribed in geographical reality; and 2), where Lecercle, a disciple of Althusser, sees no other issue than the linguistic game of point/counter-point (232), hence the inevitable triumph of ideology, I would lay bets on the effect of a delinquency in the autobiographical story, which inscribes the "I" inside a game challenging the structures of ideological placement, in a sort of poetic transaction of the self.
Repository Citation
Regard, Frédéric. "Autobiography and Geography: A Self-Arranging Question." Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture vol. 2, no. 3, 2002, pp. 1–10. https://digitalcommons.odu.edu/reconstruction/vol2/iss3/9