This session addresses these questions by considering the central concern they describe, that theory, poststructuralist style, sought to undo the political and epistemological hegemony of the self-knowing individual only to risk inscribing an agent-less world governed by the operations of language as a disembodied realm. Each paper assembled for the session can be understood as a defense of poststructuralism, but their collective point is not simply that theoretical writing is always engaged in a complex negotiation between the personal and impersonal. They also demonstrate through the performance of their analyses that the auto of the autobiographical has to be rethought, less to interrupt poststructuralism’s concern for subject construction than to more fully and more compellingly engage with it. By offering careful discussions of the work of well known critical theorists and philosophers—Jacques Derrida, Judith Butler, and Didier Eribon—the presentations argue for the importance of developing a more capacious understanding of how we read theory’s personal life.
The panel opens with Ryan Tracy’s discussion of the signal role that Derrida has played in forwarding the deconstructive critique of the self foundational to poststructuralist thought. Such a critique is not about abandoning the autobiographical, as scholarly attention to Derrida’s references to his love life, his mother, his cat, and his vexed relationship with his Algerian-Jewish and French national identities have already shown. Instead, Tracy moves in the direction offered by Jarrod Hayes who argues in “Derrida’s Queer Roots” (2017) that deconstruction itself might be read as an allegory for the interpenetration of theory and autobiography. To that end, Tracy’s paper, “Auto-Mobility: Reading Derrida Reading Stein,” takes up one of Derrida’s most autobiographical pieces of writing, “Circumfession” (1993), in order to engage with the conceptual aporia that rotates at the center of Derrida’s attempt to deconstructively re-write Western philosophical reflection on being in the world. By drawing attention to Derrida’s little noticed reference to Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography in “Circumfession,” Tracy explores how Derrida engages with a set of specifically modernist questions about the representability of the self in literature, and the difficult task of accounting for the pleasure of the auto-mobile (the auto-matic, auto-mated, auto-maton, and even he promises, the car).
In “Judith Butler’s Ambivalent ‘I’,” Stephanie Clare turns to a figure more anxious than Derrida about the use of autobiographical references—an anxiety that has its roots, Clare argues, in critical theory’s own contentious relationship with feminism where the “personal is political” has held an especially vaulted place. By foregrounding the conflicts within feminist thought over the authority of the first person, Clare establishes the doublebind in which Butler’s autobiographical references must be read. One the one hand, autobiographical writing has been a central method and genre in feminist theory, one that has led some scholars to argue that all critical theory be read as a form of autobiographical writing, even if the theory does not employ the genre’s conventions. On the other hand, autobiographical writing has been repeatedly critiqued for repeating ideologies of individualism which famously obscure the ways in which both subjectivity and experience are socially and discursively structured. To trace the operations of this doublebind in Butler’s work, Clare returns to the now canonical 1991 essay, “Imitation and Gender Insubordination,” to analyze the relationship between the text’s autobiographical passages and its theory of subjectivity and the psyche. How, Clare posits, do we read the “I” that appears across these pages? What is personal about the author’s use of first person address? In answering these questions, Clare pays close attention to the way that Butler revised her essay across the various venues in which it would later appear, thereby demonstrating at the level of the text the very instability of the auto that founds Butler’s theoretical commitments.
The final presentation on the panel turns to Didier Eribon, a experimental philosopher and critic. For Elisa Russian, Eribon is exemplary in his negotiation of the long-standing tradition that casts theory as impersonal and self-analysis as confessional. Her paper, “‘Argumenter par la vie’: Didier Eribon and Contemporary French Life Writing” argues for reading his deployment of personal experience as theoretical innovation, especially as his work contends not only with the question that lies at the heart of autobiographical narrative—“Who am I?”—but also with its ontological underpinnings—“What am I?”. To support her claims, Russian situates Eribon’s writing in the context of French intellectual history, drawing on his debt to Jean-Paul Sartre’s conjunction of existentialism and Marxism, Michel Foucault’s history of sexuality, and Pierre Bourdieu’s reflexive sociology. The final move of the paper turns to Eribon’s influence on younger writers who are taking up the charge of first person narration to decipher the complexities of subjectivity in contemporary social worlds.
Together, these three papers will expand upon, and add nuance to, current conversations about the auto inflections of contemporary critical theory, especially as the status of the authoritative “I” remains both rhetorically indispensible and critically contentious.