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Memory and Autobiography: Explorations at the Limits
This book by one of Latin America’s leading cultural theorists examines the place of the subject and the role of biographical and autobiographical genres in contemporary culture.
Arfuch argues that the on-going proliferation of private and intimate stories – what she calls the ‘biographical space’ – can be seen as symptomatic of the impersonalizing dynamics of contemporary times. Autobiographical genres, however, harbour an intersubjective dimension. The ‘I’ who speaks wants to be heard by another, and the other who listens discovers in autobiography possible points of identification. Autobiographical genres, including those that border on fiction, therefore become spaces in which the singularity of experience opens onto the collective and its historicity in ways that allow us to reflect on the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions not only of self-representation but also of life itself.
Opening up debate through juxtaposition and dialogue, Arfuch’s own poetic writing moves freely from the Holocaust to Argentina’s last dictatorship and its traumatic memories, and then to the troubled borderlands between Mexico and the United States to show how artists rescue shards of memory that would otherwise be relegated to the dustbin of history. In so doing, she makes us see not only how challenging it is to represent past traumas and violence but also how vitally necessary it is to do so as a political strategy for combating the tides of forgetting and for finding ways of being in common.
Arfuch argues that the on-going proliferation of private and intimate stories – what she calls the ‘biographical space’ – can be seen as symptomatic of the impersonalizing dynamics of contemporary times. Autobiographical genres, however, harbour an intersubjective dimension. The ‘I’ who speaks wants to be heard by another, and the other who listens discovers in autobiography possible points of identification. Autobiographical genres, including those that border on fiction, therefore become spaces in which the singularity of experience opens onto the collective and its historicity in ways that allow us to reflect on the ethical, political, and aesthetic dimensions not only of self-representation but also of life itself.
Opening up debate through juxtaposition and dialogue, Arfuch’s own poetic writing moves freely from the Holocaust to Argentina’s last dictatorship and its traumatic memories, and then to the troubled borderlands between Mexico and the United States to show how artists rescue shards of memory that would otherwise be relegated to the dustbin of history. In so doing, she makes us see not only how challenging it is to represent past traumas and violence but also how vitally necessary it is to do so as a political strategy for combating the tides of forgetting and for finding ways of being in common.
180 pages, Hardcover
Published November 2, 2020
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May 25, 2023'Michael Holroyd, the well-known English biographer, who speaks of the task of giving *form* to a life that didn't exist before the narrative" (xxi - Works on Paper: The Craft of Biography and Autobiography [2002])
'It could be argued that this heteroclite list does not do justice to the valuative differences between genres - testimony or life story as opposed to media sensationalism, for example; experimentation in writing and the visual arts as opposed to the explosion of the personal on the Web - but the truth is that - without any wish to asperse the pertinence of that venture - my gaze is not so much directed at the hierarchical ordering of the discursive genres involved in this reconfiguration of contemporary subjectivity as at the reconfiguration itself in symptomatic terms. But why the configuration? What would be new - and symptomatic - about that tendency if there have always been self-referential voices, if the narration of a life can possibly be traced back to the distant ancestors of folk tales? In response to these questions, three signifiers can be posited: historicity, simultaneity and multiplicity' (3)
'Sebald constructs a story of himself through autobiographical fiction and the essay - particularly in the works cited here - turning his gaze to the world rather than on himself - or speaking of himself through that gaze - in a form of writing whose power and originality come close to producing a new genre, one that is unclassifiable in terms of conventional parameters' (22)
'in the words of Regine Robin, "the impossible narration of oneself"' (23 - Identidad, memoria, relato: La imposible narracion de si mismo [1996])
Christian Boltanski: 'The work you and I are doing together in these interviews is also part of this wish to gather everything up before dying' (q. 25)
'In contrast to a work of fiction which has no responsibility to attend to facts and whose author does not need to identify with the characters, biographical genres, as Bakhtin pointed out, involve a splitting of the self that in some way sets biographers and autobiographers on an equal footing: in order to construct their characters, the former must immerse themselves in the lives of others; on objectifying their own stories, the latter stand outside themselves to see themselves through *the eyes of others*. The frontier between biography and autobiography is not, therefore, so clearly defined, and in fact, as Holroyd observes, there is a great deal of the autobiographical in the mode of approaching that life of the other and also an ethical limit: not confusing oneself with that other. This subtle imbrication makes it interesting to observe how - from that *other side*, from the narration of the experience (and its vicissitudes) of the person who intends to trace out the distinctive features of a life (the subject of the biography) - the figure of the biographer develops almost unconsciously in the background' (26-7 - cf. Cavarero's Relating Narratives)
'Austerlitz, as a case in point, is an admirable exercise in the transmission of memory that, in turn, constructs the emblematic scene of that transmission: the story of a person who makes of his/her life in terms of a search for a lost memory, configuring it performatively as such in intelligible unity, for the other, the storyteller's singular "you": a story that the narrator in turn tells us, establishing us as the "you" of the present of the utterance' (45 - cf. Al-Jurf)
On Bakhtin: 'the essential quality of the utterance is its *addressivity*, the "quality of being directed at someone", at an-other, the (present, absent, real or imaginary) addressee and then attending to its expectations, anticipating its objections, *responding* both in terms of *giving a response* and taking responsibility for one's own word and that of the Other, in that strong sense of "vouching for". So response and responsibility are intertwined in an ethical plane' (49)
'Here it is possible to find one of the reasons for the constant unfolding of biographical space, the innumerable narratives in which the I is enunciated *for* and *through* the other ... and in doing so gives form - and therefore meaning - to the uncertain lives we all lead, whose unity, as such, does not exist outside the story. To put it another way, there is no "subject" or "life" that the story represents ... rather, both of them (the subject and the life) are, as an intelligible unit, the *result* of the narrative. Before that narrative act - without it - there is only that muted murmur of existence, disjunctive temporalities in the simultaneity of memory, sensation, impulse and live experience - with its immediacy and permanency, its dazzling quality and expressive capacity, as the monad of the universe' (50 - cf. Cavarero)
'Derridean *iterability* makes the paradox of being self and other clear on every occasion' (51 - cf. Cavarero)
Rosalyn Deutsche: 'Discourse on public art tends to assume that art is public if it is located in physical spaces outside museums or galleries, such as urban squares. On automatically accepting that such spaces are public, the discourse on public art conceals the fact that they are, like any other social space, subject to restrictions, dominated by private economic interests and controlled by the state, under the aegis of urban planning. On assuming that spaces outside art institutions are public, art is given affirmative and decorative roles, and that is so deeply embedded in the discourse ... as to make the term meaningless in critical terms. From my viewpoint, the public condition of a work of art is not rooted in its location in a space defined as public, but in the fact that it carries out an operation: *the operation of making space public by transforming any space that the work occupies into what can be called a public sphere' (q. 101, Arfuch's italics)
'It could be argued that this heteroclite list does not do justice to the valuative differences between genres - testimony or life story as opposed to media sensationalism, for example; experimentation in writing and the visual arts as opposed to the explosion of the personal on the Web - but the truth is that - without any wish to asperse the pertinence of that venture - my gaze is not so much directed at the hierarchical ordering of the discursive genres involved in this reconfiguration of contemporary subjectivity as at the reconfiguration itself in symptomatic terms. But why the configuration? What would be new - and symptomatic - about that tendency if there have always been self-referential voices, if the narration of a life can possibly be traced back to the distant ancestors of folk tales? In response to these questions, three signifiers can be posited: historicity, simultaneity and multiplicity' (3)
'Sebald constructs a story of himself through autobiographical fiction and the essay - particularly in the works cited here - turning his gaze to the world rather than on himself - or speaking of himself through that gaze - in a form of writing whose power and originality come close to producing a new genre, one that is unclassifiable in terms of conventional parameters' (22)
'in the words of Regine Robin, "the impossible narration of oneself"' (23 - Identidad, memoria, relato: La imposible narracion de si mismo [1996])
Christian Boltanski: 'The work you and I are doing together in these interviews is also part of this wish to gather everything up before dying' (q. 25)
'In contrast to a work of fiction which has no responsibility to attend to facts and whose author does not need to identify with the characters, biographical genres, as Bakhtin pointed out, involve a splitting of the self that in some way sets biographers and autobiographers on an equal footing: in order to construct their characters, the former must immerse themselves in the lives of others; on objectifying their own stories, the latter stand outside themselves to see themselves through *the eyes of others*. The frontier between biography and autobiography is not, therefore, so clearly defined, and in fact, as Holroyd observes, there is a great deal of the autobiographical in the mode of approaching that life of the other and also an ethical limit: not confusing oneself with that other. This subtle imbrication makes it interesting to observe how - from that *other side*, from the narration of the experience (and its vicissitudes) of the person who intends to trace out the distinctive features of a life (the subject of the biography) - the figure of the biographer develops almost unconsciously in the background' (26-7 - cf. Cavarero's Relating Narratives)
'Austerlitz, as a case in point, is an admirable exercise in the transmission of memory that, in turn, constructs the emblematic scene of that transmission: the story of a person who makes of his/her life in terms of a search for a lost memory, configuring it performatively as such in intelligible unity, for the other, the storyteller's singular "you": a story that the narrator in turn tells us, establishing us as the "you" of the present of the utterance' (45 - cf. Al-Jurf)
On Bakhtin: 'the essential quality of the utterance is its *addressivity*, the "quality of being directed at someone", at an-other, the (present, absent, real or imaginary) addressee and then attending to its expectations, anticipating its objections, *responding* both in terms of *giving a response* and taking responsibility for one's own word and that of the Other, in that strong sense of "vouching for". So response and responsibility are intertwined in an ethical plane' (49)
'Here it is possible to find one of the reasons for the constant unfolding of biographical space, the innumerable narratives in which the I is enunciated *for* and *through* the other ... and in doing so gives form - and therefore meaning - to the uncertain lives we all lead, whose unity, as such, does not exist outside the story. To put it another way, there is no "subject" or "life" that the story represents ... rather, both of them (the subject and the life) are, as an intelligible unit, the *result* of the narrative. Before that narrative act - without it - there is only that muted murmur of existence, disjunctive temporalities in the simultaneity of memory, sensation, impulse and live experience - with its immediacy and permanency, its dazzling quality and expressive capacity, as the monad of the universe' (50 - cf. Cavarero)
'Derridean *iterability* makes the paradox of being self and other clear on every occasion' (51 - cf. Cavarero)
Rosalyn Deutsche: 'Discourse on public art tends to assume that art is public if it is located in physical spaces outside museums or galleries, such as urban squares. On automatically accepting that such spaces are public, the discourse on public art conceals the fact that they are, like any other social space, subject to restrictions, dominated by private economic interests and controlled by the state, under the aegis of urban planning. On assuming that spaces outside art institutions are public, art is given affirmative and decorative roles, and that is so deeply embedded in the discourse ... as to make the term meaningless in critical terms. From my viewpoint, the public condition of a work of art is not rooted in its location in a space defined as public, but in the fact that it carries out an operation: *the operation of making space public by transforming any space that the work occupies into what can be called a public sphere' (q. 101, Arfuch's italics)
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