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i n t r o d u c t i o n A Clutch of Brothers: Alterity and Autothanatography I shall therefore confess both what I know of myself and what I do not know. For even what I know about myself I only know because your light shines upon me: and what I do not know about myself I shall continue not to know until I see you face to face and my dusk is noonday. augustine, Confessions X, 5 Between us, I have always believed . . . that the absence of filiation will have been our chance. A bet placed on an infinite, which is to say a voided, genealogy, in the end the condition for loving one another. jacques derrida, La Carte postale In the numerous studies that have been devoted to autobiography in the past 30 years, surprisingly few take on directly the question of the other. The reason for the surprise is simple enough: One can hardly envision the self without the other against which it is defined or an autobiography that does not involve the other both in its narrative and as the one to whom the ‘‘I’’ addresses itself in its act of confessing. In representing itself, the I must not only represent the others encountered in life, but must also address that representation to another. What is more, such representations are confided to an indeterminate third thing: a text, which is to say, to an autobiographical writing both fictional and documentary in nature.1 There is thus, if not exactly a third other, at any rate a third alterity to contend with whose effects the autobiographer has to calculate. Why, then, has there been so little direct critical attention to the problem? A look at the term in a dictionary suggests one reason why it is difficult to center a study on the other in autobiography. There is a paradoxical logic to the concept that makes it all but impossible to make it a proper object of study. By the other, says the Oxford English Dictionary (OED), we mean ‘‘that one of two which is remaining after one is taken, defined, or specified.’’ The other is its remainder, what is left after the operation of determining. But when, having seized one through determination and left 1 2 Introduction the other, we then return to seize the other remaining, that other is immediately determined and becomes the one to a new other left undetermined. The other is always the other for a particular I, and as such, is no longer undetermined, no longer quite so other. It becomes the other for the subject : its object. We have learned from Levinas, among others, to suspect the subject for its reductive violence against the other. As the undetermined , the other as such always recedes from representation. Ought we then simply to forget about it, to give up the attempt to seize the other that must recede by virtue of our attempt? Politically oriented studies of autobiography have made us very aware of the stakes of such neglect. The operation by which the one is seized and the other left as a remainder involves political consequences for the ‘‘others’’ left out of the representational field. We cannot conceive of an ethics that does not pay attention to the I’s responsibility for the other or a psychology that sets aside an experience of others necessary for, if also wounding to, the subject ’s narcissistic self-sufficiency. For this is the other part of the paradox: The self cannot entirely leave behind the other, either, but finds itself tied to it as its other, even after its separation through determination. Given our object of the autobiographical text, therefore, we are bound to interest ourselves in alterity. To study the self, independent of any relations to it, would be to forget about the scar left when it is separated from that other in the process of self-constitution. And it is showing the self with its scars, suggests Jean-Jacques Rousseau in one preliminary sketch of the Confessions , that distinguishes the truth from the studied half-truth.2 Truthful autobiography leaves at the least traces of its leaving out the other. Critical studies of the I in autobiography have thus always had to suppose an other against which the I is determined. There can have been no studies of autobiography that did not consider the subject’s regard for the other, both its...

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