Regard for the Other: Autothanatography in Rousseau, De Quincey, Baudelaire, and Wilde

1. Developments in Character: ‘‘The Children’s Punishment’’ and ‘‘The Broken Comb’’

c h a p t e r 1 Developments in Character: ‘‘The Children’s Punishment’’ and ‘‘The Broken Comb’’ I write the life of a man who is no longer, but whom I once knew well . . . That man is myself. jean-jacques rousseau, Ébauches des Confessions ‘‘Reading’’ is a term that, through overuse, can easily become confused with interpretation. In fact, there is a crucial difference: Reading involves the undoing of interpretative figures; because it is not an operation opposed to the understanding but rather a precondition for it, it allows us to question whether the synthetic moves of the understanding can close off a text. It leads away from meaning to such problems as the text’s constitution and meaning generation. Unlike interpretation, which implies a development over the course of a narrative toward a single figure reconciling all its diverse moments, reading states the logic of figures and the logic of narratives to be divergent. Divergence implies that an autobiographical text, for example, does not simply serve to bring meaning to the unorganized events of a subject’s experience as well as self-recognition to author and reader, but serves the further function of making those events available to a reader allegorically, as exemplary of the manner in which all narratives are constructed.1 We could even define as autobiographical the text produced by the confrontation of consciousness with effects of ordering excessive to the capacity of totalizing figures to regulate them. Such confrontations dramatize the potential for the subject’s writing of its life in autobiography to become an autothanatography, the writing of its death, and to present through allegory meaning unavailable to the subject. 33 34 Autobiography Interrupted Rousseau’s Confessions, which provides a particularly rich source for the study of narrative figures and strategies, will allow us to pursue the distinction between interpretation and reading and to determine some of the stakes involved. I’ve started from the hypothesis that understanding the difference between a linguistic term (like reading) and a term with a rich philosophical past (like interpretation or hermeneutics) can help further our inquiry into the differences between autobiography and autothanatography, which also ride on how the text’s alterity is to be considered with respect to the selfconscious subject. But the difficulty of the enterprise is perhaps already apparent in the terms just used to define the project: for what are we doing in understanding the difference between reading and interpretation but moving onto the terrain of interpretation, casting the linguistic term of reading we are trying to define in terms of a philosophical conception of a difference between how a thing appears to us (a text is a signifying object that is like a consciousness) and how it might really be in itself (a differential system unlike a consciousness)? For Andrzej Warminski, an alert reader of German philosophy as well as of Derrida and de Man, the problem is indeed one that implicates the interpreter. When we ask a theoretical question like, ‘‘What is reading?’’ says Warminski in the preface to Readings in Interpretation, we are making use of the most powerful methods of philosophical interpretation to differentiate reading from interpretation by considering them in their opposition to one another. This deployment of interpretative method is necessary. A first approach to reading as differing from understanding must be to try out the steps of interpretative method upon it if only to learn that the approach is finally a defensive strategy that reduces all difference to opposition. Warminski consequently takes on the absurd and contradictory, yet necessary, task of setting out in ‘‘three easy steps’’ what leads him to assert with authority that ‘‘the path of reading is not reducible to a method.’’2 Where the progressive steps of interpretative method falter and stop, as Warminski describes it, a step out of step, outside the sequence of steps, a third (dance?) step, has to be taken to set forth the actual relation of reader to text. The supplemental step is exorbitant to the dialectical and hermeneutical logics of interpretation, in which difference is defined as opposition. It entails a break with narrative construed as a dialectical progression from error (step one) to truth (step two) or as aletheia where a hidden meaning is retrospectively revealed. Developments in Character 35 The step to reading has still to be taken, Warminski says, because within the text...