Writing in Cars with Gertrude Stein and Jacques Derrida, or, The Age of Autotheory

for anybody's L.

"autotheory" is a term circulating in contemporary academic and literary criticism to designate theoretical writing that opens itself to autobiographical aspects of the writer's life. This term has been associated with the contemporary writers Maggie Nelson and Paul Preciado and seems to hail something of a new turn in scholarly writing (Nelson). Yet autotheory may not be as new as the neologism suggests. As Robyn Wiegman mentions in her introduction to this special issue, autotheory presumes a relation between the autobiographical and the theoretical that is not necessarily new to either critical theoretical writing or the literary archives (Wiegman). In this essay, I hope to affirm the structural and historical openness of autotheory by tracking the imbrication of autobiographical writing between two thinkers set on a collision course that has not yet been given sufficient critical attention: the so-called modernist writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946) and the so-called post-modern philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–2004).¹ Both Stein and Derrida famously challenged the authority of autobiography by putting pressure on the fantasy of sovereignty and self-representation that undergirds common notions of autobiography, while at the same time, affirming "the autos" as a radically capacious and multiplying signifier. Moreover, each turned to the material, metaphoric, and deconstructive valences of the "automobile" in order to articulate the problems that circulate around self-identity. Writing (or riding) in cars with Stein and Derrida traverses the border between self and other without, however, surrendering the necessity (and risk) of theorizing from the grammatical position of the first person.

Im-possible autobiographies

But we are never ourselves, and between us, identical to us, a 'self' is never in itself or identical to itself.

Jacques Derrida

You are of course never yourself.

Gertrude Stein

There is a literary and philosophical kinship between Stein and Derrida that cuts through their thought on the self, and that is evident in their experiments with the genre of autobiography. It may come as a surprise to some scholars of deconstruction that Derrida read Stein, understood her historical importance as a major figure of feminist and modernist literatures, and was almost certainly aware that a generation of Stein scholars was coming to view her work as "deconstructive."² Derrida cited Stein's proper name on at least three occasions. During a discussion of feminism in the interview "This Strange Institution Called Literature" (1992), Derrida includes Stein in a list of "immensely great modern writers" along with Virginia Woolf and Derrida's close friend Hélène Cixous (59). In The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), he regards Stein as an "autobiographical animal," and includes her (again in a list) among a tradition of Western writers who demonstrate an irresistible urge to write about themselves (49). And in "Circumfession" (1993), an essay in which Derrida explicitly embraces the porousness of his own autobiographical signature while parasitically "[transforming] the autobiographies of others into his 'own'" (Hayes 166), Derrida quotes directly from Stein's Everybody's Autobiography (1937).

While they never met—Derrida moved to Paris three years after Stein's death—Derrida and Stein shared the experience of being writers in exile. Stein was an American expat who lived and worked in France from 1906 until the time of her death in 1946. Fame in her native country had eluded Stein until late in her life with the best-selling The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which allowed her to break into American publishing while gaining her a popular American audience.³ Because of her long absence, America came to feel like a foreign country to Stein. Stein viewed the arrival of American doughboys during World War I as America paying her a visit, which, as she wrote in The Autobiography, "was so much better than just going to America. Here you were with America in a kind of way that if you only went to America you could not possibly be" (184). The friendships and correspondences that grew out of the American military presence in France made a deep...