Auto)Thanatography or (Auto)Thanatology
Mark C. Taylor, Simon Critchley and the Writing of the Dead
Bibliographic Data
| ID | 8085959 |
|---|---|
| Authors | Ivan Callus (0000-0001-9465-3245, corresponding author) |
| Year | 2005 |
| Volume | 41 |
| Issue | 4 |
| Pages | 427-438 |
| Publication date | 2005-10-01 |
| Open Access | No |
| Type | ARTICLE |
| Venue | Forum for Modern Language Studies (JOURNAL) |
| Journal identifiers | ISSN: 0015-8518 • E-ISSN: 1471-6860 |
| Publisher | Oxford University Press (OUP) (PUBLISHER) |
| DOI | 10.1093/fmls/cqi030 |
| OpenAlex | W2094242101 |
| Language | EN |
| Citations received | 3 |
| References cited | 7 |
T hanatography ” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an account of a person's death”. Therefore a thanatography would ordinarily be a report by the living on others' dying. By extension, the term “autothanatographies” is definable as “the dead's own accounts of their own deaths”. Autothanatography, therefore, reports an experience that can be rendered possible only through an unthinkable sur-vivre which would make it possible to configure a writing d'outre tombe . Such writing would depend on the continued conceivability, to itself and to others and after death , of an authoring consciousness. It must also overcome the objection that in any autothanatographical account the self-reflexive equivalent of a Lazare, veni foras might be pronounced and obeyed, against all the laws of physics, religion and philosophy. 1 Yet, against all law, literature – which Jacques Derrida has famously described as a discourse in which it is possible to say everything 2 – is remarkably replete with examples of autothanatography. In other words, literature offers a number of instances of a writing affecting to be a writing from rather than merely of death. Such examples take to an extreme a conceit pointed out by Wordsworth in his “Essay Upon Epitaphs” (1810). In that work, Wordsworth speaks of “epitaphs [which] so often personate the deceased, and represent him as speaking from his own tomb-stone”. Literature's attempts at the autothanatographical, it must be said, rarely recall those epitaphs' efforts to present “death disarmed of its sting, and affliction unsubstantialised”. 3 Instead they tend to be more ominous, ranging from everything that is unnervingly glimpsed in the enunciation of the phrase “I am dead” in Edgar Allan Poe's “The Facts in the Case of M. Valdemar” (1845) – a phrase that necessarily confounds pragmatics – to the disturbing potentialities implicit in one of the opening statements of Epitaph of a Small Winner (1880) by the Brazilian writer Machado de Assis: “I am a deceased writer not in the sense of one who has written and is now deceased, but in the sense of one who has died and is now writing [...].” 4 As Susan Sontag remarks, this renders thinkable the impossibility of “[p]osthumous reminiscences ... written in the first person”. 5 On this theme, see J. Gregg, Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression (Princeton, NJ, 1994), pp. 38–45. J. Derrida, “Demeure”, in M. Blanchot/J. Derrida, The Instant of My Death/Demeure: Fiction and Testimony , trans. E. Rottenberg (Stanford, CA, 2000), p. 29. W. Wordsworth, “Essay Upon Epitaphs”, in: The Prose Works of William Wordsworth , Vol. 2, ed. W. J. B. Owen & J. W. Smyser (Oxford, 1974), p. 60. M. de Assis, Epitaph of a Small Winner , trans. W. L. Grossman, Foreword S. Sontag (New York, 1990), p. 5. S. Sontag, Foreword, in: de Assis, p. xi
Art · Consciousness · Epistemology · Extension (predicate logic · Linguistics · Literature · Object (grammar · Psychoanalysis · Computer Science · Contemporary Literature and Criticism · Ecocriticism and Environmental Literature · Modern American Literature Studies · Psychology · History · Philosophy
| Citations per year | 0.27 |
|---|---|
| Citation span | 2015 - 2025 (11) |
| Highly cited | No |