Thursday, November 10, 2005
(8:00 AM) | Anonymous:
"Still Life"
Autobiographical NoteHi, I'm Dominic Fox. You may remember me from such Weblog posts as "soundproofed bats", "I've read some Bonhoeffer, me", and "the goodwill and patient self-giving labour of the privileged". In real life I'm a software developer who in a previous - and neither more nor less real - life was a budding Oxford literary deconstructionist with a passing interest in "negative theology". I have a blog, "Poetix"; to which I post about Theo(log|r)y when I get drunk and/or nostalgic for the virtuous impecunity and bracing intellectual isolation of my former existence.
Adam asked me if I'd like to post something to the Weblog this Thursday, during old's absence. My hope is that readers who've been following the recent discussion of Agamben will find some of this pertinent, in a tangential sort of way.
Still Life
Robert Smith introduces the term "still life" into his discussion of the "autobiographical apparatus" in Derrida and Autobiography (Cambridge: 1995), apparently as a punning anglicisation of Derrida's sur-vivre, "survival" or "living on" (hence "still living"). That which sur-vives is still life, even if its mode of survival is somewhat sepulchral: for instance, the way the recently deceased are said to "live on" in those who mourn them; confined in the case of "incomplete" mourning, demi-deuil, to a kind of crypt or cyst, resistent to assimilation.
"Still life" would also translate tableau vivant: the capture of "life" in a suspended moment, the snapshot portrait that is instantly a memoir. We might say of the snapshot what Derrida says about the name, that it is constitutively mortal and circulates in a system of (death-)masks; which is also what Paul de Man says about the trope of prosopopoeia, the "dominant trope" of autobiography: that it belongs to a "tropological system", an alien landscape, into which autobiography - yours or mine - falls at the very moment at which it seeks to capture its subject and make it lifelike.
Still life is life in suspension, life as a detour between deaths or crossing the terrain of death; and must be thought, Smith suggests, as "not two together, life and death, one plus one, but all at once, but not quite at once: life death". He adds that this "is hardly a theme conducive to truth or method". The autobiographical apparatus, by means of which an ostensibly living subject seeks to make a present of his life, does not in spite of appearances begin with the living presence of that subject and proceed as an expression of pure vitality, only accidentally subject to the vicissitudes of narration. In Smith's account, it is rather the case that my own life, everything that might occur to my renown, is at best a kind of car accident, a snarl-up in the triumphal procession of phantasms that Smith, following Joyce, calls the "funferal" of still life:
Funferal is therefore the very structure of my life, that which gives me my life, my life in the death of the other, to autobiographise with a uniquity that comes to me outside of any ontological predilection. It is thus that I find myself in an order of generation. Generation does not generate absolutely, however; inversely, life does not begin with generation, and there is a beginning, a structure, which starts things off without having any relation to unproblematic generation, beginning, inauguration, origin etc. The structure is not other than life death, a pressure of structurality, which is to say crypts, tombs, purses and even, in "Cartouches", matchboxes. (p.148)
It may seem that the burden of Smith's own procession of Derridean figures is to put to work a systematic confusion of life with death; to expose the preconditions under which the "autobiographical apparatus" must operate, to give an account of its structural genesis. "Autobiography" is to be drawn into an imbroglio, from which none of the predicates traditionally associated with it will be able to be drawn out unmangled. And this has a bearing on - surprise, surprise - "the human": "where autobiography is commonly considered to be an ordinarily human activity", establishing the value of the human as "the relation of being to its end", Smith's conceptual defacement of autobiography prompts a revaluation, or indicates one already in progress.
To speak of a "conceptual defacement" is of course to risk being accused of cheap metaphysics: such a revaluation would allegedly owe nothing to real life, and accomplish nothing within it. Not that real life does not admit plentiful confusion over the boundaries between life and death; not that this confusion is not already "conceptual" at least as much as it is "political" or "spiritual". But insofar as the empirical belongs to lived experience, to the récit in progress of an autobiographical subject, it is already subject to both the law and the chance of life death, the still life or funferal that the autobiographical apparatus gives to be read as an assemblage of phantasms, an effect of a structure it can neither realize nor control.
