Abstract

Through examining the works of Augustine, Descartes, Rousseau, and Nietzsche, this text explores the ambivalence about autobiography as a communicative act. Autobiography is engaged in two tasks at once: the literary representation of the structure and history of a self, and the communication of that self to an outside reader. The agendas, I argue, are almost inevitably in conflict, and in each of the authors I examine here, strategies of literary seduction that actively court public attention alternate with a variety of methods of distancing the author from those very readers. The imagined reader stands as the screen against which autobiographical writing must be projected, but this requirement is deeply at odds with the desire for autonomy that motivates so much of the autobiographical practice. I conclude that in the case of each of the philosophers with whom I am engaged here, a reluctance to accept the necessary involvement of the other in self-identity seriously compromises not only the possibility of communication, but also the task of self-description itself. ;My attention throughout is devoted to the intersection between the various explicit theories of linguistic communication presented by these authors and the rhetorical purposes into which these theories are enlisted. It thus draws simultaneously from traditional philosophical techniques of conceptual exegesis and criticism, from psychoanalytic or genealogical analysis , and from "reader-response" methods of literary criticism