Introduction

Abstract

T he term “ autothanatography ” might appear to be a contradictory one, since death cannot be known to the self, far less written about. Indeed, Martin Crowley, in the introduction to his edited volume Dying Words: The Last Moments of Writers and Philosophers , notes “the unavailability of death as an experience for the existential subject”; 1 in a similar vein, in his study of Blanchot, John Gregg writes of the verb “mourir”: “It is a defective verb that cannot be conjugated, for it has no forms in the present tense, nor can any personal pronoun serve as its subject.” 2 The impossibility of writing about death, and writers' attempts precisely to do so, constitute a paradox that has prompted wide-ranging debate reflected in the contributions to this volume. Death and writing the self are the focus of this Special Issue: in particular, the ways in which death affects autobiographical practice. In this last regard, a recent comment by Jeremy Tambling in his study Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies suggests that death, rather than life, informs our understanding and exploration of self in the present: “it might be better if we started with the assumption of death working through the living, and not dissociated, therefore, from our sense of the present.” 3 Dying Words: The Last Moments of Writers and Philosophers (Amsterdam & Atlanta, 2000), p. 2. Gregg cites Blanchot's words, “Mourir ne se décline pas” ( Le Pas au-delà , p. 147), in Maurice Blanchot and the Literature of Transgression (Princeton, 1994), p. 44. See in particular Chapter 3, “Blanchot's Suicidal Artist: Writing and the (Im)possibility of Death”, pp. 35–45. Becoming Posthumous: Life and Death in Literary and Cultural Studies (Edinburgh, 2001), p. ix.