Towards a Trope of Reciprocal Reading in the Post-Medium Condition: From Paul Auster’s Leviathan to Sophie Calle’s Double Game and Back Again

Abstract

ABSTRACTIn the wake of Auster’s fictionalizing of the life and work of Sophie Calle in Leviathan (1992), Sophie Calle in Double Game (1999) brought together a body of work as if it was the outcome of her collaboration and dialogue with Paul Auster. Taking as a point of departure Rosalind Krauss’ “post-medium” condition as a notion that allows us to rethink how certain post-conceptual artistic practices unsettle postmodern self-referentiality, this article reassesses the self-reflexive tropes that were central in much postmodernist fiction and art. Auster in Leviathan and Calle in Double Game engage reflexivity as the catalyst that redirects us towards what lies beyond it and invests in the value of the document; their dialogue, thereby, points beyond the loop of self-reference and towards the malleable and changing textures of lived life.