True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern (review)

Abstract

Reviews G. Thomas Couser and Joseph Fichtelberg, eds. True Relations: Essays on Autobiography and the Postmodern. Westport: Greenwood, 1998.184 pp. ISBN 0-313-30509-9, $55.00. To begin with a mechanistic metaphor, as I read Joseph Fichtelberg's introduction to this collection on autobiography the "error light" somewhere in the back of my mind began to flicker. What made me a little nervous was the dichotomous way in which the editors frame the debate on postmodernism and autobiography. Pitting Kant as the "internist," upholder of the hermetically-contained subject, against Foucault the "marginalist," whose notion of the subject disappears into its materials and practices, if only for the sake of developing a clear context or even an ideological position for the preeminence of postmodernity, would seem to me to be wrong. Such a move does not survive careful readings of either Kant or Foucault and appears to be based on a common misrepresentation of the term subject as one evolving idea rather than several. The central problem here lies in not having made a distinction between subjectivity and individualism; indeed, in either glossing the difference between the two or else conflating them for ideological purposes. By placing Kant in a Leibnitzian tradition of the autonomous subject (one that Alain Renaut, for example, quite convincingly rejects), one can trace a simple tradition of the subject as "monad" which then postmodernist thinking (enter Foucault) succeeds in undoing. Certainly Kant's readings on the radical finitude of the subject and on its delineation as an active and imaginary agency offer us a more complex version of subjectivity than Fichtelberg represents. Moreover, there is ample evidence of Foucault's indebtedness to Kantian notions of subjectivity via Nietzsche and Heidegger, even if Foucault's focus is oriented toward the external manifestations of the subject in practices or as negotiated relations of power. The point is that Kantian thinking has crucially influenced contemporary theoretical complications of the idea of subjectivity which bear on central themes developed in this text, but which are not even to be located in the footnotes. The essays that follow are a testimony to the complication rather than the abandonment of the subject. This complication underscores the necessity of a clear distinction between subjectivity and individualism —what is not accomplished in the introduction. Indeed, if anything is being abandoned, it is the monadistic notion of the modern individual as subject in favor of a relational activity that can only be understood within the multiform range of its associations and material effects. What this book does accomplish—and the editors' selections and 116 biography 22.1 (Winter 1999) organization do this well—is to resituate the subject in a postmonadistic tradition, one that quite possibly leads to new "post modern" rereadings of the Kantian "subjectum" through theories that bridge the "inner" and "outer" dimensions of subjectivity in areas as diverse as ethnicity, gender, and cultural construction. Timothy Dow Adams's essay—"Photography and Ventriloquy in Paul Auster's The Invention of Solitude"—presents the essential features of how postmodern thinking problematizes the autobiographical subject both in terms of its relations to the Other and in terms of the connection between imago and text. Auster 's work exemplifies a mode of autobiography in which the "I" manifests itself through an archeology of the Other, in this case Auster's father and his son. Although alluding to insights developed by Paul de Man on autobiography and the specular image, Adams does not pursue further theoretical developments on specularity and identity in Lacanian intersubjective logic. The deafening silence throughout the book regarding Lacan in particular calls for a considerable act of reinvention of categories to circumnavigate such notions as the imaginary and symbolic, self/Other, the "fragmented body," and so on. Marie Lovrod's essay on sexual abuse survivor narratives also demonstrates the need for a more precise theoretical vocabulary for the fragmentation of identity that occurs when violation of the body undermines the narratives that structure and authorize the self. Although the essay collects powerful evidence for the latter in the works of several autobiographical narratives, Lovrod does not rise above the level of annotation precisely because the essay lacks a sufficientlyworked -out...