THE AUTOBIOGRAPHICAL ANIMAL

Autobiography, as representation of oneself, for oneself and by oneself, functions as metaphor for an idealised self. Does it follow us or do we follow it?

A metaphor is an analogy –a construction where the one transcends the other. In philosophical analogy, the metaphor is never a signifier, instead, it gives privilege to the idealised signified. An idealised metaphor has no physical properties, the natural figure is erased and idealised into abstract meaning.

In the Greek myth of Prometheus, our natural figure is given as incomplete and formless. Prometheus steals fire –the knowledge of technics and the arts –in order to compromise for the blunder of the god Epimetheus who had created all creatures perfectly equipped, with the exception of man. He created man naked and vulnerable. Through modern philosophy, man emerges from nature by becoming a historic and social subject, he transcends his natural figure. Hierarchical thought becomes a sacred idea that immunises him against natural defect.

Cartesian philosophy privileges mind over body. Thought, as in ‘I think …,’ always transcends the physical figure of ‘I am …’ –‘I think, therefore I am’. Cartesian metaphysics literally means that our foundation of ‘I’ is an idea that drives our thought to an image of self. In this analogy, our natural figure is concealed and we see the metaphor as our true representation, following us like a cast shadow. Paul-Michel Foucault ridicules this existential view as a form of transcendental narcissism.

The Foucauldian ‘empirico-transcendental doublet,’ where we double as both objective subject and empirically studied object, is simply a recent autobiographical invention, a pseudo-existence. We are following our own autobiography as auto-template for the making of our own image. This is the protocol of humanism, own output becomes input in an ongoing process of self-making. Our self-production constantly reproduce the elements that in turn produce our self-representation.

The autobiographical animal, the one that goes by the collective noun ‘I’ when referring to self, that is the one that follows its own autobiography in order to resemble human character. We follow a metaphor in order to give figure to the self.