I remember… Anarchivist autobiographical writings

Abstract

The work raises questions about the representation of memory in certain contemporary autobiographical texts, investigating a probable emancipatory dimension produced from the interruption of the narrative structure and the chronological linearity of memories. These writings of life are approached from an anarchivist perspective, as counter-critique of an archivistic autobiographical paradigm, whether this referential, subjectivist or deconstructionist. The emergence of such writings from the 70s (as I remember by Joe Brainard and I remember by George Perec) challenge the usual approaches in autobiographical studies (focusing on either bios, autos or graphe). The antecedentes of a possible postgraphe would be in certain sides of Walter Benjamin’s –sometimes heterogeneous and fragmentary –thought and work, such as the antisubjetivism and collecting, as well as in collector and obliquely autobiographical representations of some atlas (like those of Warburg, Serres and Richter) with enumerations structures, lists, and catalogues, also present in One Way Street and in The Passages. From this perspective, we address aspects of current works of Édouard Levé, Margo Glantz, and Martín Kohan, who also were put in operation this “machine of remembering”, considering the link with digital networks (as in the case of Glantz), and the critical and participatory potentiality -because they can be copied and continued by others- that resides in these apparently banal writings of memory.