AN EXISTENTIAL MANIFESTO INSPIRED BY ALEJANDRA PIZARNIK: AUTOGRAPHY, ABSOLUTE STYLE AND THE ANTHROPOLOGIST

Abstract

The Collins English Dictionary (2021) defines autography as “the writing of something in one's own handwriting; something handwritten” and as “the precise reproduction of an illustration or of writing”. I use the word “autography” in another sense. I define it as a journal of existence. It does not consist of an autobiography that builds up a story of one’s life, that is to say a life in a constructed form. Neither is it an auto-ethnography that concerns personal experiences of the ethnographer, with a view to shedding light on social and cultural realities. Neither is an autography a journal or notebook written by an ethnographer during his ethnographic fieldwork, specifically about his investigation. An autography is a text by oneself on oneself, written as continuously as possible, without any link to a specific field site, in the form of a journal and fragments, to understand not social facts, but one human being. Through this form, which is not reworked into a narrative story, it is existence that offers itself as a field for study.