Inaccurate autobiography – the ‘true-invention’ of a life

Inaccurate autobiography – the ‘true-invention’ of a life

Pont, Antonia 2011, Inaccurate autobiography – the ‘true-invention’ of a life, Text, vol. 15, no. 1, pp. 1-1.

Title	Inaccurate autobiography – the ‘true-invention’ of a life
Author(s)	Pont, Antonia
Journal name	Text
Volume number	15
Issue number	1
Start page	1
End page	1
Publisher	Australian Association of Writing Programs
Place of publication	Nathan, Qld.
Publication date	2011-04
ISSN	1327-9556
Keyword(s)	autobiography life death Aristotle Kristeva Arendt narrative Derrida writing invention praxis poiesis Badiou ontology the hinge self-reflexivity truth play
Summary	This paper takes the Aristotelian binary of praxis and poiesis and approaches the process of autobiography via its double lens. Drawing on a reading of Hannah Arendt done by Julia Kristeva, it considers the question of whether the activity (that is: praxis) of making-narrative might constitute an activity that is particularly ‘human’. It is framed by the playful and serious challenge offered by Derridean deconstruction to think two things at once, and to practice an inhabiting of binary ultimatums. Given this, it goes on to suggest that making in an autobiographical fashion, rather than involvinganythingprimarily representative or documentary, is more paradoxically akin to the invention of what is most true about that which we are in the habit of calling ‘our life’. Indeed, it can be argued that this praxisinvents that very ‘life’ – the latter being an entity or categorythat logically does not precede thesame writing that purports to describe it, but rather arises with its activity. This self-reflexivity (a manoeuvre that at once describes and invokes the very thing described) coincides with Derrida’s explication of invention’s mechanism.
Language	eng
Field of Research	200525 Literary Theory
Socio Economic Objective	970119 Expanding Knowledge through Studies of the Creative Arts and Writing
HERDC Research category	C1 Refereed article in a scholarly journal
HERDC collection year	2011
Copyright notice	©2011, Copyright of all work published in TEXT remains with the authors
Persistent URL	http://hdl.handle.net/10536/DRO/DU:30040290

Document type:	Journal Article
Collection:	School of Communication and Creative Arts

Access Statistics:	46 Abstract Views - Detailed Statistics
Created:	Tue, 29 Nov 2011, 14:43:15 EST by Kylie Koulkoudinas

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