Śmierć autora i jego żywoty

Writers’ biographies (written about writers by writers) constitute a genre with very long historical roots, which has flourished in the last twenty-five or thirty years. This is undoubtedly linked to the lifting of the post-structuralist ban concerning the author as a person, so that it became possible, at least in France, to legitimize biographical writing again. We date this revival to the mid-1980s, when Duras, Robbe-Grillet and Sollers all published (auto)biographical texts, whose status is certainly problematic, but nonetheless worthy of careful attention. Immersed in Romantic anthropology, in various transpositions and numerous genre nostalgias, this general ambiguity appears as the key characteristic of biographical productions of the 1980s. What we have here is a kind of a spectacle, in which the figure of the author re-enters the stage. At the same time, it is a “biographical illusion” (Bourdieu). Many contemporary biographers know that the ‘truth’ about the other can only be grasped through a play on forms (or on the memory of forms), if not, to evoke Lacan, in “a line of fiction”.