Fiction's Supplement. Notes on Derrida and Autobiography

Jacques Derrida's ventures into autobiography, as seen in a number of his books, seem to contradict a large body of his philosophical work, which, for its part, tries to demonstrate the impossibility of holding a discourse on life and identity. Thus the necessity for Derrida of displacing the usual parameters of the autobiographical genre. We will here use the term heterofiction to designate Derrida's modification of the practice of self-narrative. Heterofiction supposes a multiplicity of versions (there are a number of life-narratives), a multiplicity of dictions (in the narratives, speech supplants content), a multiplicity of modes of enunciation (several voices are necessary to carry the narratives), and finally a multiplicity of confessions (each narrative keeps a supplementary secret back from the telling, as a resource).