A Scarred Tympanum

Abstract

Philosophy is no stranger to autobiography. Yet, despite the fact that we know, thanks to Augustine and Descartes, to Rousseau and Nietzsche, that autobiography can be philosophically useful, the grounds for autobiography’s philosophical significance still evade us. Good detectives that we are, we rummage for clues, for biographical facts that may throw light on this or the other philosophical conundrum, when we have known all along that life told is more philosophically eloquent than life lived. In all of our attempts to recount our lives — to a loved one, to a therapist, to ourselves — there are incidents that seem almost naturally to take precedent over others. Memory, in this sense, works inconsistently, perhaps prejudicially; its retrospective light illuminating some events, which subsequently become important to us, whilst leaving others in the dark. The term that Freud might have used to describe this phenomenon is Nachträglichkeit, an untranslatable word announcing memory’s deferred action, the fact that some incidents only gain significance retrospectively. Nachträglichkeit in its widest possible sense thus describes the fact that whilst life is lived forwards, it can only be understood backwards. This is also true for Stanley Cavell’s autobiographical writings, in which one childhood event in particular emerges as philosophically decisive.