From the Death of the Author to the Autofiction of the Subject
Thinking, Speaking, Inventing Oneself
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.60056/CCL.2026.12.57-71Keywords:
autofiction, crisis of the subject, deconstruction, poststructuralism, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault, Jean-Luc NancyAbstract
This article proposes to rethink autofiction as a philosophical operation of subjectivation. Starting from the poststructuralist destabilization of the figure of the subject and the critique of the Author, it examines how speech and writing become the very sites where the subject comes into being — not as the origin of meaning, but as a performative effect of enunciation.
By bringing into dialogue the trajectories of Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault with the ontology of enunciation elaborated by Jean-Luc Nancy, the study shows that the “death of the Author” does not lead to the disappearance of the subject, but rather to its reconfiguration as an event of language, a practice of the self, and a fiction in the making. From this perspective, autofiction appears as a privileged conceptual operator for analysing contemporary forms of subjectivation situated at the intersection of textuality, performativity, and lived experience.
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