Autobiography as a Hermeneutic Practice of Reconciliation with Oneself

Abstract

This paper presents autobiography as the life narrative that, put in place by a retrospective look, articulates the reconciliation of the particular of a single occurrence within the universal provided by the perception of one’s own life as a “whole.” This study is part of a wider investigation on the concept of reconciliation after Auschwitz. In dialogue with contemporary hermeneutics and moral philosophers, it deals with the writings of Shoah survivors such as Améry and Frankl. Its goal is to show how and to which extent one’s life writing is a hermeneutic practice of reconciliation with oneself. Facing occurrences that appear in a first moment as contingent and unrelated (potentially irrevocable), autobiography enacts a work of appropriation of one’s heritage of lived experiences through their emplotment, by the unfolding of a narrative identity. This takes place as a meaning-making process, which in turn requires a framework of value orientation. Autobiography becomes, therefore, the diachronic reading of the story of oneself in terms of the narrative of the progressive actualization of one’s agency. Agency, indispensable for the fulfillment of one’s project of a good life, is linked, in turn, to the perception of one’s own life as a “whole.” In the mediation that leads the single occurrence back to the perception of one’s own life as a “whole,” autobiography therefore traces a hermeneutic arc from the particular to the universal, whose stake is reconciliation with oneself.