To Write Voiceless: A Derridean Approach to Santiago Amigorena’s ‘Confessions’.

MAURO GRECO

Praga

Workshop; Subtle Transitions Mini-conference and Workshop; 2024

Charles University, Prague City University, Memories Studies Associatiion

This presentation aims to share with a wider public a published article (“Écrire sansvoix: une approche en clé derridienne aux “confessions” de Santiago Amigorena”, Çédille n°23, 2023), co authored with Complutense University of Madrid’s colleague Ariadna AlvarezGavela. In this article, drawing on two novels of the aforementioned French Argentine writerUne enfance, laconique , 1998; Le guetto intérieur , 2019), we propose a Derrida informedtheoretical approach to Amigorena´s project, entitled ‘Le dernier livre’. In the latter, amongseveral cavilations, the author self presented as a silent person who could never speaktherefore resorting to writing to express himself proposes to write autobiographical novelswritten in first person, with wordplays, baroque subordinates, etc. during his mornings, andhistoric ones during the afternoon in the latter, formally speaking, the author opts a classic,formal, lineal and chronological style. Th ese latter deploy a ‘multi directional’ (Roth berg ,2009) and multi temporal one, taking back to the ‘first Amigorena in the Americas’(Amigorena, 1998), a Basque Spanish corsario accompanying Isabel the Catholic’s colonisingenterprise, to the last Argentine dictatorship (1976 1983) when Santigo Amigorena’s family hadto exile to France after a previous exile to neighbouring Uruguay. In the middle of this historicalarc Amigorena writer/character also fictionalises the history of his European family during the20th, for example, his Jewish Polish relatives enclosed in a German concentration camp. Thispresentation aims not only to share our already published findings but also to expose to criticismand constructive feedback our article’s proposed state of the art, theoretical frame, etc.,considering ours is the first systematic published piece on Amigorena’s literary enterprise . Thisent erprise , and this was my working hypothesis during a previous presentation in RosarioArgentina, although self presented as an ‘auto bio encyclopédie’, actually exemplifiesDerrida’s request for a new ‘parasite logic’: it parasites the reader’s patience, time andconstantly willing to turn the page.