Lines of Life and Death: Self-Portraiture, Autobiography, and the Proper Name in Derrida

Introduction

Across his work, Jacques Derrida returns obsessively to the problem of self-representation, the moment when thought, writing, or image turns back upon itself. In Of Grammatology (1967), he dismantled the metaphysical confidence that meaning or identity could ever be fully present, arguing that every act of expression inscribes the trace of absence. Later, in The Truth in Painting (1978) and Mémoires d’aveugle (1990), he extends this logic to the visual arts, showing that the portrait, especially the self-portrait, exposes the impossibility of seeing oneself without blindness. In Otobiographies (1979), he returns to the written form of self-portraiture — autobiography — to interrogate how a name, a life, and a signature are bound to death and repetition.

Across these works, Derrida’s persistent question remains: how does one mark the self without losing it? The painter’s cartouche and the philosopher’s signature both name and bury, leaving traces that survive by detaching from their living source.

The Signature as Tomb: Art and Mortality

In The Truth in Painting, Derrida describes the cartouche, the framed space reserved for the artist’s signature, as “a miniature tomb” that both identifies and effaces its author (p. 32). Once the painter signs the work, it no longer belongs to the hand that produced it; the mark of authorship coincides with the author’s withdrawal. This paradox extends throughout Mémoires d’aveugle, his meditation on drawing and blindness.

There, Derrida suggests that the self-portrait is the visual analogue of writing: a gesture that reveals the self only through absence. The artist cannot simultaneously see herself and draw herself; each line is made in blindness, from memory or anticipation. The portrait, therefore, is a trace, “the visibility of what withdraws from sight.” To portray oneself is to inscribe one’s own disappearance, to record the interval where vision turns into recollection.

The act of drawing becomes an act of mourning. Like the cartouche, the portrait preserves by commemorating loss. The image does not restore the self to presence but marks its evacuation. The self-portrait, then, is a form of auto-thanato-graphy: a writing of life through death.

The Proper Name and the Death of the Author

In Otobiographies, Derrida translates this logic from painting to philosophy. His focus is Nietzsche — a thinker who, as Derrida writes, “put his name on the line… to stage signatures, to make an immense bio-graphical paraph out of all that he has written on life or death.” Nietzsche’s name, after his death, becomes a site of inheritance and contamination, a mark through which his thought continues but no longer belongs to him. Derrida notes: “Only the name can inherit, and this is why the name, to be distinguished from the bearer, is always and a priori a dead man’s name, a name of death” (Otobiographies, in The Ear of the Other, 1985, p. 5).

The signature, here as in art, is both affirmation and erasure. It guarantees authenticity by testifying that the author is absent. To sign one’s name is to acknowledge that what one has produced will circulate without one’s presence. The autos of autobiography, like the auto of the self-portrait, is thus never purely one’s own: the self is constituted in its exposure to the other, to the reader, to language, to death.

Derrida’s concern with the “proper name” extends beyond Nietzsche’s case; it marks the intersection of philosophy, pedagogy, and politics. The name is never simply one’s own, it is a site of transmission, authority, and appropriation. To speak of “Nietzsche” is already to engage a network of citations and inheritances, each claiming the proper meaning of the name. Hence Derrida’s subtitle, The Politics of the Proper Name: every name circulates within institutions that both preserve and betray it. The name is what allows a thought to survive, but only by detaching it from its living origin and exposing it to other ears, other contexts. The “auto” of autobiography is thus inseparable from the “oto” of otobiography — the name always addresses an other, calling and being called, surviving as a voice that is no longer one’s own. (Derrida’s neologism plays on the Greek roots: auto [αὐτός], meaning “self,” and oto [from ous, ōtos], meaning “ear.” What seems to be self-writing is also a writing-for-the-ear, an address to the other who hears.)

Derrida plays on the double sense of bio, as biological and biographical. Life (bios) is always already written, already inscribed. To live, in this sense, is to leave traces, to be caught in the web of writing and naming. The biological body and the written corpus mirror one another; the philosopher’s life and works cannot be neatly separated. The philosopher’s proper name marks the fragile threshold where these two bodies, the living and the textual, overlap.

The Line Between Life and Writing

In Otobiographies, Derrida remarks that “life is on the line,” a phrase that resonates with Mémoires d’aveugle. In both texts, the line signifies the medium through which life becomes legible, whether as handwriting or as a stroke of charcoal. The line is never innocent; it divides as it joins, linking the living body to its representation while marking the distance between them.

In Mémoires d’aveugle, the hand that draws performs an act of faith: it traces what it cannot see. In Otobiographies, the philosopher’s pen enacts a similar gesture: it writes a self that is never fully visible to itself. Both acts require blindness, a surrender to mediation.

This “blind line” exemplifies Derrida’s broader logic of différance. Just as meaning arises from deferral and spacing between signs, selfhood arises from the temporal gap between living and its representation. The line is the spacing of identity itself, the difference that allows anything to appear as something rather than nothing.

Continuities with Of Grammatology

The connection to Of Grammatology becomes clear: the signature in Otobiographies and the self-portrait in Mémoires d’aveugle are both instances of writing, understood in Derrida’s expanded sense of archi-écriture. Both dismantle the metaphysical hierarchies of speech/writing and presence/absence.

In Of Grammatology, Derrida reverses the traditional privilege of speech over writing, showing that the voice — supposedly the direct presence of the self — is itself structured like writing, dependent on repetition and difference. Similarly, in Otobiographies and Mémoires d’aveugle, self-representation (whether verbal or visual) depends on an act of displacement. The self appears only by passing through mediation, through the line, through the trace that divides life from its depiction.

Thus, Derrida’s aesthetics and his philosophy of language converge. The philosopher’s signature and the artist’s cartouche are homologous: each marks the moment when expression becomes independent of its origin, when the living subject becomes a trace.

Conclusion

From Of Grammatology to Mémoires d’aveugle and Otobiographies, Derrida’s reflection on self-representation reveals a single thread: to express oneself is to survive oneself. The mark, whether written or drawn, is the form life takes when it passes into survival. The cartouche and the philosophical signature alike testify that the author has been here, and is already gone.

In this sense, Derrida’s signature is not simply a concept but an existential gesture. Every text and every portrait bears the same paradox: they make presence possible only by staging absence. To draw oneself, to write one’s life, to sign one’s name, all are ways of preparing one’s own monument, of leaving behind the trace of a disappearance. As Derrida reminds us, “to portray oneself is to inscribe one’s own disappearance.” The self, whether inscribed in word or image, exists only in the movement of its erasure — a living signature that endures beyond the life that gave it form.

Related Posts

The Blindness of Vision: Derrida, Memory, and the Ruin of the Self

https://derridaforlinguists.blogspot.com/2025/11/blog-post_04.html

Derrida’s Deconstruction of Presence in Of Grammatology and Mémoires d’aveugle

https://derridaforlinguists.blogspot.com/2025/10/blog-post_30.html

Bibliography

Derrida, Jacques. Of Grammatology. Trans. Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1976.

———. The Truth in Painting. Trans. Geoff Bennington and Ian McLeod. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1987.

———. Otobiographies: The Teaching of Nietzsche and the Politics of the Proper Name. Trans. Avital Ronell. In The Ear of the Other, ed. Christie McDonald. New York: Schocken, 1985.

———. Mémoires d’aveugle: L’autoportrait et autres ruines. Paris: Réunion des musées nationaux, 1990.