(Auto)thanatography or (auto)thanatology? : Mark C. Taylor, Simon Critchley, and the writing of the dead

Abstract

“THANATOGRAPHY ” is defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “an account of a person's death”. Therefore a thanatography would ordinarily be a report by the living on others' dying. By extension, the term “autothanatographies” is definable as “the dead's own accounts of their own deaths”. Autothanatography, therefore, reports an experience that can be rendered possible only through an unthinkable sur-vivre which would make it possible to configure a writing d'outre tombe. Such writing would depend on the continued conceivability, to itself and to others and after death, of an authoring consciousness. It must also overcome the objection that in any autothanatographical account the self-reflexive equivalent of a Lazare, veni foras might be pronounced and obeyed, against all the laws of physics, religion and philosophy. [excerpt]