The Life and Death of My Own Personal Blogosphere

If, as Derrida has suggested, every autobiography is in fact a thanatography, when “blogging,” to whom do I really speak? Or as Lacan would have it, is the very act of creating an ‘I’ an act of repression? In such a case I select those aspects to include in my story that at this moment (or rather, at the moment just passed) appear in harmony with the “I” I choose to represent -- while at the same time, an infinity of other aspects never appear, and are in fact, obliterated by my choice.

Where is the repression, one might ask? When I write of myself, of my life, there are three actions taking place: the choice of what to write, the choice of what to ignore, and finally, the act of forgetfulness, where no conscious choice is made because the possibilities never rise to the surface. In this realm, neither history nor law can take part – it is the gap that is never filled as itself, but only as a representation of something else, a Secret peeking out from between the lines.

If this is true, then Derrida’s assertion that the archive is both constitutive of the self and simultaneously destructive – the essence of pure evil, as he says, in which the act of representation kills all that is outside its explicitly named, its legal, boundaries – is at heart an assertion that life and death co-exist eternally in the moment passing by, with death continually triumphing until life emerges superior in that interminable, yet final breath. (Ala The Life and Death of Ivan Ilych?)

As I write about my thoughts, about my life, the I who writes and the me to whom I speak temporarily seem to merge, but this is fantasy. The gap between I and me can never fully be closed in rational thought. And when I write of my life to myself, where are the boundaries between myself and others, since I sense that the me to whom I speak is not the same as the I who speaks? If no one ever reads this post, do I as I constitute myself at this moment cease to exist? If people read and respond, does this post not reconstitute me according to their words?