First italian translation of J. Derrida, "Interpreting Signatures (Nietzsche/Heidegger): two questions". This lecture was given in a conference with Hans-Georg Gadamer organized in 1981 at the Goethe Institute in Paris. Precisely through the theme of signature, Derrida deconstructs not only the unity of Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche but even the unifying logic of Western metaphysics.

Jean-Luc Nancy sketches some notes about the meaning and the value of autobiography in Jacques Derrida’s work. Nancy touches upon various problems (from an aesthetical and a theoretical point of view) concerning Derridean autobiographism and its possible place within deconstructive paradigm. Between them: self-presentation, singular existence and physical intensity in writing.

Carlo Sini deepens the interrelations between autobiography and philosophy, pointing out some crucial features of his thought. In the interview, Sini goes through several problems such as the genealogical meaning of philosophical practice; the relationship between knowledge of signs, life and death; the problem of truth and its ethical consequences.

Starting from her book "Per sentito dire. Conoscenza e testimonianza", Nicla Vassallo goes deeper in the relations between autobiography, testimony and personal responsibility, dealing with both social and epistemological matters.

This essay highlights the self-construction of the subject in Augustine's "Confessions" and how his spiritual autobiography is connected, through the mirror of writing, to a narrative hermeneutics and conversion. In the "Confessions" we can attend to a becoming of the subject in which narration and hermeneutics are joined in a indissoluble way. This subject is made up during his conversion by the intercession of the Alterity of God, the Forma omium throught which one can change itself in a forma formosa.

This essay illustrates how Rousseau presented himself in his "Confessions" in a antithetic and a dissimulative logic: at the same time he is a philosopher, an adventurer, a charlatan and a liar.

"Vita di Giambattista Vico scritta da se medesimo" appeared in 1728. More than a recollection of his own life, Vico proposes a fable of himself, beginning with the change of his birth date. This essay illustrates the rhetorical and linguistic traits that characterize the construction of Vico’s narrative, the connection to his "New Science" and the presentation of himself as a modern Socrates. If the "New Science" is the autobiography of the human race, Vico’s autobiography is presented as a total human event, a cycle of three ages and providential events of fall and rise.

In the following paper it is maintained that Spencer’s main purpose in writing "An Autobiography" (1904) was to prove the conformity between his own intellectual biography and the general conception of evolution set out in his "System of Synthetic Philosophy". It is documented how Spencer’s rhetorical strategy was to employ some embryological lexicon and to suggest the idea of an almost necessary development. Finally, it is suggested that in so doing Spencer inadvertently highlighted a fundamental difficulty of his own philosophy: the lack of an adequate distinction between an internalistic and externalistic account of evolutionary progress.

First italian translation of D. Langer, "Subjektbegriff und Selbstinszenierung in Ecce Homo", in Ead., "Wie man wird, was man schreibt. Sprache, Subjekt und Autobiographie bei Nietzsche und Barthes", München 2005. The text illustrates how the autobiographical self-construction in "Ecce Homo" is connected to Nietzsche’s critic of the subject.

This article aims to analyze the thought of Michel Foucault with respect to the technologies of self, the analysis of the processes of subjectification/objectification and the relationship between philosophy and writing. All this is articulated through a key to understanding based on the reflection of Gilles Deleuze: the theory of ‘bending’. The explicit purpose is to show how the biographical experience of the French philosopher, marked by political and civil involvement, is closely related to the theoretical conception that makes philosophy and, more generally, writing an important instrument of liberation and of ‘resistance’.

On many occasions, Foucault said that writing is a transformative experience. This paper attempts to show that the implications of this statement are interwoven with a transformation of the thought and with a relation with truth. From this, Foucault’s writing intends to make us sharers of this transformative experience, through what he called “experience-books”. However, this paper reveals that what Foucault points out through this experience is the very possibility of transformation of our present.

The aim of this article is to enquire Ricoeur’s narrative identity from an analytical and critical point of view. Starting from "Soi même comme une autre", three major aspects are highlighted: the congruence between the concept of narrative unity of life and the practical function of hermeneutics in the intellectual autobiography; the narrative theory in "Temps et récit" and his connection to Aristotelian concept of time and poiesis; finally, the poetic creativity and the ethical limit of interpretation.

The paper inquires the co-implications between autobiographism and deconstruction in Derrida’s philosophy. By suggesting that Derrida’s autos may be the pivotal problem, the theoretical notion of writing (of) the autos will be introduced and discussed as a feasible solution. Firstly, some main features both of Derrida’s theoretical conception of autobiography (seen as mainly auto-hetero-logical) and of Derrida’s autobiographical writing (seen namely in its existential quality) will be outlined, focusing on their impasses. Then, moving from the concept of autobiography as writing (of) life in Derrida’s L’animal que donc je suis and by an analysis of the automatisms in writing in Derrida’s work, writing (of) the autos will be argued as being the pre-subjective field where autos, automatism and writing may be interconnected. The hybrid morphology (between activity and passivity) of the writing (of) the autos will be finally shown in its potential consequences concerning Derrida’s approach to corporeity.

Starting from Peter Sloterdijk’s writings, Literatur und Lebenserfahrung and Zeilen und Tagen, autobiography could be defined as an antropotechnique and then a cultural technique. This essay investigates formal features and feedback effects on the subject who writes his own story.

The present article analyzes the relationship between literary works and diary-writing in Virginia Woolf. The comparison between Woolf’s Diary and her romances Mrs. Dalloway and The Waves shows a distinguishing characteristic of Modernist Literature, i.e. the representation of the Self as Another (“Je est un Autre”, according to the famous Arthur Rimbaud’s sentence). In Woolf’s writings we observe a meaningful exchange of functionality: her Diary is focused on literary questions in lieu of personal facts, as well as her literary works reveal intimate memories of writer’s personal life. The Modernist styleme of the ego-dissimulation presents in Virginia Woolf a mystical and tragic value, for which the self’s experience is comprehensible, perceptible and real only in the light of subject’s absence.

«There is no divorce between philosophy and life», writes Beauvoir in 1948. What can be developed from this assessment according to Beauvoir’s, as a woman’s, work? The first answer is the most well known: a woman is condemned to particularity, universality being accessible to men only. The way out of this destiny cannot be given by a mere historical becoming: nowadays women are equal and have now equal opportunities. Following Beauvoir’s writings another path can be opened, the one asking for a revision of the philosophical Canon, of the style of thinking, beyond the differences among genres – biographical, fictional and theoretical.

Sarah Kofman (1934-1994) has been one of the most brilliant French philosophers of her generation. She was a highly acclaimed interpreter of Freud and Nietzsche and published more than 30 books and many articles on art, psychoanalysis, literature and the philosophical tradition from Socrates to Derrida. She was reknown for her independent thought, her humorous nature, feminist stance and her ability in drawing and painting. She often lectured in the United States and Switzerland and her books have been translated in several languages. She studied with Hyppolite and Deleuze, and taught at the Sorbonne University in Paris from 1970 onwards. She was close to Derrida, Nancy and Lacoue-Labarthe, and worked with them for 20 years creating an important editorial series – «Philosophie en effet», for the Galilée publisher. She was a child under the Vichy régime in Paris; her father – a rabbi of Polish origins - was deported and died in Auschwitz, her 5 brothers and sisters were dispersed in various refuges in the countryside, while Sarah and her mother spent the years of the nazi occupation in hiding. She wrote on this tragic infancy in her last book – Rue Ordener, rue Labat; soon after the publication of the book she committed suicide.

This essay aims at exploring autobiography in the light of the opposition between individual and person. The autobiographical exercise is a pedagogical tool and philosophical object, necessary to create self-subjectivity and to give a meaning to the existence of an individual.

I have tried in this contribution to develop a possible meeting-point between the philosophical method of Sartre and the procedure of autobiographical constructivism, where one is existentially incarnated in the act of narration and especially in writing of the self. The link discovered has led to a consideration of the act of writing in adult age as an act of self-care, though always with a problematically attentive eye.

Facing the impossible balance between the autobiography register and cinema, the latter has significantly expanded the autobiographic spectrum to make the thematic of the «I» its own and adapt it to the big screen. Guy Maddin is a particular case. His cinematographic artwork, half-way between experimental and narrative cinema, addresses in a diverted way the different levels of Maddin’s life. The expression of the «I» and also its representations are multiplied, in a diegetic world which oscillates between the fantastic, the exact opposite of the autobiographic standards, and the restitution of memories. This article proposes a study of the methods, as much narrative as aesthetic, of this evocation of the «I» in cinema, through the example of the movie "Cowards Bend The Knee".

This essay aims to underline the connection between art, autobiography writing and cinema in the light of an enigmatic and infinitive narration. Narrative and fiction become media to show, create and reflect about our sights on reality and knowledge. Throught (audio)visual and written texts it’s possible to use an instrument for a philosophical inquiry about different methods of knowledge’ building and self-education. This allows to show the relational, compositive, analytical and synthetical style, observing it through the work of the philosophy of storytelling. Everyone has its own exquisitely personal “coherent deformation” and writing art helps - being one of the elected way to accompany the dynamic behavior of our imagination (not just through films and art) - the plastic thought, the hypothetical forms, and all that is potential. Autobiography is a method to learn the aesthetic of the unfinished.

One of the main effects of the digital revolution is the strengthening of the trend towards personalization of mass media. Because of the miniaturization of hardware devices and the proliferation of mobile connections, virtual transcription and telematics sharing of personal biographies are central today. As a result, the impact on the concept of privacy is inevitable: in an era in which the primacy of the subject is reflected in the exhibition of stripped digital self, the concept is completely renewed.