Del disegnare una vita : Note sull'autobiografia di Mario Perniola

This discussion deals with Mario Perniola’s postume autobiography Tiresia contro Edipo. By setting the discourse on Nietzsche’s analogy about life’s narration as landscape drawing, the discussion focuses, firstly, on what Derrida calls the “trait” of drawing, as an experience of the difference. “Experience” means here – with Heideggerian echoes – let us open to the coming of the heterogeneous, the different. That is what tumor’s diagnosis has meant to Perniola. “Madame Death” – he writes – has opened to him something that he calls a “becoming”. But it is Perniola’s life itself that might be seen as an endless becoming, each time different. We try to show that one might look at this autobiography as a way to articulate this becoming or life. In doing so, we refer to Deleuze and what he writes on the link between “writing”, “becoming”, and “life”. Writing, in Deleuzean pages, is seen as way of thinking up new life’s possibilities. Alongside all of these topics, we show that Perniola’s gesture by which he writes his autobiography is deeply coherent with his philosophical production; “difference”, “becoming”, “writing”: these are, in fact, issues that has always got Perniola’s thought involved with.