ÉCRIRE LE SOI À L’ÂGE DE LA POST-VÉRITÉ. DE LA COGNITION « 5 E » À LA SOLIDARITÉ DÉMOCRATIQUE : UNE GRILLE CONCEPTUELLE POUR THÉORISER L’AUTOTHÉORIE
WRITING THE SELF IN THE AGE OF POST-TRUTH. FROM “5 E” COGNITION TO DEMOCRATIC SOLIDARITY: A CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK FOR THEORISING AUTOTHEORY

Summary/Abstract: Writing the Self in the Age of Post-Truth. From “5 E” Cognition to Democratic Solidarity: A Conceptual Framework for Theorising Autotheory. The notion of autotheory raises numerous conceptual questions regarding not only the epistemic shift it claims, whereby lived experience becomes a source of theorisation, but also about its roots and intellectual history, its characteristics and ambiguous status, and its apparent rejection of the notion of literary genre. This article proposes a conceptual framework for theorising autotheory, based on an autotheoretical corpus coming from French, as well as Spanish, Italian, Romanian and Québec Indigenous literatures. We suggest that it is necessary to analyse autotheory in its relation to the post-truth era, and to examine its cultural history and cognitive dimensions. Taking a step beyond Fournier’s assertion that the history of autotheory merges with the history of feminism, we show that autotheory and post-truth have a common intellectual root, namely postmodern thought, which they nevertheless revive in diametrically opposed ways, with notably antithetical projects in terms of their relationship to democracy. We then show that the autotheoretical “self” corresponds to the “5 E” model of the mind theorised by the cognitive sciences (embodied, embedded, enactive, extended, and emotive or, according to another model, ecological). Finally, we propose an enactivist account of autotheory, showing that its inherent goal is to act upon the world, thus revisiting the notion of phronesis in order to elicit actions leading to democratic regeneration. We conclude by proposing a preliminary but more nuanced definition of autotheory as a literary genre.

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