Биографичната машина, смъртта на биографиите и революционното самонаследяване
The Biographical Machine, the Death of Biographies, and Revolutionary Self-inheritance

Summary/Abstract: In this article, I return to a study conducted in the early1990s by the Institute for Social Critique, ‘The Death of Biographies’. It was extremely interesting for us at the time to witness the spectacular phenomena of the crisis of biographical machines. We called ‘biographical machine’ the effects of public constitution of identities, the heliotropic effects (turnabouts) of biographical towards historical narratives – taking a position as from the future, making the sense of ‘my/our life’ cohere with ‘the meaning of history’. A biographical machine throws bridges, neutralizes breakages and abysses between life and biography, giving life a generally accepted and recognized meaning. Life and the narratives about it, although intertwined, are not the same thing. In the transitions/translations from private to public spheres, the hidden tensions break out between the person living his or her own ‘unique’ life and his or her public presentations. Life, although being a reality made into a unified whole, has no universal structure of meaning. The border events (‘interspace events’) interwoven into narratives mark the transitions between radically different biographical situations – unfolding and convolution, acquiring and deprivation, giving and taking away a ‘meaning of life’. Following Freud, we called these processes ‘biographical dreaming’. The crisis of biographies reveals the symptoms of blocking the transfer of meanings from the individual and group plane into the universal (biographical and historical) plane and reversely, caused by the ‘Golgothas’ of history. Today, biographical machines seem to awaken again. An effect/symptom of what is this?

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