The Ethics of Autobiography: Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain. By Angel G. Loureiro. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt UP, 2000. xvi, 276pp.

Reviewed by Andres Villagra

By writing a book on text where I see myself reflected in many ways,
I am not so much attempting to find clues or consolation as I am giving myself to an obscure, imprecise addressee whose unremitting demands cannot be refused." We encounter this passage in the introduction of the five essays that make up Angel Loureiro's mordant, challenging account of his latest theoretical book on Spanish Autobiography.

The Ethics of Autobiography: Replacing the Subject in Modern Spain is not the first volume of Angel Loureiro's studies on Spanish autobiography, but it is the most ambitious and far reaching project to date. According to the author, this book is written in English because that language allows him to express ideas differently, move through uncertain territories, and expect uncompromising and heterogeneous addressee (xv-xvi). In the prologue, Angel Loureiro embarks on a very courageous, innovative, and challenging autobiographical essay, first, on his disappointment and frustration since Paul de Man's criticism of the genre and, later, on his discovery of French Philosopher Emmanuel Levinas's ethics.

As the title suggests, the various essays explore "Replacing the Subject" as proposed by Levinas's works by calling into question the responsibility of the other in the autobiographical process. Excluding the first chapter where his theoretical foundation is presented, the remaining chapters portray the autobiographies of four of the most prominent exile writers of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Century in Spanish Letters: José María Blanco White (1775-1841), María Teresa León (1904-1988), Juan Goytisolo (1931- ), and Jorge Semprún (1923- ). These chapters are organized in three stages: a general biographical description of the author, a second section of self-cognitive devices, and a third section of the ethical aspects of the text. All of the chapters are connected by the experience of exile that Loureiro compares with his own present self-imposed exile in the U.S. as a response to the "alienation" he suffered in post-Francoist Spain (xv). Arguably, Loureiro's self-portrait as an outcast shares more with immigration than exile.

Challenging established theories, particularly Paul de Man's rhetoric of prosopopeia as the figure that "gives face and voice to a dead entity" (ix), Angel Loureiro establishes that autobiography is always,

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according to Emmanuel Levinas's ethics, "the domain of the other. The self is not an autonomous, self positing entity, but it originates as a response to, and thus as a responsibility toward the other" (xi). Loureiro studies the original "forgotten" meaning of prosopopeia as expressed by Quintilian as a figure that addresses the presence of the other and of the response in the text, thus the ethical component in the autobiographical process. By way of Heidegger, Kant's intentionality of existence, Husserl's phenomenology, and Lacan's mirror stage, Loureiro establishes the area of the imaginary, the pre-discursive, and locates the autobiography in the relationship with the other, in the political and the moral, in what he calls the "Ethics of Autobiography." Loureiro concludes that cognitive self-reconstruction and a performative act are possible in autobiography and in no way contradict each other (xi).

Effectively summarized in the title of the first chapter, "Before Reference: The Ethics of Autobiography," Loureiro describes the theoretical aspects that will be the foundation of his exposition. In disagreement with ontological and Hegelian formulations of the alterity of the subject, Loureiro stresses the responsibility of the self towards the other. It is this ethical sense of the self, undefined prior to any knowledge, that can explain certain "attachments" to various autobiographical discourses that conform the self. Following Derrida and Foucault, and against critics who see autobiography as a rhetorical operation, Loureiro challenges the modern notion of autobiography as solely a "giving face," a kind of fiction that renders an essentialist's view of autobiographical studies. On the other hand, Loureiro questions what kind of referentiality mimesis does produce and what relationship is established between life and language, the self and the addressee, the ethical and the political in autobiography. The anti-essentialist view guides Angel Loureiro in the discussion of Spanish autobiographies which focus on key autobiographical issues on the subjectivities of self: identity and religious constraints, testimonies of war and exile, social, national, gender and family identity, and memories of a concentration camp and the Holocaust.

In chapter 2, "Blanco White: Decolonizing the Affects," Loureiro provocatively psychoanalyzes Blanco White's keen accusations of Catholicism, his combating of religious dogmatism, and his portrait of himself as a martyr of truth. The autobiography of this priest, at first Catholic, then Anglican, and then Unitarian, epitomizes the traditional autobiographical discourse of the Enlightenment period and modern autobiography. Loureiro lists various statements Blanco White made about his motivation to write and shows how these remarks reveal that his writing is a response to religious power that resides in "the exacerbation of feelings at the expense of reason" (31). Referring to Blanco

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White's writings as documents of self-exploration and self-defense, Loureiro points out Blanco White's acts of religious propaganda and programs for religious and moral action (43). Hence, even though the innermost concern in Blanco White's works is centered on religious dogmatism, the act of writing seems largely motivated by his desire not only to lay bare his confession, but also to provide a programmatic view of action for himself and for others. As an act of reconstruction and re-presentation, Loureiro finds in Victorian autobiography, as a series of stages or passages, the only model to represent Blanco White's "anti-catholic tribulations." The resulting study is comprehensive, but above all engaging through the discussion of the addressee of his confession, in this case the world as "third party" and as receiver of his apology, the self as ethical model for future generations.

Consistent with this approach, in chapter 3, "María Teresa León: The Ruins of Memory," Loureiro explores the subject of melancholy as depicted in María Teresa León's Memoria de la melancolía. As did other Spanish women writers such as Rosa Chacel and María Zambrano, María Teresa León participated in the Spanish Civil War and subsequently went into exile. María Teresa León writes Memoria de la melancolía as a text against injustice, to return to a lost paradise. Here, Loureiro explicates Leon's obsession with severance, displacement, abandonment, and loss produced by the war and posterior exile and her inability to set herself free from the past. Drawing from Freud's theories on psychoanalysis, Loureiro points out how María Teresa León is unable to perform, to let go, to break from a sense of loss in the present. Following Kristeva's notion of the writing process as catharsis more than elaboration, Loureiro sees León's writing as a fixation with the past, as ideology that resists the passing of time that "ends up resembling the representation of a pure and permanently ongoing experience of loss" (68). Loureiro concludes that "Leon's ideology/fantasy of universal fraternity and empathetic communication beyond differences" (75) resides in precisely that tension between ideology and utopia that melancholy suggests.

Continuing his analysis of self-cognitive operations on chapter 4, "Juan Goytisolo: Telling Death and the Nostalgia for Origins," Loureiro turns to Lacan, Althusser, and Foucault and goes beyond the ideological to the affective/imaginary (101). Exploring Goytisolo's relationship with his family, his country, his sexuality, and his writing, Loureiro shows how it transgresses cultural norms prevalent in Spanish society. As an act of self-reconstruction, Goytisolo sheds light upon an identity previously erased, the "other" Goytisolo, unsuccessfully repressed because of social, political, and personal constraints. Goytisolo's writings operate as counter-narrative of the reductionist gender and iden-

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tity constructs in Spain that viewed homosexuality, political, historical, and national reevaluations as excesses that threaten the movement of culture, family, and gender roles. Loureiro sums up his exploration of Juan Goytisolo's autobiographies by emphasizing a process of recovery of the body, whereby the body becomes the locus for the writing of repression and the enactment of resistance. In presenting Goytisolo's autobiography as an autobiographical writing of alterity, Loureiro questions accepted notions of clan, class, and country and challenges reductionist views of ritualistic and destructive acts in Goytisolo's writing. The recovery of the "other" repressed self occurs in the presymbolic, Lacan's imaginary, and the ethical. The annihilation of the father, "defatherment," opens up the possibility to rescue his repressed past, his mother, and other female ancestors through continuous rebirths and analysis of origins. Following Lacan's hermeneutics of guilt, Goytisolo embarks on a process to rewrite the history, literature, nationalism, and values of Spanish culture, and his own truth before his death for a third party, the ethical.

In chapter 5, "Jorge Semprún: Radical Evil and the Secrets of Fraternity," Loureiro lays bare how Semprún's text L'écriture our la vie differs from most accounts of concentration camps in that it does not want to be a personal testimony; instead it deals primarily with the consequences of survival (143). By discussing the Holocaust in the context of Todorov and Hayden White, Loureiro gives a nonconforming analysis of the question of radical evil that appears as an obsession in Jorge Semprún's autobiography (149). Drawing on Primo Levi's image of dream within a dream, the consequences of such traumatic experiences in concentration camps, the ever present exposure to death, the dehumanization of individuals, the fight for survival, the subsequent personal shame for their own acts, and the discontinuity of chronological time, conform the subject not as guilt in Lacanian terms, but as responsibility of the death of the other, following Levinas's "ethical subject." To comprehend such an indescribable, unthinkable act, Semprún resorts to artifice and the literary, an autobiographical aspect challenged by George Misch and Georges Gusdorf among others. By fictionalizing his testimony, Semprún's autobiography focuses the reader's attention on the performative social function of the subject's discourse and on the impossibility of summing up a description of this experience in the concentration camps.

The conclusion of Angel Loureiro's book, "Spanish Autobiography and the Burdens of History," illustrates how for these four autobiographers, because they are "forced to re-place themselves and to replace their selves, it is not surprising that their stories are ultimately narratives of self reparation, although in two different senses: reparation as

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restoration and renewal of the self (Blanco White and Goytisolo--story of an insufficiency), and reparation of the self as compensation for a loss (León, Semprún--story of loss and fall)" (181). Employing a multiplicity of theoretical approaches, Angel Loureiro historicizes Spanish autobiography by focusing on conflicts, values of religion, politics, nationality, and ethnicity of the identity. If this theory could be called controversial, it is not so much because of the approach it takes to the proposed ethical and political aspects of the autobiographies, but when he concludes that the lack of Spanish autobiographies resides precisely in Spanish idiosyncrasy, readers, and censorship, and categorically declares that "the most important autobiographies in Spain were written by exiles" (184). Despite some absolute statements about Spanish autobiography's quality and realm (xiv), his book fares better when addressing theoretical aspects and developing new approaches to these four well-known autobiographies. The book's only drawback is that it is jargon-laden and will probably not serve the uninitiated reader as a guide to contemporary Spanish autobiography. Furthermore, the endnote section occupies 61 pages and the bibliography 19 out of the total 276 of the volume.

With apt and lucid references to cultural theorists (Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, Deleuze, etc), Loureiro pretends to x-ray the writing process of autobiography. His analysis of the political, rhetorical, and ethical aspects of the autobiographical process does not contradict de Man's approach as discussed earlier, yet it adds a forgotten ethical value of prosopopeia to the self. To search for the sources of a theory is fascinating and, generally, unending because when one begins to disclose them, one soon discovers that the theory's roots and ramifications expand and multiply in the life of its author, of his contemporaries, of his readings, and of his era. This study, as if it were an autobiography of the writing process, of ideas and a process of self-discovery, of writing in a self-imposed exile, is a clear demonstration of this umbilical process. However, readers who anticipated a social reading of Spanish autobiography might detect in Loureiro's book a redundant acknowledgment of his position on autobiography and a willingness to speculate.

Above all, this book is, more than a scientific treatise, a moral one. As a model, Loureiro uses the history of autobiography in Spain to lay bare the interdependencies between the saying and the said, the Real and the Symbolic, and to state that in Spain, at least, autobiographies have been scarce because of the moral restrictions of the society in which they were written and that only exiles and outcasts could express their ideas freely, which in turn underscores the role of the other, the listener, the apostrophe in the autobiographical process. Yet, substantial

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questions linked to the "responsibility of the other" and "the ethics of Autobiography" remain to be examined.

In spite of differences with other contemporary and past theorists, Loureiro is capable of seeing another approach to reading and examining autobiographies. His book may not reach totally his goal, a defense against de Man's demolishing critique of autobiography, perhaps due to the excessive influence of Levinas and other contemporary thinkers on his interpretation. However, few books have shown as well how institutions, ideas, myths, beliefs, and prejudices have constrained the writing of the self. It is in this respect that Loureiro's study, The Ethics of Autobiography, represents a crucial contribution to the autobiography debate that continues in Academia today.

Pace University