Writing in Cars with Gertrude Stein and Jacques Derrida, or,

The Age of Autotheory

Ryan Tracy

Arizona Quarterly: A Journal of American Literature, Culture, and

Theory, Volume 76, Number 1, Spring 2020, pp. 15-37 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/arq.2020.0000

For additional information about this article

https://muse.jhu.edu/article/754795

[ Access provided at 19 Sep 2022 10:40 GMT from Albert-Ludwigs-Universitaet Freiburg ]

 Ryan Tracy

Writing in Cars with

Gertrude Stein and Jacques Derrida,
or, The Age of Autotheory
for anybody’s L.

`Àutotheory” is a term circulating in contemporary

  academic and literary criticism to designate theoretical writing
that opens itself to autobiographical aspects of the writer’s life. This
term has been associated with the contemporary writers Maggie Nelson
and Paul Preciado and seems to hail something of a new turn in schol-
arly writing (Nelson). Yet autotheory may not be as new as the neolo-
gism suggests. As Robyn Wiegman mentions in her introduction to this
special issue, autotheory presumes a relation between the autobiograph-
ical and the theoretical that is not necessarily new to either critical the-
oretical writing or the literary archives (Wiegman). In this essay, I hope
to affirm the structural and historical openness of autotheory by track-
ing the imbrication of autobiographical writing between two thinkers
set on a collision course that has not yet been given sufficient critical
attention: the so-called modernist writer Gertrude Stein (1874–1946)
and the so-called post-modern philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–
2004).1 Both Stein and Derrida famously challenged the authority of
autobiography by putting pressure on the fantasy of sovereignty and
self-representation that undergirds common notions of autobiography,
while at the same time, affirming “the autos” as a radically capacious
and multiplying signifier. Moreover, each turned to the material, met-
aphoric, and deconstructive valences of the “automobile” in order to
articulate the problems that circulate around self-identity. Writing (or
riding) in cars with Stein and Derrida traverses the border between self
and other without, however, surrendering the necessity (and risk) of
theorizing from the grammatical position of the first person.

Arizona Quarterly Volume 76, Number 1, Spring 2020  •  issn 0004-1610

Copyright © 2020 by Arizona Board of Regents
16 Ryan Tracy

Im-possible Autobiographies
But we are never ourselves, and between us,
identical to us, a ‘self’ is never in itself or identical to itself.
Jacques Derrida

You are of course never yourself.

Gertrude Stein

There is a literary and philosophical kinship between Stein and

Derrida that cuts through their thought on the self, and that is evident
in their experiments with the genre of autobiography. It may come as
a surprise to some scholars of deconstruction that Derrida read Stein,
understood her historical importance as a major figure of feminist and
modernist literatures, and was almost certainly aware that a generation
of Stein scholars was coming to view her work as “deconstructive.”2
Derrida cited Stein’s proper name on at least three occasions. During a
discussion of feminism in the interview “This Strange Institution Called
Literature” (1992), Derrida includes Stein in a list of “immensely great
modern writers” along with Virginia Woolf and Derrida’s close friend
Hélène Cixous (59). In The Animal That Therefore I Am (2008), he
regards Stein as an “autobiographical animal,” and includes her (again
in a list) among a tradition of Western writers who demonstrate an
irresistible urge to write about themselves (49). And in “Circumfession”
(1993), an essay in which Derrida explicitly embraces the porousness
of his own autobiographical signature while parasitically “[transform-
ing] the autobiographies of others into his ‘own’” (Hayes 166), Derrida
quotes directly from Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography (1937).
While they never met—Derrida moved to Paris three years after
Stein’s death—Derrida and Stein shared the experience of being writ-
ers in exile. Stein was an American expat who lived and worked in
France from 1906 until the time of her death in 1946. Fame in her
native country had eluded Stein until late in her life with the best-sell-
ing The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas (1933), which allowed her to
break into American publishing while gaining her a popular American
audience.3 Because of her long absence, America came to feel like a for-
eign country to Stein. Stein viewed the arrival of American doughboys
during World War I as America paying her a visit, which, as she wrote
in The Autobiography, “was so much better than just going to America.
 The Age of Autotheory 17

Here you were with America in a kind of way that if you only went to
America you could not possibly be” (184). The friendships and corre-
spondences that grew out of the American military presence in France
made a deep and lasting impression on both Stein and her lifelong com-
panion, Alice B. Toklas.
America, for Derrida, was a source of childhood imagination partly
through the global dissemination of American cinema. Benoît Peeters
suggests that Derrida’s given name, Jackie, was borrowed from Jackie
Coogan, the childhood star of Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 film The Kid
(13). The presence of American troops in Algeria during World War
II also made a major impression on Derrida. According to Peeters, the
arrival of the “Amerloques” (or “Yankees”) meant both a relief from
Vichy persecution as well as a larger-than-life “event” that gave Derrida
an almost mythical encounter with foreign America (20–22). “Before I
ever went to America,” Derrida wrote, “America took over my ‘home’”
(22), and like Stein and Toklas, Derrida’s family befriended and kept a
correspondence with an American GI. America also functioned—as
it did for Stein—as a foreign land in which Derrida found affirmation
for his work. Derrida gained enormous fame and success in America—
more so, in some ways, than in the literary and philosophical society in
France, in which he often felt out of place.
Both Stein and Derrida turned to literary experimentation to write
the intimate details of their lives into the world. Each played with auto-
biographical form while thinking through autobiography’s complex set
of representational and epistemological problems. It is difficult to find
Stein scholarship that does not address, in some way, Stein’s experimen-
tal approach to autobiographical writing. Likewise, there is a prevailing
tendency to think of Derrida’s corpus in terms of its autobiographical
texture. Jarrod Hayes contends that Derrida “increasingly wove an
autobiographical thread” into his work (165), and Michael Naas inter-
prets Derrida’s final seminar, The Beast and the Sovereign (2004), as “a
remarkable attempt to write a sort of autobiography otherwise” (7).
This autobiographical flair is reflected in a number of Derrida’s texts,
including the “Envois” of The Post Card (1980), “Ulysses Gramophone”
(1992), “Monolingualism of the Other” (1998), and several texts that
are linked or interpenetrated by the figure of the silkworm, including
“A Silkworm of One’s Own” (1996), Rogues (2006), The Animal That
Therefore I Am (2008), and a series of notebooks Derrida began in the
18 Ryan Tracy

1970s on the subject of circumcision—the work was to be titled Elie—

which Derrida heavily quotes from in “Circumfession.”4 Yet Geoffrey
Bennington goes so far as to claim that “all of J.D.’s [sic] texts are in
some way ‘autobiographical’” (Bennington and Derrida 321). From this
perspective, Derrida’s “autobiothanatographical” corpus—to use one of
his own terms (Peeters 3)—can be read as an enormous “auto body,” an
immense text in which the presumed authority of the autobiographical
signature receives something like a deconstructive tune-up.5
Automobiles were important means by which Stein and Derrida
lived and remembered their lives, and the figure of the car circles
in their autobiographical writings. For her part, Stein had a partic-
ular loyalty to the Ford brand (although she rarely capitalizes that
name), and it was while sitting on a Ford, waiting for her own Ford
to undergo maintenance at a garage, that Stein wrote one of her most
famous essays, “Composition As Explanation” (1926) (The Autobiog-
raphy 233). Stein and Toklas bought their first car, a Ford ambulance,
the “Auntie”—named after an aunt of Stein’s “who always behaved
admirably in emergencies”—with the express purpose of doing aid
work during World War I (172). When the “Auntie” broke down, they
bought a new Ford they nicknamed “Godiva.” These cars helped Stein
and Toklas to volunteer during the war, as well as to travel between
27 rue de Fleurus in Paris and their various homes in the French
countryside. While touring the United States in 1934, they rented
several Ford “drive yourself cars” so that Stein could drive the two of
them—or as Stein writes in Everybody’s Autobiography, “I drove our-
selves”—between restaurants, hotels, theaters, and universities (296).
And following the success of The Autobiography, they purchased a new
“eight cylinder” Ford.
The Jewish-owned French car manufacturer Citroën had a major
impact on Derrida’s life.6 As a child growing up in French-occupied
Algeria, Derrida often accompanied his father, who was a salesman, on
business outings in a “blue Citroën” (Peeters 25). When he got to the
École normale supérieure in the early 1950s, Derrida and a friend of
his purchased a Citroën C4, which they nick-named ‘T’chi t’cheu’ (a
Francophonic approximation of the Chinese word for “car”) (Peeters
66). And it was a “little 2CV” that Derrida used in late July, 1959, to
drive himself to Cerisy-la-Salle for the very first time; the décade where
he would first use the term différance, while at the same time abandon-
ing his childhood name and presenting himself to the philosophical
 The Age of Autotheory 19

Fig. 1. Image of “Jackie” Derrida en voiture on the Rue Augustin, Algiers. Courtesy
of the Derrida Archives.

establishment as “Jacques” Derrida (Peeters 23). These biographical

moments of self-invention illustrate how Derrida, to use his own phrase,
lived his life en voiture (“by car”) even as he eagerly sought to take apart
the autos of Western metaphysics.7
An extant photograph of a young Derrida sitting in a toy car on the
Rue Augustin captures an early moment of automotive auto-biography.
Jackie and his toy car fill the frame, as the lower portion of an “adult”
car dwarfs them from behind. He sits, hands on the wheel but feet on
20 Ryan Tracy

the ground. His face is turned in three-quarter view toward the camera.
It is undecidable whether the toy car is about to drive Jackie off, or if
Jackie will have to use his own automotive force to get the race going.
This photo more or less frames Derrida and Bennington’s Jacques Der-
rida (1993)—it appears in the opening pages and on the back cover—
suggesting its importance in constructing the Derridean autobiography,
and perhaps in some way everyone’s autobiography, insofar as the autos
names any kind of self-construction that cannot do without an automo-
tive prosthesis in the world.8

Car Trouble
Gertrude Stein always says that she only has
two real distractions, pictures and automobiles.
Gertrude Stein

Automaticity and motor function were governing concepts in

Stein’s writing from the beginning of her career as a published writer.
In 1898, before she had published any of her creative writing, Stein
wrote the psychological study “Cultivated Motor Automatism: A Study
of Character In Its Relation to Attention.” The essay was the result
of experiments Stein conducted with Leon Solomons while studying
with William James at Harvard. Even though Stein’s association with
automatic writing would come to haunt her (she was at great pains
throughout her life to insist that she wrote “exactly” and with intention
(Everybody’s Autobiography 275), she nevertheless thought of her writ-
ing in relation to motor automation throughout her life.
Stein’s “autobiographies” offer ample evidence of her literary pre-
occupation—or “distraction”—with the automobile. In The Autobiog-
raphy, the first person narrator, Alice, recounts how Stein “was much
influenced by the sound of the streets and the movement of the automo-
biles” (206). Later, in Everybody’s Autobiography, Stein explicitly thinks
of her search for a “continuous presence” in her early writing as a kind
of automobile production: “In The Making of Americans I was making
a continuous present a continuous beginning again and again, the way
they do in making automobiles or anything, each one has to be begun”
(258). The automobile’s speed was also important to Stein in her early
writing career, and she looked to the automobile as a model for a mod-
ern rhythm of writing. It was to gain a greater literary speed that Stein
 The Age of Autotheory 21

attributed her decision to begin dropping commas and replacing nouns

with a more freeing regime of pronouns, while thinking of a literary
composition as “a whole made up of parts” (“How Writing Is Written”
490). Stein wanted her writing “to feel like movement,” a feeling she
associated with an increasingly automated twentieth century.
Importantly, the automobile physically reorganized Stein’s writing
practice and allowed her to literally write among the people. The Auto-
biography’s Alice recounts how, following a period of writer’s block after
World War I, Stein suddenly fell into a time of intense productivity and
would write everywhere she went, including in the Ford they owned.
“She was particularly fond in these days,” Alice recalls, “of working in
the automobile while it stood in the crowded streets” (206). Not only is
this image completely amazing—Stein in the middle of Paris, hunched
over a pile of papers in a Ford ambulance, writing while the “crowded
streets” swarm around her—it attests to the material role the automo-
bile played in her socially engaged practice of writing, where riding in
a car could lead to writing in a car. Stein’s professional career is thus
prosthetically linked to the career—or mobility—of the automobile.
Cars were an integral, material part not only of Stein’s writing
process, but also of her travels with Toklas across the United States
in 1934 on the tour that cemented Stein’s celebrity. These travels are
assiduously if elliptically recounted in Everybody’s Autobiography, begun
two years after their American tour, and published in 1937. Writing
now in “Everybody’s” voice, this periphrastic sequel offers a sustained
thinking of the autos, as Stein extends her play on autobiography in
reflections on race, art, politics, philosophy, identity—a subject that
preoccupied Stein in the years following the tour—and the pleasures
of driving automobiles. The auto-affect of the car, its ability to affect or
move itself, is reflected in the extensive citations from her own works,
such as The Making of Americans (1925) and The Geographical History
of America (1936). By circling back to her earlier works, Everybody’s
Autobiography puts back onto the page details of her life that she had
already published, including details about her childhood. Like, perhaps
any autobiography, Everybody’s Autobiography recapitulates, or begins
again, the difficult work of tarrying with one’s own childhood.
One such recapitulation is Stein’s account of surpassing her
brother, Leo Stein, as the “genius” of the family. Stein refers to herself
as a “lion,” a term often associated with the city of Detroit and used to
22 Ryan Tracy

describe entrepreneurial titans of the automobile industry like Henry

Ford. Stein grew up under the shadow of her older brother, noting how
she, as a young woman in a strictly patriarchal family, “had always been
following” Leo (78). But Everybody’s Autobiography presents itself as
Stein’s statement about the importance of authorizing herself to real-
ize her own genius. Stein had to overcome the presumption that, as a
man, “there was this thing”—genius—that “should have been in him”
but was actually in her (79). Stein had to claim her right to the autos;
to give herself permission to embody her own literary power—and to
profit from it. “I always do like to be a lion,” Stein confesses near the
very end of Everybody’s Autobiography, “I like it again and again, and
it is a peaceful thing to be one succeeding” (328). In her essay, “On
Confession,” Rita Felski notes the “fine line between self-affirmation
and self-preoccupation” that often imbues women’s autobiographical
writing (91). Following Felski, I insist that the seemingly narcissistic
aspects of Stein’s self-lionizing confession must be read in relation to
her feminism. Everybody’s Autobiography is a text that illuminates what
is at stake for women in a deconstructive politics of autobiography.
Stein’s account of “succeeding” her brother on the highway of genius
highlights the importance of holding on to the liberatory dimension of
the autos precisely in order to resist patriarchy.
Critics are correct, however, to challenge the putative universality
of Stein’s signature in Everybody’s Autobiography. If it at first appears
that Stein’s use of the indefinite possessive pronoun “Everybody’s” is lit-
tle more than an egotistical fantasy on Stein’s part, one that would seem
to reproduce a narcissistic self-return of everybody else’s autos; however,
I read the complexity of Stein’s autobiographical experiment in terms of
what Helga Lénárt-Cheng has called “the substitutability of the autobi-
ographical ‘I’” in Everybody’s Autobiography (286). Lénárt-Cheng reads
Stein’s use of indefinite pronouns as the means by which Stein performs
a quasi-neutralization of nouns in order to create a capacious autobi-
ographical signature. Such a signature would not necessarily speak for
or from the subject position of any particular person. Rather, in a way
that Lénárt-Cheng describes as “Derridean,” Stein self-consciously
deconstructs her own “autobiography,” and by extension the genre of
autobiography, in order to allow it to drift toward a potential inscription
of everybody’s autobiography (289).9 In other words, the universalizing
movement in Stein’s neutralization of pronouns puts the auto-immune
 The Age of Autotheory 23

resources of autobiography to use in order to create an autobiographical

signature that would be more hospitable to the possibility of a radical
ex-appropriation.10 If the autos, and by extension autobiography and
the automobile, possesses the tendency to circle back on itself while
directing violence outward, it can also learn how to be more hospitable,
more welcoming to the differences that conditions its very possibility.
Such an attitude would, in theory, reduce the violent desire of the autos
to efface the trace of the other.

Cut to the Beginning, or The Return of Jackie

I was driving in Paris near the Opéra and I discovered that other
rue Saint-Augustin, homonym of the one in Algiers where my
parents lived for 9 years after their marriage.
Jacques Derrida

In one of his earliest and most important texts, Of Grammatology

(1976), Derrida provocatively asks in passing: “How is a child in gen-
eral possible?” (146). In “Circumfession,” a more or less sixty year-old
Derrida seems to be asking the same question. Originally published in
1991 by Seuil in the “Les Contemporains” series, “Circumfession” (or
Circonfession) draws Derrida back to his childhood. Childhood was a
constant interest of Derrida’s throughout his career as a philosopher.11 In
texts like “The Age of Hegel” (2002), the interview “Bâtons Rompus”
(2009), and virtually anything he has written about Rousseau, Derrida
evoked childhood as a tool to deconstruct the presumed objectivity of
philosophy—always already understood as adult philosophy—includ-
ing his own. Derrida presents himself in “Circumfession” as subjected
to the lingering forces of his youth. “I am still so young,” he writes,
“I will always be too young for the contemporaries” (273, 170). Der-
rida here is likely referring to dismissals of his philosophical work as
non-serious, self-indulgent, childish sophism. But this self-deprecatory
assessment also suggests that his childhood threatens to overrun the life
of the “Jacques” who had presumably left little “Jackie” in the dust; a
deconstructive approach to the question of boyhood that is echoed in
Gertrude Stein’s prescient interrogation of the patriarchal demand that
boys become men—“what is the use of being a little boy,” Stein asks, “if
you are going to grow up to be a man. Well some do and some do not”
(Everybody’s Autobiography 300; cf. Geological History of America 370).
24 Ryan Tracy

Begun just before Derrida’s fifty-ninth birthday,“Circumfession”—a

portmanteau of circumcision and confession—is comprised of fifty-nine
run-on sentences, or “periods and periphrases.” In its published format,
it scrolls underneath Geoffrey Bennington’s “Derridabase,” an extended
explication of Derrida’s philosophical and literary project. Together,
they form the volume Jacques Derrida (1993), a text that attempts to
push the problem of citation and quotation to the limit. Bennington
wrote “Derridabase”—in which he never directly quotes from any of
Derrida’s texts—before Derrida wrote “Circumfession.” In this way,
Derrida’s essay temporally exceeds Bennington’s “theological program”
(theologiciel) by trying to outpace or run beyond the closure of Benning-
ton’s extended gloss, which attempts to govern Derrida’s autobiograph-
ical confession—like God—from above.12 This textual dynamic stages
the scene of St. Augustine’s theological question regarding confession:
“Cur confitemur Deo scienti,” or, “why we confess to God, when he
knows (everything about us)” (3–9).
In “Circumfession,” Derrida dwells on his own vexed relationship
with Jewish identity through an extended deconstruction of the figure
of circumcision, folding circumcision back into some of his earliest phil-
osophical concerns. “Circumcision,” Derrida writes, “that’s all I’ve ever
talked about” (70). By making this claim, Derrida suggests that we can
read “circumcision” as a deconstructive figure of the autos; a self-encir-
cling cut that individuates the subject while, paradoxically, binding or
joining the self to the other or others. Derrida emphasizes the Heideg-
gerian singularity that circumcision grants the circumcised: “A circum-
cision is my size, it takes my body, it turns round me to envelop me in
its blade stroke” (242); “it only happens to me” (305). Circumcision,
Derrida seems to say, is in each case mine.13
Periphrase connotes an uninterrupted sentence that circuitously
surpasses or overruns the subject it attempts to describe (Schumm 734).
The periphrases of “Circumfession,” written between November 29,
1988 and May 1, 1991, circle around the looming death of Derrida’s
mother, Georgette Sultana Esther Safar. Derrida turns to automotive
terminology to represent the race-like structure that mortality imbues
in life and in writing. He describes not being able to anticipate who will
die first—his mother or himself—as a “race against death,” a race that
will only be decided by death (112). “I am waiting for the interruption,”
Derrida writes, “of a race against time between writing and her life,
 The Age of Autotheory 25

hers, hers, hers alone” (165). Every sentence, in this sense, can only be
read or written on the condition that it be a death sentence; a sentence
suspended between life and death, racing blindly toward a concluding
punctuation. Death will surprise the death sentence with the force of its
own authority, like a car that is suddenly shocked by the mistiming of its
own internal combustion engine: “if something should happen, nothing
is less certain, it must be unpredictable, the salvation of a backfire” (31).
Like Stein in Everybody’s Autobiography, Derrida cites his own writ-
ing throughout “Circumfession.” He makes reference to Spurs, Glas,
The Post Card (written “PC” in the essay, and playing on the initials
for “Personal Computer,” or the “theological” computer program that
Bennington writes from above), while also alluding to a text that would
eventually become another of Derrida’s explicitly autobiographical
works, “A Silkworm of One’s Own” (84).14 Derrida self-quotes most
extensively, however, from manuscript notebooks that he kept in prepa-
ration for a work on circumcision that he never completed. Begun in
1976, not long after the death of his father, the work was to be called
Elie. Elie is a francophonic and diminutive form of Eliahou (or Elijah),
the Jewish prophet who, according to Hebrew tradition, presides over
the ceremony of circumcision. Derrida received the name Elie, after
one of his uncles, but it was kept secret from him for many years. The
Elie notebooks serve as a major auto-referential intertext in “Circum-
fession” while also demonstrating how even a self-citation will have
had to circuit itself through difference insofar as the self that writes
or speaks is always different from itself. Self-referential autobiography
would still follow this general law of the non-self-sameness of any autos.
Autobiography, to use Stein’s words, “is never yourself” (Everybody’s
Autobiography 70).
Composed of quotations from his own texts as well as from St.
Augustine’s Confessions, the periphrases of “Circumfession” are thus
self-interrupting, polyvocal, and internally divided—like, perhaps, an
automobile that is a whole made up of both domestic and foreign parts.
Noting Derrida’s strategy of self-and-other quoting, Johanna Schumm
interprets Derrida’s project in “Circumfession” as a “quoting confession”
(742), or, a “conjunction of autobiography and heterobiography” (752)
that highlights the “impossibility” of an autobiography that would pro-
ceed from itself prior to any reference to alterity (730). Derrida’s “quot-
ing confession” attempts to exploit the referential rift within the autos,
26 Ryan Tracy

embracing the self-infecting force of its own signature. It is this aspect

of “Circumfession” that threatens to convert every self-reference into
an other reference, thereby undermining Derrida’s attempt to authori-
tatively sign his own text.
It is in the fifty-ninth and last periphrase of “Circumfession,” at
the very end of this self-and-other citing text, where Derrida quotes
from Gertrude Stein’s Everybody’s Autobiography. After imagining the
next time he would see his mother, whose life remains in the balance
even as “Circumfession” speeds toward a finish line, Derrida reflects on
the force of “the ‘present’” and the way his own writing troubles Ben-
nington’s attempt to summarize in advance everything that Derrida will
have ever written. This reflection on the “present” plunges rather sud-
denly into a quotation of Stein:

it’s enough to recount the “present” to throw G.’s theological

program off course, by the very present you are marking him,
Everybody’s Autobiography, yours which tells you so well that
there is no thinking that one was never born until you hear acciden-
tally that there were to be five children and if two little ones had not
died there would be no G.S. [ . . . ] (311–12)15

This passage pivots on a remarkable personal coincidence between

Stein and Derrida. Both were one of five siblings, and both lost two
siblings to early death when they were young. 16 In this virtually unfore-
seeable moment, Derrida countersigns Stein’s attempt to write her
own autobiography as everyone’s autobiography. By doing so, Derrida
confirms Stein’s desire to write everybody’s autobiography, but at the
risk of opening his own autobiographical signature to a radical counter
re-appropriation.
It feels important, here, to note that Stein’s literary imprint is
present and can be felt in a number of ways in “Circumfession.” Its
experimental form, its division into run-on sentences (a texture
explicit in much of Stein’s writing), and the aphoristic quality of Der-
rida’s periphrases, as well as the citations that are grafted into them,
all bear the marks of Stein’s highly influential modernism.17 Derrida
also expresses something like a desire for a continuous present, or a
“continuum” of experience when he evokes the phantom of “a writ-
ing without interruption” (201). As the 59th, and last, periphrase runs
its course, the sentence veers toward a series of present participles,
 The Age of Autotheory 27

or sematic units that represent the “continuous present” that was so

important to Stein:

too late, you are less, you, less than yourself, you have spent
your life inviting calling promising, hoping sighing dreaming,
convoking invoking provoking, constituting engendering pro-
ducing, naming assigning demanding, prescribing command-
ing sacrificing [ . . . ] (314)

Addressing himself in an ambiguous second person voice, Derrida draws

an autobiographical portrait of an autos as a “continuous present” that
is deprived of the present at every passing moment, while allowing the
mode of address to swerve between self and other.
Derrida’s citation of Stein illuminates how he and Stein shared a
certain relation to “lost generations”; not only because of their status
among absent siblings, but because of their skeptical attitudes toward
Jewish heritage. Throughout “Circumfession,” Derrida refers to himself
ironically as “the last of the Jews” because he refused to circumcise his
sons, thus effectively severing his sons from Jewish community by, par-
adoxically, not severing part of their bodies (154, 190). This lostness
translates, for Derrida, as a kind of “being lost in perdition” in relation
to Jewish identity and culture (132). For her part, Stein was not devout,
but she nevertheless made moves, at certain moments in her career, to
affirm the necessity and appeal of Jewish particularity. In an essay she
wrote during her college years at Radcliffe, “The Modern Jew Who Has
Given up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently
Believe in Isolation” (1896), Stein offers a complex defense of secular
Jewishness. A copy of this essay exists in Derrida’s library at Princeton,
and he appears to have read it. I thus want to suggest that both Stein
and Derrida were Jewish writers who had in certain ways “given up the
faith” of their fathers while “reasonably” expecting to be isolated for
their experimental approaches to literature and philosophy.
Derrida’s citation of Stein in “Circumfession” flows into a brief
narrative account of a student who approached Derrida after he had
given a lecture at UCLA on the Nazi’s “Final Solution.” The student, or
“imbecile” as Derrida uncharitably refers to him, not quite realizing that
Derrida was Jewish, confronts Derrida and asks him, presumably in bad
faith, what he had “done to save Jews during the war” (312). Though
Derrida informs the student of his Jewish identity, this encounter leads
28 Ryan Tracy

Derrida to reflect on the guilt he feels about being more or less in the
closet about his Jewishness:

it recalls the fact that people might not know it still, whence
this announcement of circumcision, perhaps you didn’t do
enough to save Jews, he might be right, you always think the
other is right, at the beginning or the end of the book, perhaps
you didn’t do enough, not enough to save yourself first of all,
from the others or again from the Jews [ . . . ] (312)

“Circumfession,” “this announcement of circumcision,” performatively

outs Derrida as Jewish in his philosophical practice. And while he does
not seem to seek expiation, here, he does assume a kind of depressive
positionality in relation to the complex experience of being persecuted
for being Jewish while, at the same time, being skeptical of Jewish com-
munity.18 It is at this point that Derrida’s text begins to threaten Stein’s
with a parasitic ventriloquism.
Critics have cast scrutiny upon Stein’s general reluctance to address
her own Jewish identity in her work, as well as her vocal support of her
friend, Bernard Faÿ, who was an avowed anti-Semite, a Vichy collabo-
rator, and who encouraged Stein to translate the speeches of the Vichy
leader, Philippe Pétain, whose government oversaw the 1940 repeal of
the Crémieux Decree, thus stripping Algerian Jews of their citizenship
and leading to the expulsion of Jackie Derrida from his French lycée
in El-Biar.19 By any reasonable measure, Stein’s few gestures to assert
Jewish particularity do not seem to balance these worrisome biograph-
ical facts.20 Nor are they likely to assuage the censure of today’s critics
looking for at least one moment of self-criticism from Stein. Never-
theless, reading back through Derrida’s confession in “Circumfession,”
the voice of Derrida’s second-person remonstrations—“perhaps you
didn’t do enough to save Jews”—following so closely after his cita-
tion of Stein, seems to quaver between Derrida’s and Stein’s. Via the
rhetorical maneuver of a parasitizing prosopopoeia, Derrida seems to
make space for Stein to offer a confession of her own. It was “G.S.,”
perhaps, who didn’t do enough to save Jews. In this way, Derrida’s
autobiographical appropriation of Stein comes to the aid of Stein’s
autobiographical signature by helping Stein make a confession she
may never have been able to make.
 The Age of Autotheory 29

Everybody’s Auto Body

To conclude this essay, I want to think of this double-infection of
the autobiographical signature in relation to the automobile and the aid
work that Gertrude Stein and Alice B. Toklas did during World War I.
It was the sight of a Ford ambulance belonging to the “American Fund
for French Wounded” that inspired Stein to learn how to drive, and to
order her own Ford ambulance so that she and Alice could volunteer.
Their service allowed them to travel around with young doughboys,
whom they called “god-sons.” One of these god-sons, William Rog-
ers, later became the manager of Stein and Toklas’s travels around the
United States, where Stein and Toklas met Charlie Chaplin, the film
auteur who made The Kid.21
In both of her “autobiographies,” Stein refers to William (or W.A.)
Rogers as “The Kiddie,” that is, “the one we knew in Nîmes who was in
the ambulance and was the first American uniform we had with us in
our automobile” (Everybody’s Autobiography 131–32). After World War
I, “The Kiddie” went back to America and more or less disappeared
from their lives until 1934, when Four Saints in Three Acts was premier-
ing in Hartford, Connecticut. Rogers re-established contact after seeing
the production.
In a photograph taken in 1917, Stein is seated behind the wheel
of their two-cylinder Ford ambulance. Alice stands plainly beside “The
Auntie,” while a mustachioed man photobombs the scene, his face
peering through the pane of windshield glass. In the photograph, Stein
is wearing gloves and a heavy winter coat, and can be seen grinning
between the wrap of a thick scarf and a hat. Alice stands in front of sev-
eral wooden crates, which were likely used to transport important goods
and equipment. Like the photograph of Jackie Derrida, which is taken
from a similar angle, an undecidability obtains between the author and
the automobile; where the force of the autos is distributed between car
and driver. I read this image as a reflection of the complicated aid-work,
or the rehabilitation, that Stein performs on the autos, asserting her
right, as a woman, to take a turn in the driver’s seat while nevertheless
aiding the deconstruction of her own autobiographical authority.
To return to Derrida’s quotation of Stein, “G.S.” does complex
work. While “G.S.” stands for Gertrude Stein’s proper name, “G.’s”
occurs—only in the English translation—just before the citation from
30 Ryan Tracy

Fig. 2. Alice B. Toklas and Gertrude Stein with the “Auntie” in 1917. Courtesy the
Stein Estate.

Everybody’s Autobiography, and represents the possessive formation of

Geoffrey Bennington’s first initial—G—in “G’s theological program”.
In French, this passage is written “il suffit de raconter le ‘présent’ pour
dérouter le théologiciel de G,” with the preposition “de” marking
the possessive relation (Derrida, “Circonfession” 288). Thus, it is the
English translation that brings out the added visual pun between “G.
S.” and “G’s.” G. and S. also play on the first two initials of the name of
Derrida’s mother—Georgette Sultana, whose life and death, one might
say, looms over the text of “Circumfession.”
While the substitution of initials for proper names is a common
convention in autobiographical and epistolary writing, I would like to
speculate on Derrida’s decision to depersonalize his addressee’s name
in “Circumfession” in a way that resonates with Stein’s depersonalized
autobiographical writing through the use of indefinite pronouns. The
letter G is itself of autobiographical importance to Derrida. Elsewhere,
Derrida will link an array of associations to this letter, including the
G or jet (pronounced (d)ʒā in French) of jetée (or the “being thrown”
 The Age of Autotheory 31

of Dasein), the Gs of Glas (Genet and Hegel), and the four Gs that
Derrida derives from the writings of Hélène Cixous in Genesis, Gene-
alogies, Genres, Genius. The G, then, cuts a number of autobiograph-
ical paths through Derrida’s corpus, threatening to overrun his entire
auto-theoretical discourse.22 And yet, it bears noting that the G graph-
eme was already introduced by Stein in the autobiography that Derrida
cites as his “own” in the fifty-ninth periphrase of “Circumfession.” In
accounting for the origin of her own name, Stein writes in Everybody’s
Autobiography:

Then when any of us were named we were named after some

one who is already dead, after all if they are living the name
belongs to them so any one can be named after a dead one,
so there was a grandmother she was dead and her name not an
easy one began with G so my mother preferred it should be an
easy one so they named me Gertrude Stein. All right that is my
name. (119; emphasis mine)

I am not claiming to know that Stein’s G is the source of Derrida’s Gs

in “Circumfession.” But there is perhaps here a moment when Derri-
da’s attempt to parasitically graft Stein’s autobiography into his own
inverts, in auto-immune fashion, and re-writes “Circumfession” as a
text in which the G presiding over Derrida’s text might be Gertrude,
the God-mother of us all, G(ertrude) S(tein), G.S., supplanting Geoff
and Georgette, parasitical author of G.’s theological program. This ret-
roviral re-programming of “Circumfession” in turn recasts Jackie “The
Kid” as another G.S., or “g-s”—one of the many lost GI “god-sons” or
kiddies that Stein and Toklas picked up while driving en voiture around
France in an ambulance named after an aunt “who always behaved
admirably in emergencies” (The Autobiography 172). Derrida’s citation
of Stein exposes his text to this retroviral emergency.
I justify my use of “retrovirus” by way of Derrida’s own reflections
on AIDS and the supplementary structure of the pharmakon in “Cir-
cumfession” and elsewhere. When Derrida declares in “Circumfession”
that “the virus will have been the only object of my work” (92), he
invites a reading of his deconstructive (auto)theory as “a theory of the
parasite virus, of the inside/outside, of the impeccable pharmakos, ter-
rorizing the others through the instability [it] carries everywhere, one
32 Ryan Tracy

book open in another” (308).23 In The Animal That Therefore I Am, the
text in which Derrida refers to Stein as an “autobiographical animal,”
Derrida again draws a portrait of the structural undecidability of autobi-
ography in epidemiological terms:

Autobiography, the writing of the self as living, .  .  . the

auto-affection or auto-infection as memory or archive of the
living, would be . . . an immunizing movement that is always
threatened with becoming auto-immunizing, like every autos,
every ipseity, every automatic, automobile, autonomous, auto-­
referential movement. Nothing risks becoming more poison-
ous than an autobiography, poisonous for oneself in the first
place, auto-infection for the presumed signatory who is so
auto-­affected. (45)

While Derrida is aware of this “risk,” and while he attempts to embrace it

in “Circumfession,” his counter-signature of Stein nevertheless remains
susceptible to a re-appropriation that Derrida cannot foresee. It is as if
Derrida’s text is caught off guard by the risk of auto-immune backfire
inherent in “every autos.” In other words, by autobiographically citing
Stein, Derrida’s Gs suddenly risk an auto-immune, retroactive re-appro-
priation by the very text his signature attempts to appropriate.
This autobiographical double-infection confuses the timeline that
runs between the autos and any other autos, troubling the chronolog-
ical borders that determine which text comes first: Gertrude Stein’s
Everybody’s Autobiography, which casts itself forward toward a salutary
re-appropriation by anybody, or Derrida’s “Circumfession,” which takes
the bait, re-writing Stein’s autobiography as his own while exposing
his signature to the retroviral infection of Stein’s G? When will this
auto-allo-biographical grand prix end? What kind of autos could even
win such a race? Conversely, will there have ever been a time in which
theory, any theory, could outrun its own prosthetic dependence on the
autos; on some force or “I can” needed to press the “self-starter” in an
autocratic desire to move itself through the world? If we accept that any
theory is in some sense autotheory, then perhaps, as Derrida will have
said of the virus—autotheory has no age.

The Graduate Center of the City University of New York

 The Age of Autotheory 33

Notes
  1.  This essay contributes to scholarship that reads Stein as a literary and
intellectual figure who, though the oracle of high modernism, anticipated many
of post-modernism’s major conceptual and literary moves (cf. Conrad; DeKoven;
Stein and Feinstein). It also attempts to shift—into reverse—the common ten-
dency to situate Derrida as a post-modernist, by depicting him as a self-conscious
inheritor and practitioner of a modernist aestheticism that is traceable to Stein’s
influence.
  2.  Annotated copies of Everybody’s Autobiography (Box B-000170, Folder 8)
and How to Write (Box B-000224, Folder 4) can be found in Derrida’s library now
held at Princeton University. The latter includes Derrida’s copy of Amy Feinstein’s
edited transcription of Stein’s early essay, “The Modern Jew Who Has Given Up
the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably Believe in Isolation,” published in PMLA
in 2001. In her introductory comments, Feinstein uses the phrase “deconstructive
literary practices” to describe Stein’s experimental writing, which some critics
interpreted as a smokescreen for a reactionary politics. Derrida appears to have
circled the word “deconstructive.”
  3.  See Bryce Conrad; Marianne DeKoven; Craig Monk; Joan Retallack
  4.  Originally written in the Elie notebooks, Derrida’s allusion to “the story
about the white taleth (to be told elsewhere)” (84) in “Circumfession” joins these texts
to “A Silkworm of One’s Own,” where Derrida discusses the white taleth given to
him by his grandfather. The self-references to “A Silkworm of One’s Own” in The
Animal That Therefore I Am and Rogues thus link Derrida’s later thought on autobi-
ography, the animal, and sovereignty back through these early notebooks.
  5.  In the United States, “auto body” refers to roadside car maintenance facil-
ities, or “shops,” as well as both the main or load-bearing part of a vehicle and the
enclosed part of the vehicle.
  6.  Citroën was founded by André-Gustave Citroën, a Jewish entrepreneur.
Unlike most of the automotive companies in the France (not to mention the West),
Citroën resisted the Nazi occupation (Parissien).
  7.  In his introductory comments to the biographical timeline that appears
near the end of Jacques Derrida, Geoffrey Bennington broaches the wordplay
between the CV of curriculum vitae and the CV (or cheval-vapeur, the French equiv-
alent of “horsepower”) of the automobile: “In Curriculum vitae, I also hear the ironic
allusion to the passage of a mobile, to the ‘academic’ character of a professional
‘career’ (J.D.’s having been that of a homo academicus, certainly, and through and
through, but so unacademic too)” (321). It is worth noting that Gertrude Stein’s
career was mobilized in part by her own CV, or “CVV,” Carl Van Vechten, who was
one of Stein’s most important patrons.
  8.  For an extended analysis of the imagery in Jacques Derrida, see Thomas
Dutoit. For more on the autos and prostheticity, see Naas (83–103).
34 Ryan Tracy

  9.  From a different perspective, Sidonie Smith has argued that Stein’s autho-
rial ventriloquism in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas undermines the presumed
authority of the autobiographical act.
10.  From the 1990s onward, Derrida increasingly relied on the term “auto-­
immunity” to mark the re-inscription of an autos that affirms the traces of its expo-
sure to exteriority and its necessary, prosthetic circuit through the world. For more
on Derrida’s different uses of auto-immunity, see Erin Obodiac, Elina Staiku, and
Eszter Tímar.
11.  See Jarrod Hayes.
12.  See Peeters and also Johanna Schumm.
13.  I am paraphrasing Heidegger’s contention in Being and Time that “Dasein
is in each case mine” (112).
14.  Derrida’s allusion to Virginia Woolf—one of many throughout his body of
writing—offers more evidence of Derrida’s lifelong if ultimately marginal preoccu-
pation with women’s literary modernism.
15.  Note: This is not an exact quotation since Stein does not abbreviate her
name—“G.S.”—but writes it out, “Gertrude Stein” (EA 118).
16.  Derrida was born one year after the death of Paul Moïse, who would have
been his second older brother. Then his younger brother, Norbert Pinhas, died
when Derrida was ten years old (Peeters 51–52).
17.  Derrida would certainly have identified with Stein’s penchant for apho-
rism. See his essay “Aphorism Countertime” (1992).
18. For more on Derrida’s vexed relationship with community and group
belonging, see Peeters.
19.  For more on the repeal of the Crémieux Decree, see Peeters 17. For critical
debates about Stein’s politics and her relationship with Barnard Faÿ, see Stein and
Feinstein, Emily Greenhouse, Retallack, and Renate Stendhal.
20. I’m thinking, here, of Stein’s early essay, “The Modern Jew Who Has
Given up the Faith of His Fathers Can Reasonably and Consistently Believe in
Isolation” (1896), as well as a moment in Everybody’s Autobiography where Stein,
perhaps not unproblematically, equates Jewish and “Negro” identity. While I do not
have the means to fully explicate and evaluate this passage in this essay, it suffices to
note that Stein affirms Jewish particularity by arguing that “Jew,” like “Negro,” is a
“nice strong solid” name, and should therefore be kept in use (206).
21.  See Conrad and also Monk.
22.  One could perhaps write endlessly on all the Gs in the Derridean “auto
body”; gramma, grammatology, Gayatri, Genet, Geoffrey, Georgette, Algeria,
 The Age of Autotheory 35

Ponge, margin. G is also the seventh letter of the Latin alphabet. Derrida often
played on the number seven in the pun “j’accept”, or “Jacques sept,” as there are
seven letters in “Jacques”.
23.  See also the interview “The Rhetoric of Drugs” (1995).

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