The Autobiographical Pack

This paper seeks to revisit and revise the autobiographical pact in light of current work done on companion species, especially dogs, by emphasizing that Donna Haraway’s foregrounding of becoming together and the importance of touch troubles Philippe Lejeune’s foundational concept. Lejeune postulates that the autobiographical pact presupposes that the name on the title page of a text matches the name of the author and, in so doing, assumes that the text is written and that the author is singularly constituted and human. But the co-constituting of canines and human beings as companion species call for a different theoretical approach to life narrative that will embody how co-constituting serves to get and have a life lived mutually as well as one which deemphasizes seeing in favor of the communicative touch that is central to the bond dogs and humans enjoy. The messiness of daily, tactile co-constituting challenges the distanced, looking at texts in ways that favors foregrounding mutual exchange via the touching of bodies, including their emissions, and zoe, the smallest form of life often considered as below the threshold of livable existence. To get at companion species co-constituting, I purpose that we revision and revisit the archives of our daily lives with companion species to think about how touch and the exchange of zoe between and among species necessitate a rewriting of touchstone life experiences, such as birth or death, and the narratives within which we have traditionally encased them. To do so would challenge the stranglehold of the visual on autobiographical theory and practice but it would also mean a reconceptualizing of theoretical constructs such as Lejeune’s autobiographical pact, which presupposes an easily negotiated correspondence among reader, author, and publisher with the reader’s experience paramount. However, the theory of the autobiographical pack displaces the reader in favor of co-constituting so that the reader must renegotiate his relationship to the pack.