Ayreen Anastas,

Ayreen Anastas abandons the exhausting pursuit of an old piece of herself, she does not try to “restore” herself (as one would say of a monument). She does not say: “I am going to describe myself” but: “I am writing a text, and I call it my short biography.” She shifts from imitation (from description) and entrusts herself to nomination. Does she not know that, in the field of the subject, there is no referent? The fact (whether biographical or textual) is abolished at the same moment it is written, because it immediately coincides with it. “Writing oneself” as one’s own symbol, she is the story which happens to her:  freewheeling in language, she has nothing to compare herself to; and in this movement the pronoun of the imaginary “I” or “she” is impertinent; essential danger for the life of the subject: to write on oneself may seem a pretentious idea; but it is also a simple idea: simple as the idea of suicide.