Page 307 - Contribution To Phenomenology

300 MANO DANIEL

circumvent these difficulties. Biographies, as the product of the biographi-
cal process, also function as cultural objects. In the second section, I
canvass a number of different accounts where biographies as cultural
objects have been harnessed for methodological, heuristic, practical and
political purposes. The link between the two parts is the claim that the
practice of biography serves as a nexus of techniques aimed at the
explication of the biographee as object, and, by understanding the context
and circumstances that have led to the adoption of these techniques, we
will be in a better position not only to provide a robust theoretical
foundation for the practice, but also to appreciate the role of biography
in the exploration and study of aspects of culture in general.
This essay is propaedeutic and hence necessarily suggestive, explorative
and tentative. My aim is less to forward a theory of biography than to
focus attention on the central yet polymorphous deployment of biography
and to suggest that it should be considered a discipline in its own right
by advocating the advent of a philosophy of biography devoted to such
an inquiry. (Of course, to write biography does not require a philosophy
of biography, although philosophy is indispensable for producing a philos-
ophy of biography.)

I. Reflecting on the Practice of Biography

A biography, typically, is a presentation in words of a specific life—the
"life of one individual who actually existed at a historically delineated
moment in time.*'^ As James Clifford puts it "biography contracts to
deliver a self."* There are, of course, many kinds of biographies; for
example, literary biographies (i.e., biographies of writers), cliobiographies
(i.e., biographies of historians), political biographies, religious biographies,
etc. Traditionally, biographies were written about exceptional individuals
drawn from the upper strata or mainstream of society. This was especially
true of Victorian biographers that for the most part picked their subjects
because of the latter's pubUc benefaction or excellence. This motive

^ Michael Scriven, "Sartre on Flaubert: Problems of Biography." Degre Second-
2 (1978), 217. In order to distinguish biography from autobiography, it is further
necessary to specify that the biography be written by an individual who is not the
main subject of the biography.
* James Clifford, "Hang Up Looking Glasses at Odd Corners: Ethnobiograph-
ical Prospects," in Studies in Biography, edited by Daniel Aaron (Cambridge, M.A.:
Harvard University Press, 1978), 44.