The Autographic Gesture: Concluding Remarks
摘要
This concluding chapter summarises the book’s exploration of the selfhood shaped in autobiographical graphic narratives, or autographics. To do so, the chapter generates a dialogue between, on the one hand, the main arguments presented in the book, and various autobiographical comics created by Dutch underground cartoonist Peter Pontiac on the other. Pontiac’s comics, the chapter argues, indicate that an autographic form of selfhood can only emerge when the logics of trace, figure, and narrative are knotted together through what this book defines as the autographic gesture. This gesture refers to (1) the leaving of traces as an embodied self, which (2) transform into a drawn figure that represents this self and acquires a certain autonomy as a character, and which (3) are embedded in a narrative that tells all or part of this self’s life story. The chapter concludes with a reading of autographic self-constitution in the sixth volume of Sattouf’s The Arab of the Future.