ABSTRACT
The phrase – You have to write your own life – was originally used by Hans Jaeger, the founder of the Norwegian fin-de-siècle bohemian community, as the first of the nine “anti-laws” devised to subvert the rules of the nineteenth-century bourgeois society. I would like to focus on its slogan-like power and show how modernity enlists literature as an instrument of individuation which resists the societal law and order. The storytelling canvas of modern literature fulfills thus a function which Victor Turner calls liminoid: the permanent borderline which, in modern times, moves from the fringe to the very center, occupied by an anomian individual, evading simple attribution to a generic social role. I attempt to build a political philosophy of literary narrative as a “piece of resistance” of modern democracy: a liminoid, antinomian, and agonistic practice, necessary for the maintenance of a healthy democratic life. I also refer to Walter Benjamin, for whom the very act of storytelling was antinomian in the subtle sense of opposing the generality of the law, as well as to Jacques Derrida and his concept of the individual as an “autobiographical animal.”
