Life as a Retort – Considerations on Autobiography in O insistente inacabado, by Luiz Costa Lima

Abstract

In his book O insistente inacabado (2019), Luiz Costa Lima recurrently elaborates on the relations between biography and theory when dealing with the establishment of a Science of History in the 18th and 19th centuries. In this book’s chapter on autobiography, besides the writing of a life, Costa Lima approaches the biographical contingencies that interfere and give contour to that genre and its construction strategies. This article intends to distinguisch two sustaining elements in the writings of the biographer and of the autobiographer, both pervade by res fictae and by res factae: “bio”, corresponding to what has been lived, and “life”, corresponding to what can be experienced.