Making the Self Visible: the Shades between Autobiography and Autoportrait

Abstract This study investigates self-reflective visibility through the intersections of autobiography and autoportrait, in which the self becomes visible in the registers of these two forms. It will take two assumptions as a point of departure: (i) the phenomenological interpretation of appearances and visibility is distinguished from seeing through representations or copies, and instead regarded as self-manifestations, (ii) accordingly, appearances transgress the limits of thinking determined by a strict distinction between the intelligible and sensible. John Sallis’s interpretations of the visibility of work of art, and particularly his writings on Klee exhibit that words and images can build an “arch” that enhances the visibility of each other. It will be argued that this perspective on artistic visibility allows us to examine the visibility of the self in both artistic transposition and transfiguration. To this end, these two forms of self-manifestation and their temporal difference will be examined and exemplified through autobiographical autoportraits of Klee and Cau Jun. This framework reveals how the self sees itself through a self-reflective act of seeing on paper or a canvas, and how the differences in each encounter with the self form an openness to seeing itself anew in the shades between visibility and invisibility.