Autobituary: the Life and/as Death of David Bowie & the Specters from Mourning

Abstract

This article addresses the uncanny fascination for specters that long haunted David Bowie’s artistry. Following the hauntological work of Jacques Derrida and a few of his followers, I consider the ways in which the late Bowie came to haunt the late Bowie, how mortality and mourning condition his final output, especially on Blackstar, his last album. In tracing these ghostly traces, I show how his music and videography pursue an alternative form of composition beyond the conventional attempts toward narrative closure of autobiography, a form of spectral rhetoric that I outline as autobituary. Through practices of writing attuned to the mournful structure that conditions signification, Bowie responds to Derrida’s and Michelle Ballif’s call to find ways of ethically addressing the (dead) other’s absolute alterity. In the form of autobituary, I suggest that Bowie provides one avenue for reconceiving the conventional relation between life and death, self and other, addressor and addressee.

Keywords

• autobiography
• hauntology
• rhetoric
• mourning
• address