VON DER AUFLÖSUNG DER PERSON: DAS SELTSAME PROBLEM DER PERSONALEN IDENTITÄT IN NEUEREN DEUTSCHSPRACHIGEN AUTOPATHOGRAPHIEN

Texts from the field of autopathography are close to the professional discourse of the medical sciences and offer alternative ways of conceptualizing and thinking about illness. The recent autopathographic works that are analysed in this article describe illnesses that are no longer evaluated as consequences of social developments, as was usually the case in the “new interiority”; rather, pathologies are interpreted as part of an individual life. Since the associated experiences and the consequences of the disease are serious for the individual life, the question of personal identity is often raised. The question of self is always relevant when people who express this question do not know or no longer know who they are (or have become), or when they no longer have a sense of unity. This concerns not only external orders (i.e. uprooting of any kind), but also internal disruption. These insecurities are thus the trigger for questions about identity that are posed in the analysed texts.