Avskapelsens estetik. Om representationskritikens förhandlingar i Lars Noréns En dramatikers dagbok

While Lars Norén’s confrontational and self-exposing En dramatikers dagbok (A Dramatist’s Journal, 2008) already has spurred discussions on the nature of confession in today’s mediatised literary public sphere, less has been said about the aesthetic project of the journal. By tracing this project back to Norén’s poetry of the 1960s as well as by comparing it to works by Lyn Hejinian and Kenneth Goldsmith, a continual dialectic between subjectivity and textuality is outlined. Drawing upon Hal Foster’s ideas on ‘the return of the real’ as well as on Simone Weil’s notion of ‘detatchment’, the article consequently argues that the diary’s subject is aestheticized to the point of negation by means of a performative process simultaneously rendering it anew in the realm of public debate.