Abstract
This essay aims at situating the practice of the personal diary in the context of the writings of the self and of intimacy, stressing its character as an ethical exercise in which the subjectivity submits to the transforming experience of its own unknown. From such situating, differences among the writing of the diary and the writing of other autobiographical genres are identified, following the way each one registers and presents the discontinuous and impersonal process of living. In a second moment, the essay focuses on the concept of diary of writer in order to consider its thematic, rhetoric, existential, and ethical particularities from the convergence of three registers: literature, life, and literary life. The diaries of writers explore the conditions of (im)possibility of the meeting between annotation and life, and reflectively exhibit a knowledge about the ties between writing and experience, through digressions on the meaning and the functions of writing a diary when one also writes literature.
Keywords:
Diary of writer; literature and life; literature and intimacy; writings of the self