Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Being Contemporary, Then and Now
- I Conceptualizing the Contemporary
- II Contemporary Politics and French Thought
- III The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives
- IV Writing the Contemporary Self
- 13 ‘I’ in the Plural: A New Writing of History
- 14 Selves at Risk: Reading Susan Suleiman with Marc Augé, La Vie en double
- 15 Risking Who One Is, at the Risk of Thinking: On Writing an Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva
- 16 ‘La Connaissance par corps’: Writing and Self-Exposure in Annie Ernaux
- V Novel Rereadings
- VI Memory: Past and Future
- Contributors
- Index
15 - Risking Who One Is, at the Risk of Thinking: On Writing an Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva
from IV - Writing the Contemporary Self
- Frontmatter
- Dedication
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction: Being Contemporary, Then and Now
- I Conceptualizing the Contemporary
- II Contemporary Politics and French Thought
- III The Second World War and Vichy: Present Perspectives
- IV Writing the Contemporary Self
- 13 ‘I’ in the Plural: A New Writing of History
- 14 Selves at Risk: Reading Susan Suleiman with Marc Augé, La Vie en double
- 15 Risking Who One Is, at the Risk of Thinking: On Writing an Intellectual Biography of Julia Kristeva
- 16 ‘La Connaissance par corps’: Writing and Self-Exposure in Annie Ernaux
- V Novel Rereadings
- VI Memory: Past and Future
- Contributors
- Index
Summary
[Strong autobiographical reading] is done by anyone who reads his or her contemporaries for the sake of self-recognition, an expanded historical awareness, and a sense of at least potential collective action.
Susan Suleiman, Risking Who One IsWhether one is talking about institutional identity politics or wider geopolitical crises, the question of how to ‘be contemporary,’ how to be an intellectual subject with one's contemporaries, involves taking risk. In Susan Suleiman's book whose title is included in my own title here—Risking Who One Is— she discusses in particular the problem of modernist and postmodernist views of subjectivity in relationship to historical events, their representations, and the actions (or lack thereof) of artists and intellectuals. She worries especially about the relationship between those of us who work with words and those who work with ‘rough reality’:
But that introduces (or brings us back to) the old, vexed question of the relation between action and theory: can the discourse of intellectuals, whether modernist or postmodernist or other, have any effect on ‘rough reality’? And what, in particular, can intellectual discourse accomplish once the shooting starts?
Suleiman asks how intellectuals can help create ‘a world where dialogue is not only valued over butchery, but actually prevails.’ Can they? Can we? As I write these words, in July 2014, the world is reeling from the unspeakable human suffering in Ukraine and in Gaza, and in too many other parts of the world.
It is in preface to her questionings about the status and function of the intellectual—past, present, and future—that Suleiman celebrates a central practice undertaken both consciously and unconsciously by those of us who are intellectually and politically driven: our ‘strong autobiographical reading’ of our contemporaries. As indicated in the epigraph above, strong autobiographical reading ‘is done by anyone who reads his or her contemporaries for the sake of self-recognition, an expanded historical awareness, and a sense of at least potential collective action.’ Suleiman continues: ‘This pattern suggests that “being contemporary” is necessarily an unstable condition, a process of movement toward an open future.’
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- Publisher: Liverpool University PressPrint publication year: 2016