How Not to Write about Oneself

The final chapter approaches the autobiography effect from the other side, discussing authors who prefer not to write about themselves. Claude Lévi-Strauss’s Tristes Tropiques leaves out significant parts of the author’s life, while also giving a biographical account of the genesis of structuralism. The discovery of Paul de Man’s wartime writings led his work to be reread as the symptom of a politically pernicious past. Finally, for Michel Foucault, self-disclosure often served the interests of power – a view that changes with the theoretical reconceptualization of the subject in his final years.